The State, the Nation, and the Jews

Liberalism and the Antisemitism

Dispute in Bismarck’s Germany
Marcel Stoetzler

University of Nebraska Press Lincoln & London

© 2008 by the Board of Regents
of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the
United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-

in-Publication Data
Stoetzler, Marcel.
The state, the nation, and the Jews:
liberalism and the antisemitism dispute in
Bismarck’s Germany / Marcel Stoetzler.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references
and index.
isbn 978-0-8032-1625-9 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Antisemitism—Germany—
History—19th century. 2. Liberalism—
Germany—History—19th century.
3. Jews—Germany—Social conditions.
4. Nationalism—Germany—History—
19th century. 5. Treitschke, Heinrich von,
1834–1896—Political and social views.
I. Title.
ds146.g4s76 2008
305.892404309034—dc22
2008028382

Set in Minion by Bob Reitz.

 Contents

Acknowledgments . . vii
Introduction . . 1
part 1. The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute . . 29
1. Liberals, Antisemites, and “Educated Men” . . 31
2. Jew-hatred and Nationality . . 47
3. German-Jewish “Mixed Culture” . . 63
4. State, Nation, Race, Religion . . 91
5. Emancipation, Assimilation, and the Concept of Rights . . 146
6. The Riddle of Treitschke’s Intentions . . 155
7. Dissent and Consensus in the Berlin Antisemitism Dispute . . 171
part 2. The State, the Nation, and the Jews . . 189
8. Antisemitism . . 191
9. Liberalism and National Liberalism . . 221
10. Nationalism and the Reich of 1871 . . 252
Conclusion: Antisemitism and the Limits of Liberal Society . . 275
appendixes
1. Heinrich von Treitschke’s “Our Prospects” (1879) . . 309
2. Moritz Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean? A Lecture” (1880) . . 317
3. Open Letter on the Jews by Löb Baruch (Dr. Ludwig Börne) to the
Member of the German Reichstag and Heidelberg Professor
Dr. Heinrich Gotthard von Treitschke (Berlin, 1880) . . 360
4. The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute in the Literature . . 378
Notes . . 389
Bibliography . . 475
Index . . 505
 Acknowledgments

This book is based on the research I did for my PhD at Middlesex Universi-
ty, London, between 1999 and 2003. I am grateful to the School of Arts, Mid-
dlesex University, for funding this work. I was enabled to make the neces-
sary revisions and add further layers of writing by an Economic and Social
Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship held subsequently at Goldsmiths
College, University of London, School of Social Sciences, and a Simon Fel-
lowship at The University of Manchester, School of Arts, Cultures and His-
tories. More than to anyone else, I am deeply indebted to John Hope-Mason,
whose doctoral supervision was like a ride in a black cab. I had the bene-
fit and pleasure of important discussions with and support from Nira Yu-
val-Davis, Vic Seidler, Christine Achinger, Raphael Gross, Lars Stubbe, and
Stefan Müller. The primary debt, though, is to those who in the first place
taught me how to read, philologically, historically, sociologically: Walther
Scholl, Wolfgang Gierke, the late Harald Patzer, Klaus Briegleb, and He-
lene Manos. I also want to thank Jonathan Lawrence for his excellent and
instructive copyediting.
The product is for Hae-Yung, although we can write a much better
book.
The State, the Nation, and the Jews
 Introduction

In the November 1879 edition of the prestigious Berlin-based journal Preus-

sische Jahrbücher (Prussian Annals), one could read the following words
by its editor, Heinrich von Treitschke: “What we have to demand from our
Jewish fellow-citizens is simple: that they become Germans, feel themselves
simply and justly as Germans, regardless of their faith and their old sacred
memories, which all of us hold in reverence; for we do not want thousands
of years of Germanic civilization to be followed by an era of German-Jewish
mixed culture.”1
The most momentous of the many responses provoked by the article
that contained this passage began with the following statement: “Fierce
struggles have unified our fatherland to a powerfully advancing Empire.
Unity has been achieved because the feeling that necessity has welded us
together carried the victory over the tribal and religious divisions that had
fragmented our nation like no other. Making individual members [of the
nation] pay for these divisions is unfair and vulgar and mostly punishes
those who honestly and seriously strive to overcome [their] particularity
and to achieve true amalgamation with the nation.”2 The string of themes
voiced in this much-quoted declaration—national unity, power, progress,
“the feeling that necessity has welded us together,” individual fairness, true
amalgamation—outlines quite accurately the typical position held by Ger-
man National Liberals in the second half of the nineteenth century, including
Treitschke himself.
2 Introduction

The event under examination here, the Berlin Antisemitism Dispute,

began in November 1879 when Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–96), a leading
German liberal, in a review of current affairs, reflected on the anti-Jewish
activities of some groups and individuals, particularly in Berlin, in a way that
was generally understood to support their cause. The best known among
the respondents to his remarks included the social scientist Moritz Lazarus
(1824–1903), the historian Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), the philosopher
Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), and the banker and politician Ludwig Bam-
berger (1823–93). Treitschke, born in Saxony, was a leading ideologist of a
Prussian-led unification of Germany. He was a member of parliament and a
professor at Berlin University. Lazarus had been the president of the Israelitic
Synods of 1869 and 1871 and was coeditor of the prestigious Zeitschrift für
Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (Journal for Psycho-Ethnography
and Linguistics).3 Mommsen, also a professor at Berlin University, was the
author of Römische Geschichte (Roman History), whose celebration of Julius
Caesar had profoundly influenced the political thinking of middle-class
Germans in the 1860s. Bamberger, born in the Francophile environment of
Mainz, was a republican, a (former) democrat, and a banker. He had been
an adviser to Bismarck and had played a leading role in the restructuring of
the German currency system. The historical background to the Dispute was
the foundation of the German Reich in 1871 after a particularly brutal war
between Prussia and France. The year 1879 saw the formation of some fringe
groups of radical antisemites, complete with some antisemitic street violence,
and indeed the word antisemite itself was coined in the same year.
What later came to be known as the Berlin Antisemitism Dispute was a
twofold intellectual scandal. The first scandal was that Treitschke expressed
sympathy for antisemitic attempts to curb Jewish emancipation. This kept
parts of the educated liberal elite in Germany on their toes for the best part
of two years, and also gained prominence abroad. It continues to be of
central interest for those studying German history, especially that of Ger-
man state-formation, nationalism and antisemitism, and German-Jewish
history: an established representative of National Liberalism—the form of
liberalism that primarily bore the German national movement in the period
 Introduction 3

after 1848—took a stand against what by that time had come to be seen as
an important plank in the liberal program. The second, complementary
scandal, however, was a matter for comment merely for some in the Jewish
community: what liberal (Gentile as well as Jewish) critics of Treitschke’s
move put forward was limited by their commitment to a nationalism that
was to a large extent held in common with the offender. Viewed a century
and a quarter later, this second scandal emerges as at least equally chal-
lenging for our understanding of the historical process. In the Dispute,
overlapping theoretical premises were used for the defense of, as well as
for the attack on, Jewish emancipation, and this created ambiguities and
confusions that make the analysis of the Dispute significant far beyond its
specific historical context.
This book offers a presentation and interpretation of the Dispute, an
exchange of journal articles and pamphlets between scholars and other
members of the educated elite in Germany between 1879 and 1881. Although
it is not an attempt at developing a general theory of antisemitism, liberalism,
or nationalism, it has been guided by a set of general (and painfully contem-
porary) theoretical questions: How do liberals conceive of that Janus-faced
creature, the nation-state? What is the role of culture for liberal nationalism?
What place do liberal nationalists give to cultural difference? What does
antisemitism have to do with all of this, and with the Jews?
The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute was a dispute on the relevance, mean-
ing, and origins of the antisemitic movement that was, like the word itself,
emerging at the time. More specifically, the Dispute was about why Tre-
itschke, a leading National Liberal historian, political theorist, and politi-
cian, appeared to lend his support to antisemites, and how this should be
responded to in a period of intensified consolidation of the “small-German”
nation-state. On closer inspection—and only close inspection can reveal
what is most interesting here—one might be surprised to find how much
the Dispute exceeded the issues of antisemitism, the Jews, and Judaism. The
Dispute was as much about Germans and how they could best form and
consolidate their national state as it was about Jews and those who hated
them. Those involved took the scandal of antisemitism as an occasion for
4 Introduction

an extended and sophisticated argument about the concept of the nation,

its relation to culture, the relevance of religion for culture, and likewise, that
of “race” for culture and nation. The exploration of how Treitschke arrived
at supporting antisemitism from within the national-liberal framework of
his thinking, and how his (mostly) national-liberal opponents struggled to
come to terms with this fact, is of burning contemporary relevance, because
several fundamental aspects of this framework—the ones I will focus on in
the discussion—are still with us today.
Antisemitism responded to the twin processes of Jewish emancipation
and assimilation. The contributors to the Dispute argued about whether
antisemitic agitation would push the Jews to accelerate assimilation (Tre-
itschke’s view) or would obstruct and slow down their assimilation (most
others’ view). Antisemitism has, of course, a variety of origins, and the form
expressed by Treitschke—due to his elitist, anti-democratic self-understand-
ing—is in itself probably not even one of the most historically significant
ones. In this sense the analysis of this particular dispute can make only a
partial contribution to the general analysis of antisemitism’s origins, but it
can make a major contribution to explaining a historically decisive aspect
of the history of antisemitism’s success.
The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute cannot on its own be taken to be rep-
resentative of nineteenth-century discourses on antisemitism or, more
generally, hostile attitudes toward Jews. However, the polemical as well as
scholarly literature has consistently recognized that the remarks Treitschke
made in this context were a crucial instance in the development of Jew-hatred
in Germany in the period between legal emancipation—culminating in
1869–71—and the Nazi extermination of European Jews.4 The combination
of the two observations that the Dispute has been central to the development
of antisemitism and that the concept of the nation has been central to the
Dispute makes the latter an obvious starting point for exploring the place
of antisemitism within late-nineteenth-century thinking on the relations
among liberal state, nation, culture, race, and religion. The general point I
will be making is that the existence of the nation-state puts pressure on its
representatives to enforce some extent of cultural homogeneity, especially
 Introduction 5

in times of crisis, and that this tendency is one of the forces that helped (in
the German case, successfully in the twentieth century) antisemitism gain
hegemony.5 A more generic theory of antisemitism would have to look at
a much broader range of issues (especially the factors that gained mass
support for populist antisemitism); the analysis proposed in this book—of
why and how a liberal turned to endorsing and helping propagate blatantly
anti-liberal ideas such as antisemitism, and of how those who tried to defend
the liberal program and its specifically liberal articulation of nationalism
had such difficulties in doing so—is understood here as a contribution to
the wider analysis of the tendency of liberalism to be complicit in its own
undoing.
The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute followed the emergence of an “antise-
mitic movement,” although it predated the development of that movement
into differentiated and programmatically articulated political organizations.
The Dispute was in the first place a debate about the nascent antisemitic
movement and did not involve the protagonists of this movement as par-
ticipants.6 This reflects the specific social location of the Dispute: mainly
professors, liberal politicians, priests, and rabbis exchanged extended and
elaborate statements. The social exclusiveness of most of the contributors
and their style obviously limited the debate’s immediate impact, but they also
contributed to its long-term relevance: the Dispute features members of the
educated elite trying to make sense of a new key word that had been coined
in a lower-middle-class milieu and had populist connotations. In a society
that held scholars and (state-approved) intellectuals in as high prestige as
the Bismarck Reich, such an exchange was bound to have a lasting impact.

Treitschke’s Ambivalence
Treitschke’s texts are notorious for catchy antisemitic formulations such as
“The Jews are our misfortune” or “Our country is invaded year after year by
multitudes of assiduous trouser-selling youths from the inexhaustible cradle
of Poland.”7 However, his position is full of ambivalence and cannot easily be
dismissed as that of a racist and anti-liberal demagogue. Treitschke is inter-
esting particularly because he was a figure of the center, not the margins, of
6 Introduction

German society. His opponents, some of whom were or had been his friends,
colleagues, or political allies, acknowledged this either implicitly or explicitly
and demonstrated difficulties in coping with Treitschke’s ambivalence as
well as the fact that they belonged to the same social and political milieu.
In the Dispute, national liberals responded to a fellow national liberal’s
anti-Jewish remarks; both sides were equally committed to defending and
helping consolidate the newly founded German nation-state. Both sides
shared assumptions about the national state, emancipation, and the status
of cultural or ethnic minorities.
Why did the “Jewish question” seem so important that a nationalist like
Treitschke chose to undermine national-liberal unity in order to challenge
what he saw as the “Jewification” of society? In the period of the consolidation
of the German nation-state, most National Liberals tended to subordinate
a general and rather diffuse feeling of antipathy toward Jews to the larger
objective, national unity. Treitschke stopped doing this, and was attacked
for it. The question is, what prompted him to transform his latent, as it
were acceptable, dislike of Jews—the “normal” antisemitism that has been
described as a “cultural code”—into a virulent and “political” endorsement
of antisemitism?8
The text that triggered the Berlin Antisemitism Dispute is a difficult and
ambiguous document. The illiberal or even racist elements in a text that
seems predominantly to constitute a call to accelerated assimilation—a
staple of the liberal tradition—beg explanation. A look through the literature
clearly shows that the Dispute has consistently puzzled commentators.9 It
is widely seen as an event of decisive significance for the development of
“modern antisemitism” (i.e., the transformation of “traditional Jew-hatred”
into whatever different authors suggest is its late-nineteenth-century variant
or successor), the development of liberalism (German liberalism in particu-
lar), and its relation to nationalism. Furthermore, almost all commentators
note that there is some form of ambivalence in Treitschke’s position (and
many state the same for Mommsen, Treitschke’s most prominent critic). The
most widely noticed ambivalence in Treitschke’s argument was that between
the demand for the Jews to accelerate their assimilation and—at the same
 Introduction 7

time—the (less explicitly stated) demand for their social exclusion. However,
not much has been written that would try to explain that ambivalence, nor
is there much systematic discussion of how nationalism, antisemitism, and
liberalism relate to each other.10 The scandal that the Dispute constitutes for
liberal nationalism has as often been named as avoided.11
My contention is that the close interpretation of the historical sources can be
put to work for the current debates on antisemitism, race, and ethnic-cultural
difference in the context of modern state and liberal society. Treitschke is
a prime example of the type of antisemites described by Max Horkheimer
and Theodor Adorno as “liberals who wanted to assert their antiliberal
opinion.”12 Horkheimer and Adorno proposed this notion in contrast to
that of late-modern, post-bourgeois, fascist antisemites. As liberal society
has historically defeated fascism, study of the forms of antisemitism that
occur in liberal societies is (again, and perhaps against the expectations of
the Frankfurt theorists) of highest urgency: if “liberal” antisemitism ever
disappeared at all, it should be expected to have reappeared after the defeat
of fascism. This means for the current situation, at least in the West, that
the type of antisemitism represented by Treitschke demands analysis more,
rather than less, urgently than that of Hitler or Goebbels. Horkheimer and
Adorno pointed in the same context to the dialectic between liberalism
and antisemitism: “The beer hall politics of the antisemites revealed the lie
of German liberalism, on which it fed and whose demise it finally brought
about.”13 What exactly “the lie of German liberalism” (arguably, not just of
German liberalism) was, or is, is among the problems that are pivotal to
this book.
Trying to explain the paradoxical phenomenon of a liberal asserting antilib-
eral opinions is one of the two perspectives under which I explore the Berlin
Antisemitism Dispute. The other is to look at the validity and effectiveness
of the liberal counterattack. Treitschke’s critics rejected antisemitism pri-
marily as the signature of “exaggerated nationalism”: antisemitism seemed
to them a case of “too much” of what was basically a good thing, benign
and well-proportioned nationalism. I will be testing here another thesis by
Adorno, namely, that “the philistines [Spiessbürger]” (short for treacherous
8 Introduction

bourgeois who have abandoned the classic ideals of the era of bourgeois
revolution) were never able to define “the line between nationalism [which
they professed to reject] and that which they cultivate as natural national
feelings [gesittete Bürgerlichkeit].”14
The moniker “Berliner Antisemitismusstreit” seems to have been coined
by the publicist Walter Boehlich, who used it as the title of his 1965 edited
volume of most of the more important texts.15 Boehlich, who was born in
1921 in Breslau but lived then in Frankfurt/Main—something like an arche-
typical Frankfurt intellectual—was (until 1968) a chief editor of the highly
influential left-liberal Suhrkamp publishing house, and to the present day
he has remained a leading essayist, publicist, and critic. Before Boehlich’s
term became universally accepted, the object of the present exploration was
usually referred to as the “Treitschke-Streit”; I use both terms as synonyms.16
I selected texts that explicitly refer to Treitschke’s rather sophisticated and
elaborate argument or any of the responses to it, not the more populist
debates that took place at the same time (and had their epicenter also in
Berlin).17 My intention and—to the extent that there is any—the original-
ity of my work lie in presenting, charting comprehensively, and opening
up for examination the actual content of the Dispute, by doing so, taking it
seriously as a historically crucial debate on how to make sense of modern
society, and exploring what place antisemitism occupies in it.18 After all,
as Reinhard Rürup wrote, antisemitism is but “the travesty of a theory of
society.”19 Furthermore, my presentation and discussion will try to draw out
why a debate about the demand for a revocation of Jewish emancipation
(at the time in Germany a hopelessly remote possibility) could take on the
enormous weight that it did. The hint may suffice here that one of those at-
tending seminars at Berlin University while the repercussions of the Dispute
could still be felt was the “father of sociology,” Max Weber, whose father in
turn was one of the signatories of the declaration against Treitschke.20
As the dispute about and with Treitschke attracted some of the brightest,
most articulate, and most politically committed minds of the time, it can
scarcely be rivaled as a document of social and political thought in Bismarck’s
Germany. It was predominantly about how national culture was understood to
 Introduction 9

mediate among state, society, and individual in the modern context. As it was
also a crucial instance in the development of modern antisemitism, it allows,
or rather, demands from us a reflection on how the former are connected
to the latter, that is, the relations among antisemitism and state, nation, and
national culture. The gist of my thesis is that—Treitschke’s embarrassment
and temporary silence on the issue after 1881 notwithstanding—the Dispute
highlights a conceptual weakness of liberalism in its relation to antisemitism
and Jewish emancipation. Treitschke’s support for antisemitism is rooted
in the contradiction between inclusionary and exclusionary tendencies in-
herent in the “nation-form.”21 National states refer to and presuppose the
existence of a national culture. To the extent that liberal society constitutes
itself in the form of a nation-state, it has to guarantee, or produce, some
degree of cultural homogeneity or conformity, that is, the assimilation of
not-yet-conforming elements.22 If a considerable minority seems not to be
assimilating, the nation-state’s representatives will inevitably ask whether
this minority is prevented from assimilating, refusing to assimilate, or unable
to assimilate. Exactly these questions are pivotal to the Berlin Antisemitism
Dispute. I suggest that Treitschke’s support for antisemitism is a symptom of
contradictions intrinsic to liberal society, by which is understood a modern
form of society characterized by the duality and interplay of a “civil society”
and a “liberal state.” Antisemitism develops from within; it is not a chal-
lenge coming from somewhere outside that society and its values. To the
extent that antisemitism is anti-liberal, it is an element of the self-negation
of liberal society. In antisemitism, liberal society revokes its promise to
gradually expand emancipation to all groups of the population. Liberalism
is understood here to be a tradition of modern thinking that is as much
concerned with individuals (rights-bearing subjects who are owners and
sellers of commodities) as with how best to construct the state they form
in line with their specific needs and interests.23 Liberal theory often asserts,
and always implies, that in order to meet the needs of an association of
individuals of selfish interests, the state must be provided with an ethos of
belonging and a sense of “us,” which is typically referred to as “the nation.”
Liberalism without some form of nationalism is therefore an impossibility.24
10 Introduction

The notion put forward by Treitschke’s critics—namely, that his antisemitism

is based on “exaggerated nationalism”—contrasts in an illuminating way
with the currently predominant liberal notion that there are two distinct
“kinds” of nationalism, one benign (“Western,” French, political), the other
malign (“Eastern,” German, ethnic-cultural).25 Treitschke’s case illustrates
that this distinction does not hold, as his support for antisemitism follows
from a form of nationalism that would fall into the political (“Western”)
just as much as the ethnic (allegedly German-romantic) category.

Treitschke’s Initial Remarks on the Jews

The concluding section of the review of current political affairs in Preus-
sische Jahrbücher of November 1879 that was the starting point of the Dis-
pute, contained nearly all the topics that would be unfolded in its course.26
Treitschke argued as follows:
There is a frightening anti-liberal mood among the public that needs to be
explained in terms of what goes on “in the depths” of “the nation’s life.” The
current mood is in its essence an adverse reaction to “humanitarianism and
Enlightenment,” implying a return from skepticism to “moral groundedness”
and “religious earnestness.” On one hand Treitschke welcomes this trend,
but on the other he stresses that religion ought not to interfere with “the
positive right of the secular state.” The awakening of the national conscious-
ness is directed against “effeminate philanthropy” and aims at restoring the
“majesty of the law.”27
The new anti-Jewish movement is one of the symptoms of this overall, anti-
liberal current. It represents an ugly but welcome liberation from the liberal
anti-anti-Judaism of the preceding decade; it comes from “the people” and is
directed against the “authoritative” discourse of the liberal-intellectual-Jewish
establishment. The Jews, the press, and more generally liberalism are to be
blamed for having caused the popular irritation, which Treitschke implies could
get out of hand. While different from earlier forms of “Jew-baiting,” which had
been “hollow and unfounded,” the current “noisy activity” expresses a “long-
suppressed anger” that is genuine and legitimate. It reflects the emergence of
“a German Jewish question [eine deutsche Judenfrage].”28
 Introduction 11

Because of the mass immigration of Polish Jews, Treitschke argues, the

“Jewish question” in Germany differs from that in “Western” countries such
as England and France. While the “Spanish Jews” who immigrated into the
western countries tended to assimilate easier, the “Polish Jews” who are
immigrating into Germany are unable to assimilate.29
Treitschke’s main emphasis is his demand for assimilation: the Jews shall
“become Germans,” which means in the first instance to “regard themselves”
as Germans, irrespective of their religion. However, he makes this demand
on the grounds that “Germanic civilization” must remain unmixed. The
conflict between the concern for an “unspoiled” Germanic civilization and
the demand for political assimilation irrespective of religion remains un-
resolved: the Jews are expected to adopt the “German spirit.” Treitschke ex-
presses doubts about whether many Jews actually want to become Germans.
In a reversal of the Enlightenment expectation that legal emancipation will
lead to assimilation, Treitschke suggests that “Jewish arrogance” is a post-
emancipation phenomenon. He argues that Jewish academic and business
involvement is changing the traditional character of German economy and
“German spirit.” He develops at length the theme of “Jewish domination
of the press.” He accuses Ludwig Börne in particular of mocking Germany
“as if ” he were not a member of the nation—implying that he actually was
and ought to have acted more loyally. Nevertheless, he argues the German
nation is a “Christian nation,” leaving open how or to what extent Jewish
citizens (short of conversion, which he does not demand) ought to identify
themselves with the Christian German nation.30
Treitschke urges the reader to take seriously the anti-Jewish movement,
and he warns against underestimating it as a transitory mood of the mob
and a few fanatics. The current anti-Jewish movement is grounded neither
in mere “Christian fanaticism” nor in “national arrogance”: some of the
“best educated” men share the anti-Jewish feeling. Treitschke suggests only
indirectly that this may include himself.31
Treitschke rejects the idea of revoking legal emancipation, arguing that to do
so would mean a betrayal of the “fine traditions” of the (liberal, secular) state.
However, he argues that the weakness of the German nation (as compared to
12 Introduction

France and England) necessitates a specifically German unequivocal stance

toward the Jews. Once German national consciousness will have become as
strong as it already is in France and England, it will constitute an environ-
ment in which Jews will be “harmless” or “even beneficial.” He concludes
with two demands: the Germans shall become more conscious and proud
of their nationality, and the Jews shall become more German. To the extent
that assimilation can never be complete, Treitschke argues, the minority
should accept the dominant role of the majority without criticism of, or
intervention in, “their” business and show “tact” and “tolerance.”32

On Mistrusting Bourgeois Political Culture

In the most recent contribution to the growing scholarly literature on the
Berlin Antisemitism Dispute, the German historian Uffa Jensen writes that
it ought to teach us how to mistrust what he calls the “bürgerliche Bildungs-
kultur,” the culture of educated bourgeois, which was the common intel-
lectual home of Treitschke as well as his critics.33 This “culture” is still today
expected by the liberal public to provide the cultural framework for the
rejection of the barbarism of which antisemitism has become a signature,
and when Jensen invites us to cast doubts on this expectation, he echoes the
point famously made by Adorno: that after Auschwitz all culture is garbage,
and that this included even the critique of culture itself.34 The focus of the
present discussion is more specifically on the traditions in which educated
members of modern bourgeois society have thought about this society and
its political forms, that is, on modern social and political theory. Adorno’s
fundamental suspicion against any effort to resurrect “the culture” or the
social and political thought of an apparently more salubrious and benign
pre-Nazi world remains the same. The salient—and deliberately paradoxical—
point I am trying to make is that Treitschke’s illiberalism is liberal, and his
opponents’ liberalism is also illiberal.
One methodological point needs to be added: in the presentation of
my argument I aim to tease the relevant theoretical questions out of the
source material, rather than confronting the latter with a preformulated
set of questions or problems (as if research ever started with exactly the
 Introduction 13

questions for which it finally suggests answers). The key concepts of my

analysis are liberalism, nationalism, and antisemitism. I will not strain the
reader’s patience with detailed discussion of what exactly I hold these con-
cepts to mean before going into the thick of the primary source material of
“the case”: I trust that the material itself will throw into relief the meaning
and interrelationships of these terms. I will do the conceptual and contex-
tual work after, as I hope the exploration of the source material will have
urged unto the reader the questions with which the concepts will have to be
approached, as it has done to me. Contextualizing the material too much
and too early would mean bringing to the fore prêt-à-porter narratives into
which the source material only needs to be slotted and fitted, and would, I
believe, strangle it rather than make it speak. The reader will have to bring
to the book a childlike, leisurely pleasure in wading through a labyrinth
of original text that was written by people who were scholarly trained but
found themselves in political combat, and who threw into battle all and
sundry they could muster.35 The messiness of the material is witness to the
seriousness of the case; too much streamlining of its presentation would
mean a betrayal of the struggle. In the second part of the book I will de-
velop theoretically and historically the problems and contradictions that I
suggest can be found in the material, concerning the state, the nation and
the Jews. There I will also address the historians’ Gretchenfrage whether or
not all this is perhaps merely a German peculiarity (perchance obliterated
in 1945, as the most optimistic commentators suggest), that is, a regionally
limited problem that should not cause too many sleepless nights to those
not directly involved.36

Dramatis Personae
Heinrich von Treitschke, born in Dresden, Saxony, was at the time of the
Dispute the editor of the prestigious journal Preussische Jahrbücher (a position
he had held since 1866), a member of the Reichstag (since 1871), and, since
1873, a professor of history and what we would now call political science at
Berlin University. He had been a member of the National Liberal Party until
he left this party in July 1879 because of its less-than-unanimous support
14 Introduction

for the introduction of a number of tariffs.37 Treitschke was a liberal and a

nationalist, as the name of the party he represented in parliament indicates;
however, his statements on Jews and on antisemitism will necessitate a more
detailed look at his development, which I will provide later on.38 For the
purposes of this introduction, it may suffice to embrace Guido de Ruggiero’s
judgment: “Treitschke’s political conception . . . represents a form of Liber-
alism doubtless in many respects at variance with Western Liberalism, but
at bottom inspired by the same motives, and equally tending to find in the
autonomous personality the source of a rich and varied political life.”39

First Set of Responses

Treitschke’s notorious text “Unsere Aussichten” (Our Prospects) from No-
vember 1879 was immediately answered by an open letter from Manuel Joël,
a moderately conservative rabbi in Breslau40 and the author of a “pioneering
work” on the Jewish sources of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise.41 It
was published first in a newspaper and then as a brochure that was reprinted
three times already before the end of the year. A rapid response was also
provided by a man who came closest to what in today’s parlance would be
called a “community leader” of Berlin’s Jewry, Moritz Lazarus, like Treitschke
a professor at Berlin University.42 Lazarus, born in the Prussian province
of Poznan, was (in 1869 and 1871) president of the Israelitic Synods, two
international gatherings of rabbis, scholars, and lay leaders, predominantly
liberal but including conservatives.43 On December 2, 1879, he gave a lec-
ture before the general meeting of the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft
des Judenthums (College for Jewish Studies), an opportunity he used for
promoting self-clarification among the Jewish community on the issues
addressed by Treitschke. The lecture was titled “What Does National Mean?”
and was widely circulated in a printed version published in January 1880.44
Politically, Lazarus was “a devoted German patriot”: his first-ever published
text, Über die sittliche Berechtigung Preussens in Deutschland (On the Ethi-
cal Legitimacy of Prussia in Germany) (1850), had been a “hymnic defense
of Prussia.”45 Lazarus had then argued that Prussia’s cultural superiority
warranted its political hegemony.46 His academic fame was based on his
 Introduction 15

having cofounded with the specialist in Humboldtian linguistics, Heymann

Steinthal, in 1859 the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft
(Journal for Psycho-Ethnography and Linguistics).47 When they developed
Völkerpsychologie in the early 1850s, Lazarus and Steinthal first considered
calling the new discipline psychische Ethnologie (mental ethnology). They
refrained from using the concept of “anthropology,” as this was at the time
too much concerned with physiology. Most of the topics covered by the
Zeitschrift “clearly fell within the scope of socio-cultural anthropology as
we know it today.”48 Volksgeist meant for Lazarus and Steinthal “the social
heritage of an ethnic group,” that is, roughly what anthropology today calls
“a culture.”49 Lazarus defined as the central category of this new discipline,
Völkerpsychologie, the objektiver Geist (objective spirit) or Gesamtgeist (all-
spirit). According to Völkerpsychologie, objektiver Geist, Volksgeist, or Gesamt-
geist precedes the individuals, who are primarily carriers, not creators, of
“objective spirit.”50 From December 1880, Lazarus would be at the forefront
of efforts to organize Jewish self-defense against antisemitism.
Four other Jewish intellectuals were quick to respond: Seligmann Meyer
(1853–1925), a rabbi in Berlin, wrote several articles as the editor of the jour-
nal Jüdische Presse.51 Moses Aron Nadyr (1848–1909), a rabbi from Löbau,
Western Prussia, wrote a “letter from a Polish Jew” to Treitschke. Ludwig
Philippson (1811–89), a rabbi in Bonn, was the editor of the Allgemeine
Zeitung des Judenthums: Ein unparteiisches Organ für alles jüdische Interesse
(General Journal of Jewry: A Nonpartisan Organ for All Jewish Interests).
This liberal journal (“clearly the most important Jewish weekly of the nine-
teenth century,” writes Shulamit Volkov) published numerous articles and
comments, and also reviews of pamphlets and brochures concerning the
anti-Jewish agitation.52
The only contemporary Jew whom Treitschke attacked directly was the
historian Heinrich Graetz (1817–91), a professor in Breslau. Treitschke had
read the eleventh volume of Graetz’s famous Geschichte der Juden (History of
the Jews) (1870), dealing with the period from 1750 to 1848, just weeks before
he wrote the remarks that triggered the Dispute. In his book, Graetz makes
frequent use of the (mildly derogatory) term Deutscher Michel (denoting
16 Introduction

an easy-going, well-meaning simpleton) and implies that the failure of the

Germans to achieve political liberties was due to their national characteris-
tics.53 Graetz’s book seems to have been the catalyst that triggered Treitschke’s
piece. Less than three weeks later, Graetz published (in a newspaper) the
first in a series of responses and replies to Treitschke, to which Treitschke
responded in turn, and so forth several times over. Despite their particularly
bitter dispute, as Michael Meyer writes, “Graetz and Treitschke were remark-
ably alike in the manner of their historiography.”54 For example, reference
to “Jewish blood” is “a racial element which is as prominent in Graetz . . .
as in Treitschke.”55 They also shared a background in the German school of
historicism. It was a crucial element of nineteenth-century thinking that
religious forms evolve and progress like other historical forms. Graetz, who
taught (like Joël) at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar (Jewish Theological
Seminary) in Breslau, helped establish historicism within the Jewish context.
For Graetz the historicization of Judaism seemed to be the key to finding
a way of being Jewish in the modern world without “submitting” to liberal
reform Judaism. He thought that the reform idea of Judaism as a “modern
religion of reason” would help to dissolve rather than emancipate the Jewish
community. While accepting the idea of slow and gradual development of
religious forms, Graetz defended the unity of the religious and the national.56
He aimed to defend Judaism as it had developed historically against what he
saw as the imposition of religious forms taken from other contexts (Prot-
estantism), much as Ranke had defended German political forms against
the imposition of French republican conceptions. Although he hesitated
using the word, Graetz’s historiography presupposed the notion of a Jewish
Volksgeist evolving through history that needed to be defended against sud-
den and “non-organic” challenges.57 “His interest in theological problems
was limited,” though.58 His concern was with the continuation of a “Jewish
existence” that maintained Jewish particular characteristics—including but
not primarily religion—that was secular, that is (at least implicitly), national
in character. Hans Liebeschütz writes that Graetz’s “view of the future of
the messianic people had . . . taken on the bourgeois forms of his century
and his environment.” Graetz was also decidedly German-Jewish and had
 Introduction 17

no high opinion of Polish-Russian Jewry (nor of their language, Yiddish,

nor of Hasidism): for Graetz, Judaism owed its reemergence—from Men-
delssohn’s time onward—to the German Enlightenment.59

Second Set of Responses, January 1880

Another newspaper contribution was published in January as a brochure
that went through six editions in 1880 alone, being one of the most highly
circulated contributions. The text, “Against Heinrich von Treitschke,” was
by Paulus Cassel, priest at the Christuskirche in Berlin.60 Cassel (1821–92),
born in Silesia as Selig Cassel, had converted from Judaism in 1855 and
was a Protestant theologian working for the Judenmission. He had briefly
(1866–67) been a Conservative member of the Prussian Diet. His statement
bore all the ambivalence of his office, and it is interesting that it sold in huge
numbers, although no well-known commentator on either side seemed
particularly impressed by it.
Apart from the publication of Treitschke’s first three statements in the
Dispute as a brochure called “Ein Wort über unser Judentum” (A Word about
Our Jews), which became the (until that time) biggest-selling antisemitic
pamphlet ever,61 January 1880 saw the publication of six of the most sub-
stantial contributions, namely, those by Breßlau, Bamberger, Oppenheim,
Cohen, Endner, and Naudh, the last two of whom were radical antisemites
and so far the only non-Jews to respond publicly to Treitschke. Also, the
pamphlet “Börne and Treitschke: Open Letter on the Jews,” by an author
who masquerades—or rather, ironically pretends to masquerade—as Löb
Baruch/Dr. Ludwig Börne, elegantly adopting Börne’s radical-liberal lan-
guage, was published in the same month.62
The historian Harry Breßlau (1848–1928), another Berlin professor, a stu-
dent of Johann Gustav Droysen, was involved in a number of Jewish cultural
institutions but believed in the possibility of assimilation. As Liebeschütz
writes, “the continued existence of Jewry was not a concern of his.”63 Be-
ing like Treitschke a National Liberal, Breßlau had as late as in 1878 closely
cooperated with Treitschke in an election committee that aimed to defeat a
Progress (i.e., left-liberal) candidate in Berlin.64 Breßlau’s letter to Treitschke
18 Introduction

from January 1880 that was published as a brochure is “sober like the posi-
tivistic scholarship of which Breßlau became a master.”65
Of a quite different temperament, and commanding a writing style that
reflected his somewhat more exciting biography, but also a member of the
same National Liberal Party, was the politician Ludwig Bamberger, whose
spirited response to Treitschke was published first as an article in the journal
Unsere Zeit, then as a brochure; it was the only article he ever published on
the subject.66 Bamberger was a man with a history: he was born in Mainz, a
place whose Jacobin and Francophile political traditions could still be felt at
the time. The young Bamberger had been a republican and supported a cen-
tralized German state modeled on France to be established by revolutionary
means, while (then) rejecting Prussian hegemony.67 During the revolution
he played a decisive role in the process in which republican democrats split
away from the liberals (April 1848), which won him the nickname der rote
Bamberger (the red Bamberger) and an invitation to join the local communist
Arbeiterbildungsverein, one of the “workers’ educational associations” that were
at the time of revolution not so strictly about education.68 Holding observer
status as a journalist, he came to the conclusion in June 1848 that the Frankfurt
Parliament would not bring about any political change, and he suggested
mobilizing the wider population. He also advocated careful social reform and
propagated a Proudhonist Volksbank (People’s Bank) project.69 Bamberger
took part in the Reichsverfassungskampagne (Campaign for the Imperial
Constitution, May 1849) but dissolved his corps and fled to Switzerland on
arrival of the Prussian troops in the Palatinate, partly to escape reprisals by
the remaining insurgents for his premature capitulation, partly because he
was sought for high treason by the state.70 (The Reichsverfassungskampagne
was the effort by democrats and a minority of liberals to force the German
princes militarily to accept the compromise that liberals and democrats had
found in between themselves in the Paulskirche parliament.) In this period,
Bamberger strongly rejected the stirring of cultural-nationalist emotion
(such as promoted by Mazzini in Italy or Kossuth in Hungary) and praised
“the healthy and simple logic of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.”71
Subsequently, he lived in London, Antwerp, Rotterdam, and Paris, where
 Introduction 19

he became a multimillionaire and was able to retire from business in 1866.

In this period he developed from democrat to (“Manchester”) “left-liberal”
with no sympathies for state-led social reform.72 However, he also came to
the conviction that only Prussia could effect the creation of a unified nation
state and the ending of Kleinstaaterei, the parallel existence of a multitude
of (often semifeudal) small German states. Instrumental for this seems to
have been the influence of Heinrich Bernhard Oppenheim, with whom Bam-
berger edited the official journal of the Deutscher Nationalverein (German
National Association), the institutional face of the national movement, the
Deutsche Jahrbücher für Politik and Literatur (German Annals for Politics
and Literature).73 In 1859 Bamberger advocated in a widely read pamphlet
(“Juchhe nach Italia” [Three Cheers to Italy], first published anonymously)
that German unification should be modeled on the example given in Italy by
Cavour: Prussia ought to push Austria out of the German League and annex the
smaller German states. His position became—and remained thereafter—that
there was no social basis for any alternative process of unification. Bamberger
joined the Progress Party, returned from exile to Mainz in 1868, and became
a member of the Zollparlament (the parliament of the Customs Union).74
He was convinced that the “thousand-year-old culture of the German people
will absorb Prussia” once a unitary (i.e., not a federal) state allowed Prussia to
dissolve all the smaller dynasties.75 Rather optimistically, and in this sense he
was a typical nineteenth-century progressivist, he held that this state would
then inevitably evolve into a republic. He understood (and therefore sup-
ported) Bismarck as the “executor of the economic and national desires of
the bourgeoisie.”76 As an expert on France, Bamberger worked as an adviser
and publicist for Bismarck during the German-French war when he was
instrumental in securing liberal support for the Prussian cause (while Tre-
itschke rejected an invitation to work directly for the government, preferring
the institutional independence of the academic). Bamberger was among the
supporters of the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine and characterized the Paris
Commune as “a horde of clowns and cannibals [eine Horde kannibalischer
Possenreisser].”77 At the time of the Dispute he belonged to the left wing of
the National Liberal Party.78
20 Introduction

Heinrich Bernhard Oppenheim (1819–80) was a National Liberal journalist

who published widely on law, politics, and economics. From January 1880
he wrote a series of articles on the Dispute in the journal Die Gegenwart
(The Present). In 1844, while a lecturer at Heidelberg University (where
Bamberger was one of his students), Oppenheim published a celebrated
volume on international law, and in 1850 he published Philosophie des Rechts
und der Gesellschaft (Philosophy of Law and Society). In 1848 he belonged
to the democratic left around Arnold Ruge and took part in the civil war
in Baden. He then spent eleven years in exile in Switzerland, Belgium, and
England. Subsequently, he became a member of the Progress Party and
from 1866 was a leading National Liberal supporter of Bismarck.79 He was
one of the main contributors to Die Gegenwart, which had been founded
in 1871 as a liberal discussion journal trying to bridge the divisions between
the competing liberal parties. In 1872 Oppenheim published a controversial
essay “On the History of Stock-Market Fraud” at a time when the Gründer-
zeit (a contemporary term literally meaning “the time of the founders and
promoters”) was still generally seen as a time of economic boom. In his
influential text on Kathedersozialismus (socialism of the lectern) (1873)80 he
argued that trade unions were a corrupting influence on workers and that
academic theorists of (state-sponsored) socialism were a threat to academic
freedom.81 His polemic against “Stöcker and Treitschke” was his final longer
publication—he died on March 29, 1880. Significantly, a large part of the
Gegenwart’s obituary for Oppenheim dealt with Treitschke and the antise-
mitic “Berlin movement.” Reflecting views formulated by Oppenheim in
the last weeks of his life, the obituary argued that religious and racial hatred
are “signs of barbarism, lack of culture or a regress in culture.”82 Its author
found it “incomprehensible” that racial hatred could be formulated with
reference to the national state, since it had seemed that only some “backward”
countries in southeastern Europe would host such “stupidity and passions.”83
The author of the obituary relates that Oppenheim had observed in the
last conversation they had shared that every war “destroys an amount of
economical, moral [sittlichen] and intellectual [geistigen] cultural capital
and leaves behind a certain degree of brutalization [Verwilderung]” among
 Introduction 21

the victorious no less than the defeated. This is where Oppenheim saw the
deeper cause of the Jew-baiting—an observation that was as true for the
situation after 1870–71 as it was for that after 1914–18.
One of the more famous but little loved and somewhat scandalized re-
sponses to Treitschke was by the philosopher Hermann Cohen, also published
in January 1880. Born in Coswig (Anhalt), Cohen studied at the Jewish
Theological Seminary in Breslau with Zacharia Fränkel (“the founder of
Conservative Judaism”) and Heinrich Graetz.84 After two years of stud-
ies he turned toward liberal Judaism in the vein of Abraham Geiger and
studied philosophy in Breslau and Berlin. His publication Kants Theorie
der Erfahrung (Kant’s Theory of Experience) (1871) gained him a post in
1873 at Marburg University, where he became professor in 1876. He was the
first Jewish ordinary professor in Germany, and he held this professorship
until 1912.85 Although Cohen was affiliated with various Jewish organiza-
tions, particularly those concerned with education, his interest in Judaism
arose only after 1880; his statement against Treitschke seems to have been
the first reflection he published on the relationship of Judaism and Ger-
man nationality. Before Cohen published his response to Treitschke he had
already sent him two letters, seeking some kind of shared understanding,
that remained unanswered.86 Treitschke merely made some dismissive and
polemical remarks that seemed to allude to Cohen’s letters in his second
contribution to the Dispute. Cohen adhered to the notion of a close affinity
between Protestantism and Judaism that he seems to have adopted from
left-wing Hegelianism.87 He supported “the idea that the political unity of
the nation needs to be firmly based on the spiritual, on the humanitarian
content of religion.”88 He saw his position as the continuation of the earlier
liberal tradition that had “understood [the formation of] the nation state
and the ethics of German classicism as one undivisible task.”89
Nothing seems to be known about the antisemite Wilhelm Endner, whose
pamphlet “Zur Judenfrage” (On the Jewish Question), a response to Breßlau’s
letter to Treitschke, also came out in January 1880. His fellow pamphletist
Naudh (apparently a pseudonym for Heinrich Nordmann) was a well-known
antisemite, though. Naudh was the author of one of the most emblematic
22 Introduction

texts of racial, anti-Christian antisemitism, Die Juden und der Deutsche Staat
(The Jews and the German State) (first published in 1862 or earlier).90 He
succeeded Wilhelm Marr in April 1880 (according to comments in the publica-
tion) as editor of the extremist and short-lived but highly influential journal
Die Deutsche Wacht: Monatsschrift für nationale Kulturinteressen—Organ
der antijüdischen Vereinigung (The German Guard: A Monthly for National
Cultural Interest—Organ of the Anti-Jewish Association).91

The Dispute Simmers on Low Heat

In studying the Berlin Antisemitism Dispute there are some unexpected
rewards in the form of great humor. There is of course the unintentional
comedy constantly produced by the radical antisemites, such as the following
sentence from the Deutsche Wacht: “We are of the opinion that the system
of uncontrolled advertising is a thousand times more pernicious than all of
Hegel’s philosophy and Darwinism together.”92 On the other side there is the
very intentional humor of those who perceive and challenge the pomposity
of Treitschke’s discourse. The example of the (anonymous) mock-Börne has
already been mentioned; another gem is the letter by the rabbi of Memel,
a town on the German-Polish border, Isaac Rülf, published in the Allge-
meine Zeitung des Judenthums in February 1880: he engages critically with
Treitschke’s use of the epitheton ornans “trouser-selling” for the emigrating
Jewish youths from “the East” and points out, inter alia, that they tend not
even to own a decent pair of trousers for themselves to wear.
The general tone of the Dispute, however, remained serious. An important
gesture of the highest symbolic value available to Imperial high society was
made by the historian Theodor Mommsen in March 1880, when he attacked
Treitschke’s support for antisemitism (without naming Treitschke directly) in
a keynote speech at the Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Prussian
Academy of Sciences) on the occasion of the emperor’s birthday. Mommsen,
who held equal if not higher prestige in German academia at the time, referred
to antisemitism as a “process of moral-civilizational disintegration [sittliche
Zersetzungsprozess].”93 This remark mirrored a similar one famously made
by the crown prince Friedrich Wilhelm (the future Emperor Friedrich III)
 Introduction 23

on the occasion of attending a fund-raising concert at the New Synagogue

of Berlin at the end of December 1879.94
The most important publication in the summer of 1880 was that by the
renowned statistician and medical doctor Salomon Neumann (1819–1908,
born in Pomerania), Die Fabel von der jüdischen Masseneinwanderung (The
Fairy-Tale of Jewish Mass Immigration).95 Neumann was one of the demo-
cratically inclined members of the medical reform movement and a pioneer of
social and health statistics.96 He was close to the reformist workers association
Arbeiterverbrüderung and later also to Social Democracy. He was a left-liberal
city councillor of Berlin and also one of the founders of the Hochschule für die
Wissenschaft des Judentums.97 The initial publication of Neumann’s refutation
of Treitschke’s claims about Jewish immigration (in August) had little impact.
Its second edition (in November), however, received a positive review in the
liberal Vossische Zeitung. It was referred to by the liberal Rudolf Virchow (also
a famous medical doctor and a founder of the Progress Party) in the debate
in the Prussian Diet on the Antisemitenpetition (on November 20) and then
by Theodor Mommsen in his own highly publicized response to Treitschke
that was published later in the same month. (The Antisemitenpetition was
an antisemitic petition circulated in the fall of 1880 that fetched a quarter of
a million signatures all over the Reich. It was debated in the Prussian Diet
in November 1880 after the left-liberal Freisinnige Party demanded that the
government make a public statement on the petition, which it refused to do.
On New Year’s Eve night 1880–81, “organized gangs of hooligans provoked
antisemitic incidents outside coffee-houses in Berlin Friedrichstadt” after a rally
organized by the group behind the Antisemitenpetition.)98 The public recogni-
tion of Neumann’s scholarly argument forced Treitschke subsequently to write
a review of Neumann’s brochure and publicly acknowledge that significant
Jewish immigration from Poland and Russia did not exist at the time.99

The Declaration and Mommsen’s Letters

A short, but perhaps the most momentous, reaction to Treitschke’s anti-
Jewish comments was the text that became famous as the “Declaration of
the Notables,” first published on November 14, 1880, in the liberal press.100
24 Introduction

Its seventy-five signatories (seventy-three in the first publications) included

the mayor of Berlin, Max von Forckenbeck (who seems to have initiated it);
the historians Johann Gustav Droysen, Rudolf Gneist, and Theodor Mom-
msen; the engineer Werner von Siemens; Rudolf Virchow; Max Weber Sr.,
father of the sociologist Max Weber; and also a comprehensive list of leading
Berlin businesspeople.101
Theodor Mommsen published on November 20 a letter which confirmed
that one particular passage in the Declaration was targeted at Treitschke
(without naming him directly), and slightly later he published a detailed
response to Treitschke, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum” (Another
Word on Our Jewry). Apart from the Declaration, whose initiators had de-
liberately asked only non-Jews for their signature, Mommsen’s was the only
high-profile public statement against Treitschke that came from someone
without Jewish background. This fact gave Mommsen’s statement, although
it had been written grudgingly and hesitantly, a prominence and long-lasting
reputation as the liberal counterpoint to Treitschke’s illiberalism, and makes
necessary a somewhat closer look at Mommsen’s background.
Both politically and as a historian, Mommsen was quite close to Treitschke.
Mommsen had been a student of Droysen and was influenced by the latter’s
conception of history.102 The building of the German nation was a central concern
for Mommsen. He commented in 1865 on the controversial Prussian annexation
of Schleswig-Holstein (where he was born): “If the great dream of 1848 should
come true, then every means, including force, will be justified. Necessity and
the nation both speak in the categorical imperative, and as the nation-state can
heal every wound, it is also entitled to inflict every wound”103 (a use of the term
“categorical imperative” that Kant would hardly have approved of). In August
1870 Mommsen published an open letter in Italian newspapers asking readers
to support the German war effort of “defending the freedom of the continent
against the common tyrant,” France.104 In a letter from December 1877 he wrote:
“Whoever lives within another nation has to assimilate to it, and the resistance to
do so is as wrong as the hesitation of those who let them get away with it.”105
According to a letter written by Hermann Grimm (a colleague at Berlin
University and common friend of Treitschke and Mommsen) to Treitschke
 Introduction 25

in February 1880, Mommsen had remarked to Grimm that Treitschke’s com-

ments in “Our Prospects” “would have been good and legitimate” as a chapter
in Treitschke’s academic work on German history “but not as a journal
article.”106 In a related letter, Mommsen confirmed to Grimm that he agreed
with his suggestion that “we all share the basic attitudes” but insisted that
“the sun is reflected differently in a chamber pot and in a silver shield . . .
in issues like this one, everything depends on how one says something, not
what one says.”107
Mommsen exerted political influence on the German educated classes
most importantly through his widely read major work, Römische Geschichte
(Roman History) (1854–85).108 Especially Mommsen’s positive depiction of
Julius Caesar was often seen as an endorsement of the kind of politics that
Bismarck came to stand for. Indeed, Treitschke used a quote from Mom-
msen’s work to support one of his antisemitic arguments, and the fact that
Mommsen did not want to let that happen without a response seems to
have been what drove him to get involved in the Dispute in the first place.
To the extent that Treitschke’s use of Mommsen’s formulation was not as
disingenuous as Mommsen furiously claimed it was, his strong commitment
as the leading non-Jewish critic of Treitschke can be seen as a form of denial
and displacement of his own subliminal antisemitism.
Mommsen depicted the formation of the Roman Empire as a process
of “national decomposition” in the course of which “the Greek and the
Latin nationality find a peace with each other” that is based on “the rubble
of second-rate peoples [Völkerschaften].”109 Greek and Latin elements are
the “positive” elements of the new citizenry, while the Jews and others form
the “parasitical” Hellenistic-Oriental population of Rome. Julius Caesar
faced the task of amalgamating the two principal “nations”—Greeks and
Italians—that were destined to rule the Empire. The “Barbarian” nations
had to be destroyed, while the Jews—that “peculiar, flexible but enduring
people [merkwürdige nachgiebig zähe Volk]”—acted “as it were” as a third
party.110 Mommsen wrote: “Already then we find the distinct antipathy of
the Occidentals against this so thoroughly Oriental race and its foreign
opinions and mores. Nevertheless, this Jewry [Judenthum]—although
26 Introduction

it was not the most pleasant trait of the nowhere pleasant picture of the
miscegenation of peoples [Völkermengung] of the day—was a historical
element that developed in the natural course of things.” Caesar (like Alex-
ander before him) protected the Jews’ “peculiar cult” from the hostility of
local Greek and Roman clerics. He “of course” did not intend to establish
Jewry as a third nationality of equal weight, but rather wanted to take ad-
vantage of two characteristics of the Jews: first, their indifferent behavior
against any state (the Jew—unlike the Occidental—had not been given the
“Pandora’s gift of political organization”);111 and second, their tendency
to adopt any nationality to a certain extent in order to “wrap up [umhül-
len]” their “national particularity [Eigenthümlichkeit].” “Therefore the Jews
were as if made for a state that was built on the debris of one hundred de-
stroyed polities and that needed to be fitted with an—as it were—abstract
and integral [abstracten und von vornherein verschliffenen] nationality.
Already in the old world, Jewry/Judaism [Judenthum] was a powerful fer-
ment of cosmopolitanism and national decomposition and for this reason
a particularly legitimate member of the Caesarian state whose polity was
nothing but cosmopolitanism, whose nationality [Volksthümlichkeit] was
nothing but humanity.”112 Mommsen’s interpretations of Jewish history in
the Roman context tell a lot about his general political-historical concep-
tion. The chapter “Judea and the Jews” (in volume 5) discusses the Jewish
defeat by Rome in 70 ce as a result of the failure of the Jews to be integrated
into the Empire.113 Mommsen writes that while under Caesar relations were
good, the subsequent combination of clerical restoration and a sentiment
of Jewish-national exclusivity prevented Jewish state-political development.
Tendencies for secular statehood that could have controlled clerical rule
were defeated by anti-secular popular movements (the Pharisees).114 As a
result, the only opposition to the combination of rule by Rome and by the
clerical hierarchy was clerical-fanatical messianism. Mommsen argues that
the diasporic Jews in the Hellenistic world, by contrast, remained central to
Hellenic civilization, enjoying privileges while also being victims of popular
riots, and thus developed differently.115 Only the existence of the clerical
state in Palestine and its “cult of the temple” maintained the Jews’ national
 Introduction 27

identity as a religious identity and prevented their complete assimilation.

Mommsen compares the role of the Temple to the role of the Vatican in the
present: the Roman state had to defend itself by crushing clerical-theocratic
fanaticism just as the German Reich had to defeat ultramontanism in the
Kulturkampf.116 As Hoffmann points out, though, the Roman Empire was
not the secular quasi-modern state that Mommsen’s comparison suggests,
and the role of the Jewish community of Palestine surely had little in com-
mon with that of Catholics in nineteenth-century Germany.117
Treitschke used Mommsen’s formulation of the “ferment” of “national
decomposition” and thus associated Mommsen’s view of the Jews with his
own and that of the antisemites (something that antisemites had done be-
fore, however).118 Mommsen’s response is dominated by the effort to dis-
sociate the notion of the Jews as pictured in his Römische Geschichte from
antisemitism.119
Like several others of the group who published the Declaration, Momm-
sen was also among those who founded in 1890 the Verein zur Abwehr des
Antisemitismus (Defense League against Antisemitism), whose advocation of
“complete amalgamation”120 was not necessarily welcomed by most Jews.121
Having been an enthusiastic Bismarck supporter, Mommsen turned into a
skeptic in his later days; in 1885 he wrote in a letter, “I wish to be forgotten
by this spineless nation as quickly as possible.”122 The “spineless nation” had,
however, good reasons not to forget him. Hans Kohn commented scornfully
that “even in his last years . . . [Mommsen] continued to live in the illusion,
typical of a German National Liberal, that Germany’s unification through
Bismarck’s Prussia could have established a free society. So he turned in
the 1880s against the German nation which had followed his own precepts.
He sat in judgement over the nation. He never sat in judgement over his
own nationalism.”123 At the time when it would have mattered, in 1848–49,
Mommsen failed to support the liberal-democratic draft for a constitu-
tion for the German Reich, as he found “that the Frankfurt Constitution
was too democratic and not sufficiently centralized.”124 In 1865, in addition
to suggesting that both necessity and the nation speak in the “categorical
imperative,” he also, rather illogically, said that “as the nation-state can heal
28 Introduction

every wound, it is also entitled to inflict every wound.” Most importantly,

however, Mommsen’s glorification of Julius Caesar contributed to the con-
solidation of an authoritarian spirit in German middle-class society, and
this was hardly an unintended side effect of innocent historical scholarship:
after having met Napoléon III in 1863, Mommsen wrote in a letter that he
envied the French for having “such a grand criminel” and wished fate might
“throw one” to the Germans. As Kohn comments drily, “fate was soon to be
so unkind as to fulfill Mommsen’s wish” several times over.125

This is the colorful cast of German Imperial intellectuals that we will now
observe on the stage of a suitably dramatic battle of minds. In the following
chapters the Berlin Antisemitism Dispute will be presented and discussed
thematically. Each chapter is devoted to looking at what all discussants wrote
on a particular aspect of the Dispute, usually beginning with Treitschke.
The examination begins in chapter 1 with Treitschke’s initial comments on
the meaning and origin of the antisemitic movement, its social base, its relation
to liberalism and the concept of education, and how these themes have been
taken up and developed in the course of the Dispute. Chapter 2 looks at the
different ways in which Jew-hatred has been linked to questions of national-
ity, and chapter 3 examines the concept of culture. Chapter 4, which is also
the longest and most substantial, examines how the concepts of state, nation,
race, and religion have been interrelated and delimited from each other by
various contributors, some of whom engaged here in a detailed, scholarly, and
highly theoretical discourse. Chapter 5 looks at how the discussants related to
the concepts of emancipation, assimilation, and right. Finally, chapter 6 will
examine the (hardly resolvable) question asked by many, still today: What
did Treitschke actually think he was doing? Chapter 7 will draw some first
conclusions. In the second section of the book, the findings of these chapters,
at least some of which will challenge customary notions of how liberalism and
nationalism relate to antisemitism and its rejection, will be put into historical
context and related to some more theoretical questions.
 One. Liberals, Antisemites, and “Educated Men”

Treitschke’s comments on the “Jewish question” were made in the context

of a longer argument on foreign affairs that culminated in his thoughts on
the relationship between Germany and Austria-Hungary. This provided a
framework and opportunity for Treitschke to speak his mind on “the German
Jewish question.” Treitschke strongly rejects the grossdeutsche (pan-German)
perspective, which would aim to destabilize Austria-Hungary and to annex
its German-speaking parts to the German Reich. His is the kleindeutsche
(small-German) position, which finds the continued existence of the “Dual
Monarchy” to be in the interest of the German Reich.1 Treitschke argues
that the prospect of a possible disintegration of Austria-Hungary creates a
general “feeling of insecurity.”2 This diagnosis of the international situation
leads him to his comments on domestic affairs, starting with an analysis
of recent elections to the Prussian Diet in which Conservatives won, and
Liberals lost seats:

In such a situation we need most of all strong government, loyal harmony between
crown and people. The Prussian electorate has understood this necessity. We
want peace with the government—this was the message of the recent polls. . . .
The nation is disgusted and fed up with the quarreling of her parliaments; even
the majority of the opponents of the new economic policy seem determined
to wait for the effects of the reforms and to judge the facts. The Progress Party
finds itself limited to some big cities and a few dispersed boroughs. The voters
32 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

have mercilessly cleared out the National Liberal faction. . . . The people does
not want anymore to be spoon-fed by coteries.3

Treitschke concludes that the Prussian elections have “strengthened the cen-
tral power” over against the particular states. His argument is that because
of the looming insecurities of the international context, the German state
needs unity and a powerful, centralized government, and for this purpose it
is necessary to end the “quarreling” in the parliaments caused by the dated
doctrines of “old school” liberals and progressives. Because “the people”
seem to understand this necessity, the formula for the future lies in a “loyal
harmony” between “crown and people.”
Next follow the notorious nine pages of comments on the “Jewish ques-
tion.” Treitschke draws a general picture of the mood prevalent in Germany
as he encountered it when he returned from a holiday in Italy. (In a letter
to his wife he reported that in Italy he had found support for his view of
the “deep necessity of Christianity” and had also been able to make some
anthropological observations, such as that Romance and Slavonic people
do not have proper hip bones, “which remain the privilege of the Germanic
peoples”; some of the leitmotifs of the Dispute are in place even in Treitschke’s
holiday mail.)4 Having spent “the last couple of months abroad,” Treitschke
hints that he is in a particularly good position to observe “the stormy Ger-
man world” more objectively.
“Meanwhile a miraculous and powerful excitement labors in the depths
of our nation’s life. It is as if the nation reflected on itself, as if it judged itself
harshly.”5 The returning Treitschke “is almost frightened” by the “awakening
of the national conscience” manifested in a thousand voices “that defend
or indict each other.” He attributes to this process additional importance
and authenticity by claiming that this happens “almost in total indepen-
dence from the press.” He suggests that “the press is still” (as in the 1860s)
dominated by “liberal wish lists” and the “naive belief in the unfailing moral
force of ‘education’ [Bildung; note the quotation marks].” Different from
“the majority of the German press,” “public opinion” manifests an anti-
liberal popular mood coming from “the depths of our folk-life.” “Economic
 Liberals, Antisemites, and “Educated Men” 33

hardship, the memories of so many disappointed hopes and of the sins of

the Gründerzeiten,6 the sight of the increasing degeneration of the masses,
which keeps pace with, or even overtakes, the spreading of the secret arts
of reading and writing, and last but not least, the recollection of those days
of horror in spring 18787—all this forced thousands to reflect on the value
of our humanitarianism and Enlightenment. Thousands feel that due to
educational conceit we risk forgetting completely the moral groundedness
of human life.”8
After describing the attacks on liberalism and “the press,” Treitschke
evokes a popular sentiment against education (slandered as Bildungsdünkel,
educational conceit) that is bound to give up on Enlightenment and “hu-
manitarianism” and returns to questions of “moral groundedness [sittlichen
Halt]”—implying that Enlightenment and talk about Humanität have eroded
“moral groundedness.” He argues not against Bildung per se but against its
generalization, which he links to social “degeneration.”9
Treitschke paints a picture of a society divided into two groups: one, which
is made up of those who “fall for arid skepticism [wüsten Unglauben],” is
opposed to another, in whom “religious earnestness” and “the ecclesiasti-
cal sense [der kirchliche Sinn]” have “gained strength again.” This generic
suggestion leads Treitschke to comment on a specific event, the Protestant
General Synod. He introduces here thoughts that will remain central to
his argument: the interrelation of religion and the state. Treitschke gives
an ambivalent assessment of the synod. He applauds the way it has shown
“even to the opponents” that “this church still lives, it is still an effective
force, firmly rooted in the people, full of moral gravity [sittliche Ernst]
and not at all lacking in spiritual powers.” On the other hand, he criticizes
“some disagreeable decisions,” including the “hopefully unfeasible attempt
to subject the theological faculties [of the universities] to ecclesiastical rule
[kirchliche Parteiherrschaft].” These resolutions were accompanied by “some
ugly zealous words” and betrayed “the old theologians’ sin, the disrespect for
the positive right of the secular state.” Two of Treitschke’s key concepts—the
“positive right of the secular state” and the “moral gravity” of (Protestant)
religiosity—are introduced as standing in a relation of tension. It is significant
34 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

that in the introduction of the section of the text that is mainly about the
position of Jewry in the national state and society, Treitschke reflects on the
relationship between the secular state and the (Protestant) church. The state
depends on the church to provide vital ethical underpinnings that comple-
ment the secular state, while the state also finds its authority challenged in the
field of education—a field that is crucial to the process of nation building.
Treitschke applauds the “religious gravity” of the Protestant Synod, but he
rejects its challenge to the authority of the state.
Treitschke then returns to his observations on the popular mood that were
the starting point of the argument, phrased here as “the awakened conscience
of the people” that is directed “mainly against the effeminate philanthropy
of our age,” a remark that takes up again his attacks on liberalism and hu-
manitarianism. This is followed by the discussion of the recent publication
of a pamphlet by Otto Mittelstädt, a judge in Hamburg, titled “Gegen die
Freiheitsstrafen” (Against Prison Sentences), which Treitschke describes as
“a powerful protest against that pampering and mollycoddling of criminals
which has overcrowded our prisons and has become a cruel insult to decent
people.”10 Treitschke asserts that “this strictly objective publication” has been
answered by “incensed meetings and harsh resolutions of contempt from the
radical parties” because “the heroes of the philanthropic phrase silently feel
that the brave author—although his statements on their own often deserve
criticism—essentially merely propounds what hundreds of thousands are
thinking. The whole spirit of the age urges that the most severe majesty of
the law be fully restored in our laws and their execution.”11 Treitschke does
not give any evidence for his claim that Mittelstädt’s anti-liberalism reflects
a popular, anti-liberal mood.
Treitschke’s concerns with the resurgence of religious sentiment and with
law and its enforcement provide the context for the discussion of antisemitism,
which is referred to for the first time in the following paragraph: “Among the
symptoms of the deep change in mood that goes through our people none
appears as disconcerting as the passionate movement against Jewry.”12 The
statement that the antisemitic movement is the most “disconcerting” of a
number of “symptoms” sounds cautiously critical. The subsequent sentence,
 Liberals, Antisemites, and “Educated Men” 35

however, contrasts antisemitic agitation positively with how much worse

Treitschke alleges the situation had been before: “Until a few months ago,
the authoritative ‘reverse Hep-Hep-call’ was still dominant in Germany.”
“Hep-Hep” is the notorious rallying cry against Jews especially associated
with the anti-Jewish events of 1819.13 In the 1870s and 1880s anti-Jewish
tendencies were often likened to revivals of the “Hep-Hep” riots. Treitschke
reverses this common (liberal) topos and uses the tabooed term to stigmatize
the (liberal) critique of antisemitism. By qualifying the liberal discourse as
“authoritative [berufene]” he reinforces his point that the change of mood
among the people represents an anti-authoritative, authentically popular
movement. His attack on the liberal discourse delegitimizes in advance
liberal reproaches and allows him to express sympathies for the current
“movement” without appearing to be continuing the “medieval barbarism”
of Jew-baiting.
In the established liberal discourse, according to Treitschke, “everybody
could freely say the worst things” about “the national wrongs of the Germans,
the French and all other nations”; “but if somebody dared to speak in just and
moderate terms about some undeniable weakness of the Jewish character,
he was immediately branded as a barbarian and a religious persecutor by
nearly all newspapers.” Treitschke invokes here an anonymous (German)
collective of independent minds who wish to debate the weaknesses of all
peoples, including their own and that of the Jews, but are kept in check by
“the press,” which allegedly suppressed any criticism of the Jews.14
In the rest of this paragraph Treitschke enumerates recent events that
outline the current antisemitic movement: “Today we have already come
to the point where the majority of Breslau voters—apparently not in wild
excitement but with quiet deliberation—conspired not to elect a Jew to the
[Prussian] Diet under any circumstances. Antisemitic societies are formed,
the ‘Jewish Question’ is discussed in noisy meetings, a flood of anti-Jewish
pamphlets inundates the book market.”15 Treitschke reverts to the tone he
adopted earlier. “We have come to the point” seems to suggest that a basically
legitimate reactive development is tending to go too far: voters “conspire,”
meetings are “noisy,” “floods” of pamphlets “inundate” the market. Treitschke
36 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

uses negative terminology to express his distance from the events. At the same
time, though, he stresses that the Breslau electorate at least (in contrast to
the “passionate” popular movement) acted “not in wild excitement but with
quiet deliberation.” Taking into account that Treitschke’s main concern is
with the “positivity” of state and law (as expressed earlier), his ambivalence
about these processes seems to be more than just tactical: he perceives and
articulates the risks for the “positivity” of the authoritative state that lie in
popular movements and the “noise” and the “floods” they cause. However,
liberalism and the Jews are to blame for the fact that “we have come to this
point.” The social process is at least partly rational and legitimate.
Treitschke further elaborates on the twofold character of antisemitism:
“There is only too much of dirt and brutality in these activities [Treiben], and
it is impossible to suppress one’s disgust when one notices that some of these
incendiary pamphlets [Brandschriften] seem to come from Jewish pens; it is
well known that since Pfefferkorn and Eisenmenger, there were always many
who had been born as Jews among the fanatical Jew-eaters [Judenfressern].”16
“Dirt and brutality,” “activities,” and “incendiary pamphlets” add to the dis-
sociating tone of the previous statement. However, the (unsupported) claim
that “geborene Juden” (Jews who converted to Christianity) are among the
“Jew-eaters” suggests not only that the Jews contributed indirectly to Jew-
hatred by giving it a cause but that some are even directly involved.17 The
Jews are the force behind liberalism as well as behind the (self-)destruction
of liberalism; in other words, the self-destructive element of liberalism is
identical to its Jewish element. This construction allows Treitschke to separate
and exempt the non-Jewish and non-destructive elements of liberalism from
criticism. The same pattern works with reference to the anti-Jewish move-
ment: the Jews are responsible for the movement’s dangerous and destructive
features, which allows Treitschke to salvage also this movement’s true and
respectable side. Furthermore, the notion of Jews hating (literally: eating)
Jews (inducing “disgust” in the observer) implies that being destructive of
the group they belong to is an essential characteristic of the Jews. Under
this perspective, the “disgust” with this (as it were) “carnivorous” behavior
seems to point—in reverse—to the fundamental belief that decent human
 Liberals, Antisemites, and “Educated Men” 37

beings are always loyal to “their group.” If a group consists of people whose
main characteristic is to be disloyal to their own as to any other group, this
group is thus different from and inferior to all other groups of human be-
ings. Treitschke concludes: “But is there really nothing but mob brutality
and business envy at the bottom of this noisy activity? Are these outbreaks
of a deep, long-suppressed anger really only a momentary outburst, as hol-
low and unfounded as the Teutonic Jew-baiting of 1819? No—the instinct of
the masses has in fact correctly recognized a grave danger, a very consider-
able fault of the new German life; it is not an empty phrase when one talks
today of a German Jewish question [eine deutsche Judenfrage].” Treitschke
refers again to the Hep-Hep riots of 1819, which he dismisses as “hollow and
unfounded” and contrasts with the recent antisemitic movement, which he
argues has “correctly recognized a grave danger.” He asserts the different
character of the recent antisemitic movement (although it is also rooted in
a “deep, long-suppressed anger”). While most liberal critics tended to ignore
the historical specificity of the antisemitism that emerged in the late 1870s
and dismissed it as an anachronistic reincarnation of the Hep-Hep riots,
Treitschke grounds his sympathies for the antisemitic movement on the fact
that it is not like the earlier “hollow and unfounded” riots—or at least this
is what he wants the reader to believe. The argument implies that the recent
antisemitism is rational and well founded. It is noteworthy that Treitschke
has already pointed out that the antisemitic voters in Breslau acted “not in
wild excitement but with quiet deliberation.” His argument anticipates both
the scholarly distinction between “modern antisemitism” and “pre-modern
anti-Judaism” and Hitler’s notion of “antisemitism of reason.”18
Treitschke’s formulations in this paragraph imply further that the specific
(modern) character of the antisemitic movement in Germany is related to
the specificities of German historical development. The “grave danger” that
has been recognized by the antisemites is, according to Treitschke, “a very
considerable fault of the new German life”; the problem is thus as much
“new” as it is specifically German.
In the concluding section of this article, Treitschke states that “the noisy
agitation of the moment appears only as a brutal and spiteful but natural
38 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

reaction of the Germanic national feeling against an alien element which

has usurped too much space in our life.”19 He suggests that the removal of
the taboo on discussing “this evil” is in itself an achievement: “Let us not
deceive ourselves: the movement is very deep and strong. A few jokes about
the cheap words of wisdom from the mouths of Christian-Socialist soap-box
orators will not suffice to suppress it. Even in the best-educated circles, among
men who would reject with horror any thought of Christian fanaticism or
national arrogance, we hear today the cry, as from one mouth: the Jews are
our misfortune!” Treitschke formulates here a powerful antisemitic slogan,
but he puts it into the mouths of an anonymous multitude that is said to
include “educated men.”20 Apart from constituting a precaution against criti-
cism, the image of the “cry, as from one mouth” is a very strong rhetorical
means. Treitschke invokes a unified voice that—even metaphorically—did
not exist at the time. His claim that even “educated men” held the antisemitic
persuasion qualifies his earlier description of the antisemitic movement
as an anti-establishment movement: it is further evidence of the rational
elements of the movement that it is being joined by “educated men,” too;
antisemitism transcends class.21
The key to the formulation’s ambivalence—starting from a perspective
apparently critical of antisemitism and gradually turning to supporting
it—is the “us” at its exhortative beginning. We, the imaginary community of
reasonable people of all walks of life who do not like noisy people (Stöcker
and other populist demagogues), should not “deceive ourselves” and under-
estimate the current movement. However, the line between reevaluation and
appreciation is thin. In pointing out the modern character of the antisemitic
movement lies part of the strength of Treitschke’s text. His understanding
is here superior to that of those of his contemporaries who merely turned
up their noses to the vulgar noises of the antisemites. Treitschke asserts
that antisemitism grew “even in the best-educated circles.” He locates the
paranoid projection that identifies “misfortune” straight and simple with
“the Jews” in the imagined common mouth of men (silently including him-
self) “who would reject with horror any thought of Christian fanaticism or
national arrogance.” With this statement Treitschke points to the existence
 Liberals, Antisemites, and “Educated Men” 39

of a modern type of anti-Jewish attitude that is based neither on religious

fanaticism nor simply on “national arrogance”: he consciously inaugurates
liberal antisemitism.
In the course of the Dispute, Treitschke did not move away from most
aspects of his position, although he did concretize and qualify a lot. In his
very detailed third contribution, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage”
(Some Further Remarks on the Jewish Question), he claims to express “the
opinion of hundreds of thousands.”22 He rejects the claim that anti-Jewish
agitation has been initiated by ultraconservatives and ultramontanists. He
claims that “respectable circles [die gute Gesellschaft]” “irrespective of party
allegiance” discussed for more than a decade “how to protect our old Ger-
man ways against the growing power and arrogance [Übermuth] of the
Jews.”23 It was only a fear of being identified with the particularist interests
of ultramontanism, clericalism, and deep conservatism that made “many
decent men” still hesitate to join the “movement.” Therefore Treitschke “found
it more desirable that for a change a man who cannot be silenced with the
popular slogans ‘intolerant priest’ or ‘the Jew is being burnt’ speaks out
openly about the current movement.”24 In other words, if antisemitism has
so far been articulated mostly by reactionaries, this merely shows that non-
reactionary antisemites are still waiting for a mouthpiece from a nonclerical
background—such as Treitschke himself. Treitschke offers here an account of
the social meaning and function of his own intervention: he helped to shift
(one is tempted to say, to emancipate) antisemitism from being a domain
of clerical conservatism to being a national (and, by implication, liberal)
ideology. In other words, Treitschke made antisemitism respectable not so
much for “respectable society” as such (as opposed to “the street”) but for
the liberal, nonclerical mainstream of “respectable society” as it had become
predominant at the time. In that sense, Treitschke understands himself cor-
rectly as a modernizer of anti-Jewish sentiment—as someone who not so
much makes it “respectable” but rather helps it to remain respectable with
a new kind of “respectable society.”
In the Berlin Antisemitism Dispute, two principal views of the social foun-
dation of the anti-Jewish campaign can be found: Treitschke claims to see a
40 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

massive change of mood in the deep structure of “the people” and its “soul”
that is also embraced and articulated by “educated men.” He also appears
to believe that some “educated men” had anticipated it all in the preceding
years. Either way, the “educated men” are secondary to “the people”: they
are the latter’s mouthpieces.
The alternative model, variations of which are adopted by most others,
supposes that the masses of ordinary people are in principle unimpressed
and that the antisemitism formulated by (some) intellectuals is dangerous
but—in the eyes of most—futile demagoguery motivated by enmity toward
the Imperial state, toward liberalism, or toward both. Heinrich Graetz, for
example, argues that the antisemitic campaign is “isolated and little rel-
evant”; Seligman Meyer writes that the anti-Jewish agitation in Berlin does
not have much effect on most people.25 Harry Breßlau rejects the claim that
the antisemitic agitation “arose” from the “instincts of the masses.”26 He
traces its beginnings back to the series of five articles that appeared in the
Kreuzzeitung in 1875 in which he claims the more general anti-liberal theme
was first combined with anti-Jewish rhetoric and subsequently developed
into a campaign against the Judenwirthschaft (Jew-economy) in Prussia and
the German Reich.27 These articles were mainly directed against the financial
and economic politics of the Prussian and Imperial governments, which
were claimed to be under the influence of Jews. Soon, the “agrarian party,”
the “ultramontanist” tendency within Catholicism, and also particularist
(i.e., “anti-Imperial”) newspapers in the German provinces took up the
theme.28 By locating the origins of antisemitism in the conservative camp,
that is, in a background hostile to National Liberalism, he seems to be trying
to “win back” Treitschke. Breßlau claims that apart from the foundation of
the “League of Antisemites” (which he dismisses as irrelevant), the only news
in recent months is that the agitation has been extended “from the press
into parliament” and, addressing Treitschke, “the unfortunate phenomenon
that you also joined the anti-Jewish movement.”29 He suggests that until the
end of 1875, only “certain political parties”—identical to those who used
to be called Reichsfeinde, enemies of the Empire (and in particular of Bis-
marck’s politics)—have driven the public toward antisemitism “for certain
 Liberals, Antisemites, and “Educated Men” 41

political purposes” and “making use of old prejudices.” Breßlau concludes

sarcastically that the political and social background of the initiators of the
Jew-baiting is actually “powerful evidence to prove the Jews’ patriotism and
national-mindedness [nationale Gesinnung]—in the meaning you and I
understand this concept.”30
In a subsequent comment, Breßlau singles out the character and origin of
“today’s movement” as the main point of disagreement between himself and
Treitschke.31 He argues that the context of the current anti-Jewish agitation
makes Treitschke’s aphorism, “The Jews are our misfortune,” particularly
harmful, but he disputes the notion that the discussions Treitschke claims to
have observed among “respectable circles” are a general phenomenon.32
Manuel Joël points out a contradiction fundamental to Treitschke’s ar-
gument: the claim that the anti-Jewish agitation is “deeply rooted” in the
“spirit” of the German people is populist, while his denunciation of “noisy
antisemitic rabble” is elitist. Joël finds that Treitschke’s distancing of himself
from the antisemitic demagoguery is merely tactical. He asserts against
Treitschke that the common people are innocent in the first place and are
deliberately “seduced” for political reasons. “The people working with loyal
industriousness [das in treuem Fleisse arbeitende Volk] . . . are innocent
of the anti-Jewish campaign,” he writes. “Hatred of Jews has always been a
poison that has been injected purposefully by fanatics either of religion or
of a doctrine or by those who served those for opportunistic reasons. . . .
Unless the masses are being seduced, they have the instinct that the Jews do
not differ in humanity from their Christian fellow citizens.”33 In a similar
vein, Seligmann Meyer argues (in his response to Treitschke’s third article)
that—judging from the responses to Treitschke—the “attempt at resusci-
tating embalmed medieval cadavers has failed.” The “Jew-baiters” have not
managed “to rob the German people of its culture and enlightenment.”34
While Meyer, Breßlau, and Joël tried to reclaim the soul, instinct, and
culture of the German people from Treitschke, Naudh emphasized like Tre-
itschke the popular roots of antisemitism but attacked what he understood
is the liberal conceptual framework of Treitschke’s position. Naudh claims
that antisemitism started not in 1875 but as early as the escape of Moses and
42 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

“his bunch of lazy and dirty thieves” from Egypt.35 Anti-Jewish attitudes
have never been absent during the last three thousand years, although they
changed forms of appearance among persecution, “passive hate,” and “dis-
gust,” “depending on whether the behavior of the Jews provoked the one
or the other.” In Germany it existed “as disgust” until 1848 and “turned into
hate only since liberalism allowed itself to be hijacked by the Jews in order to
afford them domination of economy and state.”36 Naudh scorns Treitschke
for his support for Bismarck’s alliance with liberalism and connects this with
the criticism that Treitschke’s historiography is unscientific and ideologically
informed by his (liberal) understanding of the present.37 Naudh defends
Stöcker against Treitschke’s condescension and claims for Stöcker, too, what
Treitschke claimed for the anti-Jewish movement in general: Stöcker only
expressed “what was seething among the people.” However—reversing, as
it were, Joël’s and Breßlau’s indictment—Naudh reproaches Stöcker for
“soothing the passions of the masses”: his obligation to Christian love makes
him undermine patriotic love.38
Naudh supports his version of a populist, antisemitic nationalism with a
long discussion of the concept of education, reflecting on Treitschke’s use
of the term. He points out that Treitschke noted with surprise, and Breßlau
rejected, the claim that the “Jewish question” has even penetrated “into the
circles of the highest education.” Naudh argues that “these circles” are un-
likely to take up the issue, because they entertain a concept of Bildung that
abstracts from the character of the nation.39 He claims that “every ‘Bildung’
is essentially something false” because educating [bilden] “does not mean to
bring forth the thing itself but an image, a semblance of it [ein Bild].” Naudh
believes that the liberal concept of Bildung means development through
external influence, while he argues that people should develop “from inside”
only. His argument opposes the notion of an individual in harmony with his
or her authentic, inalienable essence to attempts to form or shape (bilden)
this individual according to external—that is, inauthentic—educational
standards. In Naudh’s critique of the concept of Bildung two elements of
late-eighteenth-century German thought seem to reverberate: resentment of
the elitism of official culture and the anti-French, anti-aristocratic discourse
 Liberals, Antisemites, and “Educated Men” 43

of German proto-nationalism. Naudh mocks the lack of nationalism on the

side of the “educated” elites: they “attempt to suppress nationality, which
is—in Hegel’s words—the ground of all living life, and want to be men in
general who live in a nowhere land [Menschen schlechthin, die nirgends
leben] instead of being Germans, which only they can become and be.”40
In Naudh’s demotic discourse, the educated—even when they are nation-
alists like Treitschke—are suspect because they are simultaneously also a
cosmopolitan, universal class.

The question of what motivates the anti-Jewish demagoguery is central in

particular to the contributions by Ludwig Bamberger and Heinrich Bernhardt
Oppenheim.41 Bamberger argues that “the attack on the Jews is only a smoke
screen diverting attention from today’s great campaign against liberalism” and
that “without doubt” it was the attack on liberalism that led Treitschke toward
antisemitism.42 He points out that “the essay in whose concluding section
the Jewish question is being addressed is directed against liberalism” as well
as against philanthropy and education. For example, Treitschke expressed
approval of Mittelstädt’s agitation for corporal punishment.43 Bamberger
states that a “good portion of the anger against the Jews comes from the
fact of their liberal conviction,” quoting Eduard Lasker as an example.44
Since the Jews have predominantly been seated “on the benches of the left
wing,” he continues, they “have to put up with” the anti-Jewish campaign.
He adds that only two Jewish deputies of previous Reichstage sat on the
right, the “financial aristocrats [Fürstlichkeiten der Finanz]” Strousberg
and von Rothschild. It could be held against Bamberger’s argument that
these two are regularly cited by antisemites as particularly despicable Jews.
Bamberger’s reduction of the anti-Jewish campaign to nothing but an ele-
ment of a campaign against liberalism fails to explain why it also directs itself
against Jews who are not liberals. Bamberger suggests that “educated men”
do not in their entirety hold anti-Jewish opinions and, pointing to election
results, that “the people by and large think in a much more unprejudiced way
than some scholars do.”45 Nevertheless, while anti-Jewish sentiment is least
widespread in the countryside, where Christian and Jewish poor share the
44 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

same fate, and rare among the uneducated, it is all in all more widespread
than the Jews, “especially the educated Jews,” are ready to admit.46
Oppenheim also argues that whatever is new in the current anti-Jewish
movement is of “agrarian-socialist origin.”47 He suggests—like Breßlau—
that it had been initiated five years earlier as a campaign against Bismarck in
which the Jews were merely a pretext. The campaigners had then “fantasized
about a conspiracy between Bismarck, Lasker and Bleichröder.”48 Oppenheim
sees the current campaign as an expression of “a systematic promoting of
political, clerical and in particular, economic reaction” for which Treitschke
“seems to be working . . .—probably unknowingly.” Oppenheim adds that
he had taken part in the struggle for emancipation already in the 1830s and
1840s when identical “complaints” were held against the Jews, “only sharper
and more honest.” This had then been “an honest struggle” about “actual
prejudices” and “real convictions.” The opponents were “more grim, more
convinced and more clever,” but some of them also could be “converted”
after an “objective debate” fought with “real arguments.”49 For Oppenheim,
“the Jewish question is but a pretext,” as “totally different things are at stake”:
“To challenge Jewish emancipation would mean challenging the constitu-
tional and the economic foundations of the constitutional state. Whoever
would try this, would have against himself not only the Jews.” Therefore,
“not the Jewish question, but the question of Jew-hatred” needs to be dis-
cussed. Oppenheim ridicules the pompous and pretentious rhetoric of Tre-
itschke’s article (“You believe you hear the Zeitgeist’s pulse beating, but it is
merely the noise made by the scene-shifter [Kulissenschieber]”) and refutes
Treitschke’s claims about what the current manifestations of the Zeitgeist or
the Volksgeist are, in particular Treitschke’s “phantasmagoric presentation”
that there has been a sudden change of mood in society.50 There has neither
been any particularly pro-Jewish mood before, nor is there a deep anti-Jewish
movement now among the people. Oppenheim rejects Treitschke’s claims
as fictional and points out that Treitschke fails to give any reasons for the
sudden change he claims to have observed.51 Oppenheim points out that
the only firm evidence of a change in mood is in some parts of the (party-
political) press, contrary to Treitschke’s claim that this change occurred
 Liberals, Antisemites, and “Educated Men” 45

outside the press. He concludes that Treitschke’s intention is to demonstrate

“the existence of a ‘Jewish question’” and to lend an “ideal foundation” to
crude Jew-hatred, mob brutality (“Pöbelroheit”), and economic envy (“Ge-
schäftsneid”).52 “If the people was as lowly as Herr von Treitschke writes,
then today’s Jew-baiting would inevitably lead to atrocities no less than in
1819.”53 However, then as now it was merely a small part of the “mob” that
was “incited by half-educated men enraptured by phraseology [phrasen-
berauschten Halbgelehrten].”54 Oppenheim’s observations are interspersed
with reflections of a more philosophical character. At the beginning of his
contribution Oppenheim quotes a reflection on the concepts of “progress”
and “civilization” by the French romantic writer and critic Charles-Augustin
Saint-Beuve. The quotation implies that the continued existence of “civiliza-
tion” cannot be taken for granted or as if it was natural, but has to be (re-)
invented and confirmed ever again. It can also be lost: centuries of progress
can be reversed “in just a matter of weeks”: “Savagery is always but two steps
away, and it recommences as soon as one falls back.”55 It is implied that for
Oppenheim the anti-Jewish campaign represents such a “fall-back” into
“savagery” and signifies the precariousness and reversibility of “progress and
civilization.” Oppenheim’s principal target is the decline of idealism and the
triumph of realpolitik:56 “Those who used to believe in the victory of the idea
now—with a mocking smile—merely believe in the victory of the cannon,
the right of the mightier.”57 Together with the worship of Bismarck, this has
created a general climate beneficial for reaction. As a further example of this
he refers to the argument (also quoted by Treitschke in his first article) that
the reintroduction of corporal punishment would mean the “salvation of
society.” Oppenheim opposes the talk about the “degeneration of the masses
[Verwilderung].”58 He argues that the call for cruel methods of punishment
(as advocated by Mittelstädt and Treitschke) rather suggests there is “a certain
degeneration of the so-called educated classes.” He compares the calls for
reintroduction of corporal punishment, as well as the current anti-Jewish
movement, to clerical reactionaries’ continued opposition to the heliocentric
model of the universe long after it was clearly established.
This comparison points to an important tension in Oppenheim’s argument:
46 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

the reference to the debate about the heliocentric model works as ridicule
of anti-liberalism, because attacks on heliocentrism were then obviously
futile. Oppenheim, like many others, could not imagine that attacks on
liberalism and Jewish emancipation could be successful. The centrality of
liberal values in society seemed as certain as the place of the sun in the so-
lar system. Nevertheless, his choice of the aphorism by Saint-Beuve shows
that Oppenheim also felt ambivalent about his trust in the irreversibility of
progress. While the quote stands for skepticism about progress, the liken-
ing of anti-liberalism to anti-heliocentrism stands for optimism. However,
Oppenheim does not take up the theme of the quote in the body of the text
at all: the text is ruled by liberal optimism, while the darker, skeptical tone
is exiled into its antechamber, couched between inverted commas and at a
secure distance from the argument.
A different perspective can be found in some remarks by the priest Paulus
Cassel, who comments on the weaknesses of liberalism from the perspective
of a Christian missionary. He writes that one of the roots of the anti-Jewish
movement is the fact that the emancipation of the Jews in 1848 happened
not for reasons of “love of the Jews or actual liberal-mindedness [Freisin-
nigkeit]” but “for the sake of being in opposition: emancipation was part of
the liberal platform.” Correspondingly, the Jews are now attacked with the
intention of hurting the Progress Party.59 People “begrudged them the liberty”
because “they were not liberated themselves.”60 In this situation of failed or
incomplete liberation, “self-righteous envy exploits the old prejudice.”61
Concluding from this initial sample of passages from the Dispute, it is
striking how little the questions have changed by which debates on anti-
semitism are shaped: Does it come from the people or from the elites? Is it
all political manipulation, or is it genuine popular, national sentiment? Is it
plainly reactionary, or is it also rooted in the movement of progress? Does
it have to do with progress’s failure to deliver? The following chapters will
confirm this initial sense of almost uncanny familiarity.
 Two. Jew-hatred and Nationality

More than the questions of the social background of the anti-Jewish agita-
tion and how it relates to liberalism, the question of the link between the
anti-Jewish or antisemitic tendencies and nationalism was a main theme
in the Dispute. Paulus Cassel might have been the first contributor who
emphasized this connection when he called the anti-Jewish movement the
“exuberance of national stimulation over the true cosmopolitanism of the
Gospel.”1 Treitschke reversed this argument when he stated that “the newly
reemerging Jew-debate” is merely “the sad inheritance of a long epoch of
weakened national pride and insecure religious sentiment.” He held that
“it is our fault that the Jews in Germany show off their tribal consciousness
[Stammesbewusstsein] as provocatively as in no other large state.”2 While for
Cassel and others antisemitism seems to signify an overdose of nationalism,
for Treitschke it points to a lack of nationalism.
The extent to which the Dispute is part of, and shaped by, a wider dis-
course on the nation is illustrated by Ludwig Philippson’s suggestion that
Treitschke’s article might have been triggered by an article in the French
Journal des débats by J. Bourdeau (November 5, 1879) on the anti-Jewish
campaign in Germany.3 In his own earlier review of this article, Philipp-
son had expressed his “truly patriotic pain”: he showed himself hurt that
the French author ridiculed the German anxiety about Jewish domination
as unreal and “gloatingly” interpreted the fact that the Germans perceive
themselves as captives, “the booty of a conquering race,” as showing their
48 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

own national weakness.4 One can imagine that if Philippson felt “patriotic
pain” about this kind of comment from a French journalist, Treitschke must
have been furious.
The most important evidence for the view that the Berlin Antisemitism
Dispute was essentially a debate about differing concepts of the nation is
the much-quoted and much-celebrated “Erklärung” (Declaration of the
Notables), published in November 1880.5 Significantly, its text is foremost
an appeal to patriotic unity and the defense of central liberal tenets in the
name of the German idealist tradition. The Declaration begins with a state-
ment on German national unification:

Fierce struggles have unified our fatherland to a powerfully rising Empire. Unity
has been achieved because the feeling that necessity has welded us together6
carried the victory over the tribal and religious divisions that had fragmented
our nation like no other. Making individual members [of the nation] pay for
these divisions is unfair and vulgar and mostly punishes those who honestly
and seriously strive to overcome [their] particularity and to achieve true amal-
gamation with the nation.7 They experience it [this discrimination] as a breach
of loyalty from those with whom they feel they are striving for the same goals.
It prevents what is and remains the common goal: the eradication of all past
divisions that still continue to exist within the German nation.8

The Declaration takes the standpoint of those who are committed to elimi-
nating all religious and “tribal” divisions within the German nation. It claims
that this is the group most affected by the current anti-Jewish campaign.
Those not committed to complete assimilation (let alone social divisions
along lines other than religion and “tribe”) are not mentioned. It is implied
that such groups are not included in the patriotic defense effort.9 National
unification and the elimination of particularity are presented as historical
necessities, counter-tendencies are stigmatized as anachronistic: “In vari-
ous places, in particular the larger towns of the Reich, the racial hatred and
fanaticism of the Middle Ages are currently revived and directed against our
Jewish fellow citizens in an unexpected and deeply embarrassing fashion.”10
The current campaign is referred to as “racial” as well as “medieval,”11 adding
 Jew-hatred and Nationality 49

up to an effective stigmatization: the characterization as “racial” removes

the anti-Jewish discourse from the realm of idealism and liberalism, and
the characterization as “medieval” puts it into contrast with the historical
teleology of progress that leads from pre-modern dividedness to national
unity. “It is being forgotten how many of them [the Jewish fellow citizens]
have brought benefit and honor to the fatherland in the areas of business
and trade, art and science.” Those who anachronistically hate the Jews have
to be reminded that a national policy of integration is beneficial to the na-
tion. The formulation “it is being forgotten” implies that the authors of the
Declaration presuppose that the antisemites also acknowledge that the nation
is an overriding value and that they are merely forgetful of the benefits the
Jews bring. Their motives can only be of a lesser order: the “reanimation of
an old delusion” in the name of “envy” threatens to poison social relations
based on toleration. However, the “resistance of level-headed men” can still
oppose the “confusion” and the “artificially fanned passion of the multitude.”
The Declaration appeals to “the Christians of all parties” and “all Germans
who cherish the ideal heritage of their great princes, thinkers and poets”
to defend “the ground of our common life”: “Respect for every denomina-
tion, equal right, equal sun in competition, equal recognition of merit and
achievement for Christians and Jews.” While the first half of the Declaration
focuses on national history and the necessity of unification, the second half
shifts the argument toward central liberal tenets and also refers to their wider
socioeconomic framework. The demands with which the Declaration cul-
minates include two cultural-political liberal demands—religious freedom
and legal equality—and one socioeconomic demand (in two complementary
formulations): only merit won in unrestricted competition should determine
an individual’s positioning in society.12 The Declaration thus links Jewish
emancipation to a wider conception of a liberal-bourgeois socioeconomic
order, and on the other hand it links the anti-Jewish “confusion” to “the
passions of the multitude” driven by “envy.” “Racial hatred” and also its
rejection are linked to economic interest and class positioning. At the same
time, the Declaration emphasizes the struggle for German national unifica-
tion and the elimination of all particularities as the political and historical
50 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

framework of the conflict and comes to the defense of Jewish citizens who
are assimilated or in the process of becoming such. In addition, the explicit
reference to the merits of Jews “in the areas of business and trade, art and
science” leaves lower-class Jews (such as most of the immigrants from the
East) in the cold. Although this is not openly articulated, the intertwining
of a political-cultural argument and a socioeconomic argument also implies
that the process of nation building is supposed to eliminate particular class
interests, namely, the “envy” and the “confusions” of “the multitude,” along
with the elimination of ethnic-cultural particularities.13
Theodor Mommsen’s answer to Treitschke follows similar lines. Mommsen
explicitly states that he has in mind only a group of friends and political
allies as the intended addressees of his statement, a group that is defined by
a particular historical experience—national unification: “To our generation
it was granted . . . that our nation has reached the great goals that we found
ahead of us when we were growing up to be thinking people.”14 We, “our
nation,” have reached the goals that we, “our generation,” “found ahead of
us.” Whoever grew up in those days—that is, between 1848 and 1871—“will
consider no price too high for our Reichstag and the Imperial flag come
what may—and many a thing may still come.” This nationalist confession
is followed by a qualification:

But one has to be very steadfast and farsighted in order actually to enjoy this
fortunate fate. The immediate consequences recall the saying that fate pun-
ishes men by fulfilling their wishes. While Germany was still in the making,
nobody—as befits those who are fighting for a common goal—asked about
confessional or tribal differences, about conflicting interests of rural and urban
population, of merchants and industrialists. In the realized Germany war is
being waged by all against all, and we will soon reach a stage when only he is
considered a full citizen who can trace back his descent to one of the three sons
of Mannus,15 who confesses the gospel the way the pastor collocutus16 does and
who gives evidence of his skills in ploughing and sowing. The confessional
war, the so-called Culturkampf, and the recently waged civil war of the wallet
is being joined now by the deformed child [Missgeburt] of national feeling,
the antisemitic campaign.17
 Jew-hatred and Nationality 51

Mommsen reasons that “[we] older men, all of whose willing and hoping
had been invested in the national idea,” feel ambivalent about this state of
affairs. On the one hand, the antisemitic campaign recalls “Saturn once
more eating his offspring”;18 on the other hand, this “backlash” appears
futile and merely a “retarding moment” that will not actually change the
course of things. Nevertheless, this “suicidal acting of the national feeling”
does “grave damage to persons and interests.”
Mommsen links antisemitism to the process of nation building, describing
it as its “Missgeburt” in one instance, in the next one as “Saturn eating his
offspring,” then as “that suicidal acting of the national feeling.”19 Antisemitism
appears here as a product of nationalism that is at the same time destroying
nation building. The overall historical process cannot be halted by some
antisemitic noisy rabble; nevertheless, it does “grave damage.” Mommsen
states that the social coherence that was generated in the process of strug-
gling for national unification was lost in the moment that this struggle
was successful; once the nation-state is established it develops a dynamic
of social conflicts, the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf, economic struggles, and
antisemitism. The national movement aims at a form of social coherence—
the national community—but actually seems to be able to guarantee this
cohesion only as long as it is not (yet) successful. This awareness gives Mom-
msen’s nationalism an unhappy, melancholy touch.

Treitschke’s German “Jewish Question”

One strand of the Dispute involved Treitschke’s claim that there is a German
“Jewish question,” or else that the “Jewish question” had a specifically Ger-
man character in Germany: “If the English and the French talk with some
disdain of the prejudice of the Germans against the Jews we must reply to
them: you do not know us; you live in happier circumstances which make
the rise of such ‘prejudices’ impossible.”20 Treitschke defends here the anti-
Jewish “prejudice” against criticism from English and French observers. He
claims that Jewish immigration from “the East” reinforces what he claims to
be the non-Western character—arrogance, unassimilability—of the Ger-
man Jews. The crux of this argument is that Jewish immigration is harmful
52 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

because of a continuity of “Easternness” between immigrating (Polish) and

resident (citizen) German Jews. Both are “Orientals” in the last instance.
Furthermore, Treitschke argues that the harmful effect of Jewish influence
is aggravated by a lack of national-mindedness on the side of the Germans.
He opposes “our country” to “Western Europe”: “The number of Jews in
Western Europe is so small that they cannot have any noticeable influence
upon the morality of the nation; but the eastern border of our country is
invaded year after year by multitudes of assiduous trouser-selling youths
from the inexhaustible cradle of Poland, whose children and grandchildren
are to be the future rulers of Germany’s stock exchanges and Germany’s
press.”21 Treitschke invokes an “invasion” of foreigners from the East who
first engage in petty trade and will then rise into powerful positions in civil
society. He presents this as a quasi-automatic process. He implies that petty
trade, trading on the stock market, and journalism are essentially similar
activities that not only attract the same sort of people but allow individuals
to rise easily from trouser seller to editor or stock jobber.22 Treitschke claims
that massive Jewish immigration throws up the question of how “this alien
nation” can be assimilated.23 Significantly, he emphasizes as the most threat-
ening aspect of the immigration the fact that the immigrants have successful
careers. The crucial problem is therefore not whether they can assimilate
but what exactly the immigrants assimilate to. Treitschke asserts that they
assimilate not to the “German people” but to the “German Jews,” whereas
“the Jews of the Western and Southern European countries” in their great
majority “have become good Frenchmen, Englishmen, Italians, as far as can
be reasonably expected from a people of such pure blood and such distinct
peculiarity.” Treitschke gives two different reasons for the alleged difference:
their number and their alleged descent. Those in “the West” and “the South”
“belong mostly to the Spanish branch [Stamm],24 which looks back on a
comparatively proud history and which always adjusted comparatively easily
to the Western way of life.” He contrasts these Jews favorably to the alleged
mass of Jewish immigrants into Germany: “We Germans, however, have
to deal with Jews of the Polish branch, which bears the deep scars of many
centuries of Christian tyranny.” The use of the term “Christian tyranny”
 Jew-hatred and Nationality 53

reinforces Treitschke’s dissociation from pre-modern anti-Judaism, as we

have seen. “According to experience, they are incomparably more alien to
the European and especially to the Germanic character [dem germanischen
Wesen].” Treitschke refers to those Jews who do not belong to the “Spanish
branch” with the concept of the “Polish branch” instead of calling them
“Germanic.” As he must have been aware, the Jewish population of Poland
was a product of immigration by German Jews to Eastern Europe. Logically
speaking, the equivalent of the concept “Spanish” (more precisely, Iberian)
Jews would have been “Germanic” or “Eastern European” Jews. Given the
low esteem in which Poles were generally held in the German capital at the
time, the concept of a “Polish branch” seems to be tarring the immigrants
with additional stigma. Treitschke also avoids the implication that the Jew-
ish immigrants could historically claim some form of Germanness. Under
the headings of “East” and “West,” “Polish,” and “Spanish,” his argument
invokes a notion of bad and good Jews. As Holz states, “The Western Jews
are ‘good Jews’ because they appear as ‘good Frenchmen’ (etc.) whereas ‘bad
Jews’ bring to bear their ‘alien Volksthum.’”25 This implies that the best that
can be expected from any Jew is not to make the Jewish Wesen (character)
to appear. Treitschke writes: “I think, however, some of my Jewish friends
will agree, with deep regret, when I say that recently a dangerous spirit
of arrogance has arisen in Jewish circles and that the influence of Jewry
upon our national life, which in former times was often beneficial, is now
often harmful.”26 Whether or not Treitschke actually expected that “Jewish
friends” would come forward and defend him in a dispute that he seems
to anticipate, one cannot know. Criticism of old-fashioned, idiosyncratic
Jewish particularity and the effort to get rid of a large part of traditional
Jewish habits and attitudes (or what was held to be such) was indeed piv-
otal to the Enlightenment discourse on Jewish emancipation among Jews
no less than Gentiles. The novelty in Treitschke’s variation on this theme
is, though, that he suggests a development from “former times,” when Jews
apparently have been modest and “often beneficial,” to modern times (“re-
cently,” i.e., since legal emancipation), when (a significant portion of) the
Jews became arrogant and harmful. This inverts the older liberal argument
54 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

that emancipation would turn unproductive, conservative, and parochial

Jews into good and productive citizens of modern society.
In Treitschke’s discourse, the peculiarity of the German (i.e., not “West-
ern”) Jews is mirrored and aggravated in its harmful effects by the peculiar-
ity of the German historical situation. The Jews of England or France are
“harmless or even beneficial” because of the higher “energy of the national
pride and the firmly rooted national way of life [nationale Sitte] of these
two old and civilized nations.”27 This implies that a strong national culture
does not allow a problematic “Jewish question” to emerge in the first place.
In Germany, the situation is different: “Our civilization is young; in our
whole existence we are still lacking national style, instinctive pride, a firmly
developed individuality, which is why we were defenseless against alien
manners for so long. But we are in the process of acquiring these qualities,
and we can only wish that our Jews recognize in time the change which is
now occurring in Germany as a necessary consequence of the foundation
of the German state.” Treitschke’s formulation implies here the notion of
Germany as a backward country that has to catch up with its delayed na-
tion building—the original nineteenth-century version of what later came
to be known as the “verspätete Nation” (belated nation) and “Deutscher
Sonderweg” (special path) arguments.28

“Immigration from the East”

Treitschke’s invocation of a floodlike immigration of “trouser-selling youths”
was perhaps the passage of his text that was most commented on. Both the
immigration issue and the debate on how to conceptualize the “two Jewish
branches” received plenty of attention. Only one of numerous responses
reacted to the ridiculousness of the claim by ridiculing Treitschke’s imagery:
Dr. Rülf from Memel writes drily that Treitschke might have been inspired by
his visit to the town of Memel—on the German-Polish border—the previous
year.29 There he must have noticed the substantial number of Jewish-owned
secondhand clothes shops. However, the shopkeepers there are not “youths.”
Rülf relates that the German state had just awarded one of these Jewish
trouser sellers a Hebrew bible adorned with the picture of the kaiser (plus
 Jew-hatred and Nationality 55

an amount of money) on the occasion of his diamond wedding, as this old

Jew had given over half a dozen brave soldiers to the German fatherland. Rülf
makes two points: first, the Eastern Jews are officially recognized to be Ger-
man patriots; second, the migrant youths leave the province simply because
they cannot find a living, not in order to subvert the German Volksgeist. He
points out that the young men who migrate west to find themselves a living
are often themselves short of decent trousers. Local people in Memel there-
fore donate trousers to Dr. Rülf in order to hand them on to the emigrating
young men. Rülf offers to send some of the young men to Treitschke for
him to have a look at their trousers and perhaps if appropriate to donate
a pair of his own. Rülf presents the fact of migration from the province to
the capital as an unremarkable, legitimate social process. Perhaps surpris-
ingly, only one other contributor to the Dispute made the same point, the
priest Paulus Cassel: “It is natural and a right for any human being to press
toward the light.”30
Ludwig Bamberger points to the lack of conclusive statistical evidence
and rejects Treitschke’s invocation of an “incoming flood like that of the
Chinese in California.”31 Further, the people referred to by Treitschke as
“Poles” might actually come from the Prussian part of what used to be
Poland.32 “In the latter case, with what right does the bitter opponent of
Polish national resistance treat the inhabitants of the province of Poznan as
foreigners?”33 Bamberger points to the contradiction that Treitschke on the
one hand demands loyalty to the state from ethnic minority groups, but on
the other hand excludes such groups—even when they are loyal—on grounds
of their ethnicity. However, as Bamberger suggests, the Jews of Poznan have
traditionally been understood to be not only a German-speaking but also a
Germanizing element of the population.
Moritz Lazarus writes that a proper examination of the question of Jew-
ish immigration had not been done recently and pointed to a debate on
the same issue in the 1850s.34 He holds that over the period from 1834 to
1855, Jewish emigration from Prussia regularly exceeded immigration by
a large margin. For the time after 1855 Lazarus holds that most probably
any increase in the number of Jews in Germany would stem from the Jews’
56 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

relatively higher rate of births rather than from an excess of immigration

over emigration. Lazarus suggests that the rate of emigration still in 1880
was most likely to exceed that of immigration.35 This argument is followed
by a more general consideration:

But even if . . . a handful more Jews were actually coming to Germany every
year, what danger would it be? And I am not invoking here the notion of hu-
manitarianism toward strangers, which certain circles seem not to appreciate
anymore at all. What I mean is that an Englishman would laugh into our faces
if we suggested that he control the immigration of some group of foreigners
into the British Isles. He might consider it an insult to his nation to suggest
that a handful of foreigners could corrupt the ideals, morality and character
of his people.36

Similarly, Graetz remarks sarcastically that Treitschke’s suggestion that “a

handful of Jews” present a “misfortune” for forty million Germans is less
than flattering for the “genius of the German people” and its “heroism.”37
Lazarus quotes Treitschke’s claim that it is “impossible to make the hard
German heads Jewish” and asks: “What’s the noise about then? Why the
fear?”38 Lazarus implies here that the problem was not whether Treitschke’s
readings of immigration statistics (or else his understanding of the ethnic
divisions within European Jewry) were factually correct. A large part of the
Dispute subsequently branched out, though, into discussions of just these
particulars, thereby tending to obscure the meaning and also the actual
dangerousness of Treitschke’s argument.
Treitschke himself also writes (in his answer to Graetz) that there are no
statistical data available that break down immigration numbers according
to religious affiliation, which means that such data had to be reconstructed
indirectly from other statistics. Treitschke defends his reading of these data.39
However—echoing Lazarus, although obviously with inverse intention—
Treitschke also points to the merely secondary importance of the statistical
issue: for him, the Jews’ numerical share in the population does not allow
conclusions on their “social power [sociale Machtstellung].”40
In his authoritative statement on the issue from August 1880, Die Fabel
 Jew-hatred and Nationality 57

von der jüdischen Masseneinwanderung (The Fairy Tale of Jewish Mass Im-
migration), Salomon Neumann refutes the repeated claim that Prussian
statistics that would break down immigration according to religious affili-
ation are lacking. Neumann argues that the Prussian statistics give detailed
information on religious affiliation, in particular Jewish.41 In his review of
Neumann’s brochure in Preussische Jahrbücher (from January 1881), Tre-
itschke acknowledges the validity of Neumann’s observation that Jewish
emigration exceeded Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe to the ef-
fect that the overall growth of the Jewish population in Prussia was lower
than its birth rate.42 However, he argues that this did not affect the validity
of his own claims, “for the social impact of strong foreign immigration is
not neutralized by the subsequent emigration of the immigrants. Rather,
it is obvious that those elements of Jewry that will leave Germany after a
few years will be least inclined to assimilate [sich zu germanisieren].”43 On
the one hand, Treitschke certainly has a point here: the possible existence
of an immigrant population that is merely “stopping over” on its way to
“the West” (in particular America) constitutes a social fact in its own right
that may be obscured by the statistics. On the other hand, he glosses over
that this constellation is fundamentally different from the one that he had
presupposed in his previous and also his subsequent arguments. Such a
group of “temporary immigrants”—if they existed—cannot at all be argued
to pose the kind of problem for the nation-building process that Treitschke
claims the Jews, and in particular Jewish immigrants from the East, pose to
Germany. However, instead of conceding that he was wrong in this question,
Treitschke concludes that “further substantial statistical evidence has to be
produced before the issue can be evaluated conclusively.”44
The thrust of Neumann’s argument is that Treitschke has mistaken mi-
gration from the Eastern Prussian provinces into (first of all) Berlin (in the
context of a general migration from the countryside to the urban centers)
for immigration. The people Treitschke calls “Polish Jews” are actually “Prus-
sian Jews.” The fact that this issue gained (relatively) much attention within
the debate is further evidence for how much it was bound up in a discourse
on nationality: from the point of view of a straightforwardly racialist or
58 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

ethnic-culturalist antisemitism, it is irrelevant which state’s territory the

undesirable Jews come from. The fact that Treitschke too did not care much
about the precise place of origin of the unwelcome strangers indicates that
he already had one foot in the racialist discourse that became “mainstream”
only in the 1890s. Another irony of the debate is that migration from the
East increased significantly only in the course of the 1880s. To the extent that
the defense against Treitschke focused on proving that there was no Jewish
immigration, it was eclipsed by later developments. While Treitschke “lost”
the Berlin Antisemitism Dispute on the terrain of migration statistics, in
the long run it proved fatal that the defenders of the Jews won their battle
on this ground and not on the grounds of principle. The debate’s focus on
some of the facts and figures used in the anti-Jewish discourse contributed
to avoiding the more fundamental issues at stake.

The other ground on which Treitschke based his claim of a specifically Ger-
man “Jewish question” was his notion of the “two branches” of Jewry. Three
issues were under discussion: Treitschke’s use of the term “Polish branch”
(instead of “Germanic branch”); his notion that the Jews of the “Western”
countries consisted predominantly of “Spanish Jews” and that these tended
to be more assimilated than the “Polish” (German) Jews; and his understand-
ing of how the “character” and degree of assimilation of either branch was
formed by their differing experience of persecution.
Manuel Joël rejects the concept of a “Polish branch” and argues that the
Jews of Poland are actually the descendants of German Jews who never
stopped sticking to their “Germanness [Deutschthum].”45 “The Polish Jew
is the German Jew who once had been driven to Poland.”46 Graetz argued
that the majority of French Jews were “of German descent.”47 Philippson also
writes that during the two centuries that Alsace-Lorraine was a part of France
more than 120,000 mostly German Jews lived in France; furthermore, most
Parisian Jews were of German background.48 Oppenheim argues, referring
to his own experience, that in France, England, and Holland nine out of ten
Jews involved in public affairs are “German Jews,” while the much smaller
number of Iberian Jews live more secluded than the former.49 Breßlau holds
 Jew-hatred and Nationality 59

that only Italian Jewry consisted in its majority of Spanish and Portuguese
immigrants, while in France and England (similar to Germany), relatively
few Jews were from the “Spanish branch.”50 Furthermore, he points out
that there was no evident correspondence at all between ethnic (Stammes-)
background and the measure of assimilation or emancipation.51 Differences
in the extent of anti-Jewish prejudice in different countries must have other
reasons. In England, Breßlau adds, anti-Jewish prejudice “exists to almost
the same degree, only it never took as disgusting forms as currently in Ger-
many.”52 In France and Italy it is less strong, first because in the Romance
countries there is no big difference in physical appearance between Jews and
non-Jews, and second because “one does not have to indicate one’s confes-
sion at any conceivable [official] occasion.” Due to the confessional divide
stemming from the sixteenth century, religious divisions in general are also
experienced more strongly in Germany than elsewhere.
Graetz writes that while Jews in Spain and Portugal suffered much more
brutal persecution from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the
Jews who come to Germany from Poland bring with them “no scars” since
they have been persecuted there only since the seventeenth century.53 He
concludes that the “Spanish Jews” integrated themselves despite their scars
from centuries of persecution, while the “German Jews” assimilated even
more (in the absence of such scars) and actually are “incomparably more
patriotic than for example the Poles [Wasserpolaken] in Upper Silesia and
other Slavonic tribes in Germany.”54
Treitschke responds to Graetz’s objections by restating his argument in a
rather idiosyncratic way.55 He writes that the Spanish Jews’ downfall under
the Christian monarchs (after their enjoyment of cultural and economic
high status under the Omayyad dynasty) brought them not only misery
but also “the sublime and enthusiastic power of martyrdom,” while the
Jews in Poland had suffered a “formally more moderate but essentially
more pernicious tyranny.”56 Treitschke explains that “an enslavement over
hundreds of years accompanied by modest economic well-being necessar-
ily does greater damage to the character of a people than a history full of
great sufferings and struggles. Since our occidental history is essentially a
60 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

history of freedom, aberrations and setbacks notwithstanding, the Marran-

nos of the West must be closer to us in character than the Polish branch of
the Jews.”57 He plays here on a Hegelian theme in his distinction between
the proud and freedom-loving Spanish Jews and the “Polish Jews” whose
history is not a “history of freedom” (i.e., of the unfolding of freedom)
and whose less-brutal fate has corrupted their Volksgeist. Different from
the survivors of the Spanish Catholic reaction, the Jews in Germany carry
deep “scars” not so much from persecution but from the unheroic charac-
ter of their own history.58 As a result of this, contemporary German Jews
are less patriotic and assimilated than the descendants of the “Marranos”
of France or England and are also rather arrogant and unpleasant fellow
citizens.59 Treitschke’s notion of the unheroic character of the German Jews
is perhaps a projection of German nationalism’s shame about the lack of
a continuous German “national history.” Treitschke concludes: “However,
our public opinion finally is beginning to be watchful. In only a few years
to come, it will be strengthened enough so that derogatory speeches about
the ‘ancient Germanic rabble’ [germanischen Ur-mob] as can be found
now in the Jewish press will be as inconceivable in Germany as they already
are in England.”60 Again, Treitschke points to the Jews of “the West”—in
this case, of England—as showing the way the Jews of Germany ought to
go.61 Except for Graetz, Treitschke does not give any evidence for his claim
that the German Jews are less loyal to the German state than British Jews
are to their state. Breßlau’s reaction prompted a particularly backhanded
interpretation by Treitschke: he states that Breßlau’s response was the only
one that he “read with a sincere feeling of regret” as he claims that he had
hoped his text would be welcomed by “those Jews who unconditionally feel
themselves to be Germans.”62 Treitschke turns the fact that “a man as totally
German-minded [deutsch gesinnt] as Breßlau” feels offended by remarks
that “he cannot possibly understand as referring to himself ” into another
“proof of that exaggerated sensitivity that distinguishes the German Jews
from the French or English Jews.”63
Treitschke further supports his position with a reference to the history
of the French Revolution. While the “Jews of the South”—that is, those
 Jew-hatred and Nationality 61

descending from Jews from Portugal, Spain, and Avignon—gained legal

equality in 1790, the Alsatian—that is, “German” Jews—did not do so for
another year and a half. Treitschke draws the conclusion that this must be
because the “Spanish Jews” fit better into occidental civilization.64 Breßlau
replies that the differences in the pace of the emancipation of the Jews in
France do not warrant conclusions about their “tribal” character but can be
explained much more easily. He relates that “the Spanish and Portuguese
Jews” of southern France had immigrated as (outwardly) converted Jews
(Scheinchristen) and therefore had gained civil rights in France as early as
1550. Because they followed all Catholic customs, they were not persecuted
(as, e.g., the Huguenots were) but managed in some cases even to attain
nobility. Only from the eighteenth century on did their descendants begin
to reemphasize their Jewishness. Breßlau concludes on this issue:

That a difference was made between those who had been French for two hundred
years on the one hand, and on the other hand, the Jews from Alsace, who had
been excluded until 1790 from purchasing land and from almost every decent
trade and were generally hated for this reason; that there was hesitation to lead
the latter abruptly from complete absence of rights into complete equality—
this is easily understandable and does not need to be explained through the
assumption of a difference in the ability for assimilation between the two
groups of European Jewry.65

Breßlau, in his refutation of Treitschke’s attempt to “racialize” or essentialize

the different fates of the two groups, develops a historical explanation of
the discrimination of the Alsatian Jews by the French National Assembly in
1790 that comes close to a justification.
Bamberger points out that there would have been much less outrage about
“trouser-selling youths” if their descendants had also become trouser sellers.
Anti-Jewish animosities are a reaction to “an unusual drive toward learning”
and to social advance in the areas of “honorable commerce, industry, art
and . . . scholarship [Wissenschaft].”66 Finally, Theodor Mommsen shares
Treitschke’s principal worries about the youthful vulnerability of the Ger-
man nation but draws a different conclusion: “With the war of the Jews,
62 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

we—the nation that has just been unified—enter upon a dangerous path.
Our tribes [Stämme] are very unequal among themselves. None of them
lacks their specific defects, and our mutual love is not so old that it would
not possibly die.”67 Mommsen adds that German unity is particularly pre-
carious because it has been granted more “by hatred of our enemies than by
our own merit.” He warns that what has been granted by war can be taken
away by disunity in peace.68
The centrality of nationality and ethnicity of both the Germans and the
Jews, whether long resident or recently immigrated, for the discussion of
their relationship and the formulation of a “Jewish question” is clear, and so
is the awareness of several National Liberals, perhaps especially Mommsen,
of a tricky dialectic between nationalism and antisemitism. Central to all of
these is the concept of “mixed culture,” which the next chapter explores.
 Three. German-Jewish “Mixed Culture”

Along with “the Jews are our misfortune” and the remark about the “trouser-
selling youths,” the sequence that contains what Treitschke has to demand from
the German Jews is one of his best-known formulations: “What we have to
demand from our Jewish fellow-citizens is simple: that they become Germans,
feel themselves simply and justly as Germans, regardless of their faith and their
old sacred memories, which all of us hold in reverence; for we do not want
thousands of years of Germanic civilization [Gesittung] to be followed by an
era of German-Jewish mixed culture [Mischcultur].”1 The logical structure of
this statement is contradictory: the demand that the Jews become Germans
regardless of faith and memories seems to imply that religion is irrelevant for
Germanness. This “demand” appears to be a statement about state citizenship
and loyalty only. The process at the end of which one “feels” oneself to be Ger-
man is one in which a choice that is political as well as cultural is internalized.
This is confirmed by the subsequent phrase—the one introduced by “for”—in
which Treitschke explains why he demands the Jews become Germans: “we”
do not want “Germanic civilization” to be replaced by a “mixed culture.” The
wish—a statement about “civilization” and “culture”—provides Treitschke
with the reason for demanding that the Jews become Germans. If the concern
about the purity of German culture provides the grounds for the demand for
“Germanness,” the latter cannot be primarily a state-political issue. If “Ger-
manness” is, though, a cultural issue, it is unclear how “faith and . . . old sacred
memories” could be bracketed out of the equation.
64 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

Treitschke names the composer Felix Mendelssohn and two liberal politi-
cians, Veit and Riesser,2 as positive exceptions: “It would be a sin to forget
that a great number of Jews, baptized and unbaptized . . . were German
men in the best sense of the word, men in whom we revere the noble and
fine traits of the German spirit.”3 Treitschke identifies the indifference of
religion (“baptized and unbaptized”) and presents the display of “German
spirit” as the decisive quality expected from a full member of German so-
ciety, a notion that expands on the idea that being German means “feeling”
oneself German. “At the same time it cannot be denied, however, that there
are numerous and powerful circles among our Jewry who clearly do not
intend simply to become Germans.” While there were Jewish individuals
who became Germans—that is, developed and displayed “German spirit”—
there are “numerous and powerful circles” who “clearly” do not have the
will to do so.4 As evidence he points to the Jewish “arrogance” displayed by
Heinrich Graetz, a discussion of the Jewish economic spirit, and the role of
Jews in the cultural realm. “Among the leading men of arts and scholarship
there are not many Jews; the greater is the busy horde of Semitic third-rank
talents.”5 Treitschke refers to two groups of Jewish intellectuals in particular,
writers and journalists, which together form a “swarm of literati” bonded
together by a mutual “insurance company for immortality [Unsterblichkeits-
Versicherungsanstalt]” that hands out “one-day fame” instantly and “in cash.”6
He describes cultural life here in language borrowed from the sphere of
money circulation, linking together both spheres: while dealings in money
express “Jewish spirit,” Jewish cultural production reflects the patterns of a
monetarized economy. “The most dangerous consequences, however, has
the inappropriate Jewish domination of the press—a fateful consequence
of our old narrow-minded [engherzigen] laws, which denied the Israelites
access to most learned professions. For ten years public opinion in many
German cities was ‘made’ mostly by Jewish pens; it was a misfortune for
the liberal party, and one of the reasons of its decline, that its papers gave
far too much scope to Jewry.” While the complaint about alleged Jewish
domination of the press was then a staple of anti-Jewish agitation, Treitschke
gives this an unusual twist with his claim that Jewish involvement was one
 German-Jewish “Mixed Culture” 65

of the reasons for the decline of “the liberal party.” Given that liberalism
in Germany owed a lot to a number of Jewish intellectuals and politicians,
this is a distortion and slander. But according to Treitschke, the Jews did a
disservice not only to liberalism and its press but also to the press in general.
He claims that “the little man cannot be dissuaded from believing now that
the Jews write the newspapers and therefore he will not believe anything
they say any longer.”7 Treitschke assumes here the air of one who would like
to talk “the little man” out of his antisemitic misbeliefs, but unfortunately
the Jews have driven things too far already. He continues with a nod to Jew-
ish talent: “Our newspapers owe much to Jewish talents; the acuteness and
nimble quickness of the Jewish mind always found the arena of the press a
rewarding field.”8 However, this compliment also turns into an indictment
in the same breath: “But here too the effect was two-edged. Börne was the
first to introduce into our journalism the peculiarly shameless tone of talking
about the fatherland as if from an external position [so von aussen her] and
without any reverence, as if one did not belong to it [als gehöre man selber
gar nicht mit dazu], as if mockery of Germany did not cut most deeply into
the heart of every individual German.”9 While Treitschke had in the preced-
ing formulation accused Jewish journalism of general trivialization and
commercialization of intellectual life, the attack on Börne is more specific:
Börne talks “as if from an external position” and as if he does not belong.
Significantly, the charge is not that Börne is an outsider and actually does
not belong; rather, the charge is that despite belonging, he still “mocks.” This
formulation brings the argument back to Treitschke’s earlier “demand”: the
Jews, just like everyone else, should “become Germans” unconditionally
and stop being “other” at the same time. While Treitschke on the one hand
asserts the freedom of religion, on the other hand he demands unequivocal
identification and identity, not identity and difference interlocked.
Treitschke claims that the Jews are mediocre in the arts and sciences and
harmful in literature and journalism. That they do not make any valuable
contribution shows that they do not want to “become Germans.” Treitschke
leaves open whether they are unwilling or actually unable to contribute,
that is, whether the problem lies in a Jewish lack of patriotism or in a racial
66 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

defect. Numerous contributions to the Dispute discuss the value of the

Jewish contribution to German culture, and some take up the question
whether there is such a thing as “cultural purity,” and if so, whether it is
something worth aspiring to. Another widely discussed notion is that of a
specific affinity between German and Jewish “spirit.” It is argued on the one
hand that Jewish difference is not a bad thing at all, and on the other hand
that the difference is much smaller than Treitschke claims.

The Concept of a “Mixed Culture”

For Bamberger, Treitschke’s concept of the “purity” of culture is mistaken
and meaningless:

If purity was a particularly distinguishing quality in connection with the con-

cept of culture, then indeed one would have to be suspicious about German
culture. . . . If culture was something to be grown from the primeval soil, then
the concept of a pure German culture that is thousands of years old would be
an [enormously exaggerated] fiction. . . . Fortunately, though, culture is just
the opposite of the linear propagation of a single national spirit [Volksgeist],
and German culture stands so high because it managed to assimilate and digest
so much.10

“Not even the Chinese” have pure culture; Bamberger points out that Goethe
had named Shakespeare and Spinoza as his main influences, and quotes
Herder’s statement: “We Germans would still live in the forests peacefully like
Americans, or rather brutally fighting and being heroes, had not the chain
of foreign culture urged itself closely upon us and forced us, with the might
of centuries, to get involved.”11 Since German culture is anything but “pure”
in the first place, “it is a mystery” how it should “become a mixed culture”
through the influence of the Jews, “who have settled in Germany almost
from the very beginnings.”12 Bamberger points to the particular paradox that
they are considered a threat to the purity of German culture because they
“push into the German universities and the German army,” “the two breasts
of contemporary Germany’s communal life”: the Jews “sit in the lectures of
Treitschke, Dühring and Adolf Wagner, they even break their necks for the
 German-Jewish “Mixed Culture” 67

music of Richard Wagner, and in return—O ingratitude—they are accused

of shoving German culture into their bags as if they could run away with it
like with a silver spoon.”13 Bamberger gives here a striking metaphor for the
reification of culture into a set of static artifacts (resembling silver spoons)
that underlies Treitschke’s thinking.
Breßlau rejects the concept of the unitary character of German culture in
similar terms: “Our culture is not at all, not even predominantly, a Germanic
one, and in fact we have a mixed culture resting on three factors: Germanity,
Christianity and classical antiquity. . . . Nothing had a stronger impact on
the culture of the German people than both the Old and the New Testa-
ment, both of which are undeniably products of Judaism [Judenthum].”14
Breßlau stresses, however, that he “subscribe[s] totally and completely” to
Treitschke’s demand for the “Israelites” to “become Germans.”15 He writes
that had Treitschke not joined into the common, “merely negative critique
of Jewry,” he could have “earned” for himself “considerable merits about the
development of the Jewish question.” For that purpose he should have made
an effort to “deepen the question positively,” namely, to point out what exactly
distinguishes a Jew “born and brought up in Germany” from a “Germanic”
person of similar background and by which means “the transmutation of a
Jewish into a Germanic person could be accelerated.” Treitschke then would
have “obliged every impartial and unprejudiced Jew to be grateful.” Breßlau
merely rejects Treitschke’s claim that “numerous and powerful circles” within
Jewry do not intend “to give up that quality that distinguishes the Jew from
the Germanic person.” Breßlau argues that this is true of only “a small bunch
of ultra-orthodox rabbis” who still consider “Palestine the promised land”
and the Jewish residence in Germany “merely temporary.”16 “Holding the
large majority of German Jews responsible for this bunch’s attitude would
be as unfair and inappropriate as condemning the large majority of Ger-
man Catholics because a few fanatical ultramontanists are prepared at any
moment to subordinate their German national feeling to Rome’s claim to
power. Anyway, the former’s small and declining number is incomparably
less dangerous to the German being [Wesen] than the activities of those min-
ions of Rome [Römlinge] who dare to want to teach the Jews patriotism.”17
68 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

While “ultramontanists” represent a much greater potential for disloyalty

than orthodox Jews, the existence of a small number of unassimilated Jews,
in particular in the countryside, is not surprising: “Just a century ago ev-
erything prevented the Jews from becoming German. The religious divide,
the intolerance of Christian as well as Jewish clerics [Pfaffen], and most of
all a legislation that made them pariahs, kept away every beam of German
education from the dirty and despised quarters where princely favor had
granted them a meager existence.”18 Given that emancipation had been
under way for only a short time, it is rather surprising that the “process of
amalgamation” has already succeeded so far.19 The urging of so many Jews
into education is, to Breßlau, a sign of their determination to assimilate to
German culture. Jewish scholars like Breßlau himself are making an effort
to accelerate the process by leading the way with a good example—but,
directly addressing Treitschke again: “You join the men who make the di-
vide that we chose as our lives’ aim to make disappear as far as we can more
grave and thus you make our effort more difficult. I do not doubt, my most
respected colleague, that you intend the good, but allow me to say that you
are achieving the evil!”20

The central argument of Moritz Lazarus’s contribution is that “true culture

. . . consists in diversity” and that “the permanent vocation of the Jews” is to be
promoters of difference.21 Lazarus sees at the root of the problem a concep-
tion of history that is teleological and linear. He rejects the notion that the
earlier “stage” of a development has a right to exist only insofar as it “gives
birth” to the subsequent “stage” or form of existence.22 He argues that “the
generic” or “humanity” is not the result of an evolutionary process but the
totality of all the forms or individuals that evolve in the process. Rather than
believing that history is evolving toward an “end”—such as “the individual”
or “the nation”—it ought to be understood that “the whole great diversity
of spiritual life and creation” is “precious in itself.” “Here [in the linear and
teleological conception of history] lies the deepest root of all intolerance.
This is why for the Catholic, Protestantism is nothing but secession and
heresy, while for the Protestant, Catholicism is but a preparatory stage. . . .
 German-Jewish “Mixed Culture” 69

It has been held as an ideal that the whole world should adopt the culture
of one people: all should become Roman or French. True culture, though,
consists in diversity.”23 Both Catholicism and Protestantism are mistaken.
In a Herderian tone, Lazarus condemns the cultural imperialism of Roman
as well as French culture and adds: “Mores, customs, strivings, lifestyles
can, may and should be diverse; they will have to be objectively different
because they are meant to be the ultimate, the most pure, the most certain
for everyone [subjectively]. . . . How will truth grow if not through spiritual
struggle, . . . through the competition of forces?”24
Lazarus does not reject the notions of development and progress in gen-
eral. The “ultimate,” though, consists for him not in “unity [Einheit]” but in
“totality [Gesammtheit]” and “diversity [Mannigfaltigkeit],” “which cannot
nor should be destroyed.” At this point Lazarus attributes a particular role
to the Jews: the “permanent vocation of the Jews” is to be universal promot-
ers of difference: “By participating in various national spirits” they become
themselves more and more diverse. The Jews differ from all other peoples
because they gain “heightening and deepening of their own”25 by way of
“totally immersing themselves” into the particular (national) cultures of
the societies they live in, whereas all other peoples “learn from each other”
while remaining separate. The Jews relate in every people or culture to those
elements that correspond to their own identity. The Jews thus represent a
generic element, which they find and reinforce in every particular people.
Doing this feeds and enhances within themselves “the generic” as their own
particular characteristic. In this sense, Lazarus’s argument implies that the
Jews constitute a common denominator of all other peoples and cultures
that they immerse themselves in. Lazarus defines this generic element as
“an ethical-religious content that towers in power and dignity over any
individual deed.” This specific content has come to replace what previously
had been the Jews’ nationality. Lazarus suggests that “the Jews do not have a
nationality of their own anymore.”26 Instead, they are “individualized also
according to the nations within which they live.” This allows Lazarus—in an
attempt to square the circle of (German) identity and (Jewish) difference—to
define the Jews as “not an alien but an individually shaped distinct element
70 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

inherent to each nation, reciprocally and specifically appropriated.”27 This

constitutes their “specific capability.”
In a key passage of his lecture, Lazarus discusses Treitschke’s “demand”
that the Jews become Germans, developing his concept of the specific role
of the Jews within the German nation. Lazarus asserts that the “concept”
and the “ideal” of nationality are capable of being permanently deepened
and elevated in a permanent struggle for national unity: “All of us who
care for the ideal and its fulfillment ought to unite; we should struggle
together against all those who fail to participate truly and energetically
in the national idea, against all those who hinder and damage the ideality
through their base attitudes and their mean ways of living and acting.”28
Any separation through confession and descent will damage the struggle
for national “ideality.” Lazarus’s understanding of the “national ideality”
includes a cosmopolitan dimension: “Let the highest development of the
idea of German nationality be the standard around which we flock. But
we aim at a Germanity that must be free of any felony against received
traditions as well as against universal human principles. True Germanity
. . . must be high minded and generous.”29 Lazarus argues that “the idea
of humanity stands higher than any nationality.” However, granting hu-
manity priority over nationality is a typically German attitude: “Never,
though, had the particular spirit [Gemüthsart] of any one people a more
direct relationship to this idea of humanity than the particular spirit of
the Germans has.”30 Other nations might have served humanity uninten-
tionally, but the “particular course of our history” has led the Germans to
choose consciously the idea of humanity as their (national) trademark.
Lazarus develops the notion of the particularly unselfish character of
German nationalism emphatically: “We have often been reprimanded for
not esteeming our own but instead admiring the alien; it has never been
possible to vaccinate us with a decent dosage of national pride. . . . With
all the will in the world we do not manage to despise the alien, to answer
the hate of the enemy with equal hate; we cannot help searching for and
acknowledging the good wherever it may be.”31 As a witness to his argu-
ment, Lazarus quotes Schiller:
 German-Jewish “Mixed Culture” 71

Germans, you hope in vain ever to form a nation. Strive instead, as you can,
To a state of greater freedom than that: strive to be humans.32

At this point in the argument, Lazarus introduces the concept of “mixed

culture.” He argues that “it has been long established” that the most diversely
mixed peoples turn out to be the culturally and historically strongest ones.
Therefore the German Jews “have the duty . . . to remain Jews” and to put their
Judaism “to the service of German national spirit as a part of its strength.”
This is not, however, an issue of the “mixing of blood” but of “intellectual
abilities, moral drives,” and the “longing to shape the world.” These “spiritual
abilities” are incorporated individually in the tribes that come together to
form the nation: only in the nation are they harmonized and transcend the
individual and the tribal toward the generically human.

As if, in a peculiar way, echoing Lazarus, the prominent antisemite Naudh

also attacks the (liberal) trajectory of “progress” and pleads for the par-
ticular and for diversity against the generic and the unified, but with dia-
metrically opposed conclusions for the status of the Jews. The comparison
between Lazarus and Naudh provides, mutatis mutandis, some insight into
the strange dialectic between multicultural and ethno-nationalist “celebra-
tion” of difference in the contemporary discourse.33 Naudh accuses liberal-
ism of “ignorance of the particularity of men [Menschen] by declaring all
men to be equal.” Naudh finds it “strange” that both Treitschke and Breßlau
“more or less subscribe to liberalism, although all history only originated
from the diversity of people.”34 Naudh defines history as the study of the
particularity of people and claims that it is not compatible with the egali-
tarian ideas intrinsic to liberalism (“the scholasticism of politics”). The
“science of politics” will only be able to progress “when it liberates itself
from scholastic dogmatism [Formelwesen] and transforms itself into an
empirical science [Beobachtungs-und Erfahrungs-Wissenschaft].” Liber-
als try to deflect from the “Jewish question” with “unscientific” formulas:
“According to the liberal textbook, all men are equal and thus it is a mere
matter of tactlessness [Unhöflichkeit] of the Jews that they are Jews.”35 The
72 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

sarcastic use of the word tactlessness seems to imply that the liberal con-
ception falsely suggested the ways one acts in society could be arbitrarily
chosen as well as changed. For Naudh, there is more to the issue than tactful
or not-so-tactful visible behavior, for behind the visible stands the invis-
ible, the racial essence. Naudh understands and exploits the fact that for
liberalism—as for himself—“Jewishness” is not a positive value: he does
not reproach (Gentile) liberalism for being pro-Jewish but for being naive
about the Jews. According to him, liberalism underestimates the danger
when it mistakes Jewishness for a mere surface phenomenon—for just an
accidental matter of bad manners that are easily reformable.
Naudh argues that Treitschke and Breßlau share the “liberal formula.”
When Treitschke demands that the Jews become Germans, Breßlau responds
that they already are Germans (and also that the Germans were “half Jews”
due to the Jewish origin of Christianity). Naudh rejects Breßlau’s account
of the concept of “mixed culture.” The influence of classical antiquity on the
formation of German culture has not produced a “mixed culture”: “Greeks
and Romans were people of our race [Stammes], their spirit was closely
related to ours and just as alien to the Semitic spirit. Mommsen has already
pointed out that it was for this reason that the Punic wars became wars of
extinction, and the proverbial ‘Punic loyalty’ refers to a feature of the Semitic
character in a way similar to how we use the term ‘Jewish’ when referring
to a moral character type.”36 Naudh suggests a three-thousand-year-long
Semitic-Gentile conflict (with the Phoenicians temporarily standing in for
the Jews).37 Although Naudh does not use the word on this occasion, his
notion of a conflict between two sets of peoples over a period of three
thousand years logically presupposes the concept of “race.” While, however,
“the old Jews” failed “to impose a Jewish mixed culture” on “us,” “the liv-
ing Jews” constitute an actual danger.38 This threat is not so much that of
a mixed culture but rather one of Entsittlichung, that is, a loss of culture,
morality, and civilization because the Jews are not bearers of a civilization
in the first place.39
The emphasis on the cultural-moral threat constituted by the Jews un-
derpins the radicality of Naudh’s position. He is critical of the legalistic
 German-Jewish “Mixed Culture” 73

character of the Antisemitenpetition, which he finds too “moderate.”40 The

danger will not be averted “even when we exclude the Jews again from the
sphere of the state.” Naudh grounds his argument on the anthropological
notion that “in every individual all good and all bad characteristics can be
found together.”41 Actual individual behavior is determined by predominance
of the one or the other element. This predominance, however, is determined
in turn by social “consensus,” that is, the interdependence with fellow mem-
bers of society. This is why it is less Jewish positioning in the state than the
number of Jews living in society that is at the root of the “Jewish question.”
Naudh mentions in particular the “cunning” of the Jews. The necessity for
Germans to compete with Jews will inevitably force the former to adopt es-
sentially “Jewish” strategies. The anthropological model presented by Naudh
helps him to explain why it is due to Jewish influence and responsibility if
non-Jewish Germans display behavior that is stigmatized as Jewish. How-
ever, this line of argument still needs to take account of the obvious fact
that the Jews—even after extraordinary levels of immigration—would still
constitute a tiny minority in Germany: why would not a morally superior
German majority of more than 98 percent simply annihilate Jewish misbe-
havior (which had been the expectation underpinning the Enlightenment
pro-emancipation position)? This is where Naudh brings in the concept of
the Jews as an unproductive, parasitic race. He suggests that “we” should
not wait and see when “the Jews will have the kindness to become Germans
which actually they do not want at all and, even if they wanted, could not
do.”42 “If historiography would be done in a more strictly scientific way
[mehr in naturwissenschaftlicher Richtung]” and if ethnography “would
be given the weight it deserves,” Naudh argues, then historians would not
come up with the “adventurous idea” of turning Jews into Germans. “[The
Jew’s] bones are crooked and askew and his muscles are weak, which is why
he has a low fitness for work coupled with an even lower enthusiasm for
work.” Naudh suggests that “a whole people cannot do without working,”
which is why the Jews are forced to live as “parasites” on the backs of other
peoples’ work. “Their physical disposition” also determines “their concept
of God” and “their spiritual disposition” in general. While for the German,
74 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

religion means “communion with God through moral betterment [sittliche

Läuterung],” the Jews “dispute with their God.”43 They posit themselves “as
would-be competitors [als Contrahenten] against God and as negotiating
partners “enter into an immoral contract [unsittlichen Vertrag].”44 The sub-
ject of this contract, or covenant, is the exchange of worship in return for the
supply of peoples “to eat”: “That is the promise that the people of parasites
needed,” Naudh concludes.45 “The difference in the understanding of one’s
relation to God and world” in the German/Aryan and the Jewish concep-
tion is “that the Aryan considers perfection his task, while the Jew considers
enrichment his task.” Feelings of honor and idealism spring from the Aryan
conception, while they would contradict the nature of the Jewish covenant
and be inconvenient for anyone living as a parasite. On the other hand, a lack
of feeling of honor might result in ruthlessness and thus economic success.
The effects of the covenant cannot be avoided by conversion: “Those who deny
their Torah still cannot deny their descent,” as the particular type of contract
that the Jews made a centerpiece of their religion was merely the expression of
their particular “mind-set [Denkungsart].” The latter in turn was “a function
of what was then the Jewish brain. There is no reason to assume that today’s
Jewish brain would not function in the same way.”46 The notion of the identity
of “the Jewish brain” then and now is supported by the assumed fact of “three
thousand years of Jewish in-breeding” and also by the observation that, for
example, “Negroes in Northern America did not become white.” This proves
that people’s physical “organization does not change because of a change of
climate.”47 Naudh formulates a racist version of the demand for respect for
cultural difference: “We do not want to hold the Jews’ lack of honor against
them, while we would hold it against a German, whose physique is designed
for honor. It is denied to the physique of the Jew like the drive and the fitness
for work.” Naudh suggests that, in particular, the Jew “does not know work
honor [Arbeitsehre].”48 He concludes that because of the Jews’ “parasitical way
of life, to which their physical characteristics drive them,” their character will
not be affected by “so-called emancipation.”49
Treitschke responded to Breßlau’s claim that German culture was a “mixed
culture” by restating his earlier argument:
 German-Jewish “Mixed Culture” 75

The intellectual work of past millennia is given to all modern peoples to lean
on. Although our German culture flows—as Breßlau is right to point out—
from three great sources, classical antiquity, Christianity and Germanity, it is
not at all a mixed culture: we have amalgamated the Christian and the classical
ideals with our own essence so totally that it has become part of our flesh and
blood. But we do not want the neo-Jewish being [das neujüdische Wesen] to
join these three cultural powers as a fourth one because whatever elements of
Judaism fit in with the German genius have long been included into our culture
through the mediation of Christianity. We do not want this because we have
experienced bitterly enough once before50 that the neo-Jewish spirit leads our
people astray when it faces ours independently.51

Treitschke again transforms criticism into support for his position. The
strategy of his argument is to contest the meaning of the term “mixed cul-
ture.” Treitschke opposes “mixed culture” to “amalgamations” that have
happened slowly over a long period of time. “Mixed culture” in his defini-
tion presupposes the recognizable existence of the constituting elements as
distinct. This definition serves to invalidate Breßlau’s critique. In the way
Treitschke suggests using the word, German culture is not a “mixed” but an
“amalgamated” culture: the “mixing” has proceeded so far that its elements
are no longer distinguishable. A significant inconsistency manifests itself
when he argues that “we have amalgamated the Christian and the classical
ideals with our own essence”—namely, “Germanity”—and have thereby
produced “German culture.” “Germanity,” “our own essence” appears here
as one of the three ingredients that make up the “amalgam” of “German
culture.” The extra-historical Wesen of “German culture” is in this concep-
tion joined by classical culture and Christianity—which are less essential
but rather accidental additions—to form “German culture.” This reflects
a contradiction in Treitschke’s concept of the nation as both historically
constituted and transhistorical: while in the majority of his formulations
(German) culture, as the essence of the nation, is itself understood as the
result of historical developments, in this case “Germanity” is presented as
the essence and antecedent of (German) culture (namely, being one of its
three constituents).
76 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

Treitschke argues that because the “German genius” is already an “amal-

gam,” it should not become a “mixed culture,” too. He concedes to Breßlau
that there are already Jewish elements in the “German genius,” but he turns
this into an argument against any further “mixing” of culture. The Jew-
ish elements of “German genius” are legitimate and beneficial only to the
extent that they are not recognizable as such but mediated and completely
amalgamated. While those Jewish elements that have already been added
to the German amalgam are the best ones, those that have been rejected by
Christianity are detrimental if they are allowed to constitute themselves
independently as “neo-Judaism,” that is, outside the seamless amalgam. They
must therefore not be accepted.

The Affinity between the German Spirit and the Jewish Spirit
Bamberger and Lazarus, both strongly patriotic writers, hold against Tre-
itschke the notion of a specific affinity between the German spirit and the
Jewish spirit. For Bamberger, the apparently “German-Jewish” conflict is
actually a “German-German” conflict, because it is characterized on both
sides by the same “bad habits” that are “probably German”: high emotionality
in religious and cultural affairs and a tendency for indulging in prejudices
and for voicing them aloud.52 “The thinking ones among the German Jews”
tended not to get angry about the anti-Jewish campaigning, because they
“know and appreciate their fellow Germans [ihre deutschen Landsleute]” to
such an extent that they understand that the anti-Jewish sentiment is merely
an unavoidable symptom of the Germans’ character—a frame of mind that
they share and, by and large, appreciate. Furthermore, they know—or feel,
anyway—that in sharing those bad German habits they also share in the
responsibility for the antisemitic movement. Disputing Treitschke’s claim,
Bamberger argues that the Jews have lived with no other people in such
close communion: “They are Germanized not only on German soil but far
beyond Germany’s borders.”53 The Jews’ language anywhere in Europe is
blended with German vocabulary, “and he who talks about language talks
about spirit.” Bamberger points out that the Jews had maintained them-
selves in Germany throughout the ages although their lives have always
 German-Jewish “Mixed Culture” 77

been made particularly difficult there. This “drives one to the assumption”
that the Jews must have been attracted by the Germans by “commonalties
in the fundamental character structure.” “A mixture of heterogeneous and
common spiritual characteristics” are at the basis of both mutual attraction
and “intimate animosity.” Bamberger explains: “The common trait is the
fundamentally spiritual character: Jews and Germans are without doubt
the two most spiritual nations of all times and places. . . . The inclination
towards abstract thinking, one of the foundations of the spiritual outlook
on life, is most developed in Jews and Germans.”54 As evidence he points
out that nowhere except in Germany have “the spiritual views of Judaism,
denationalized in the form of Christianity,” or “Spinoza’s speculative philoso-
phy,” or “the philosophizing socialists Marx and Lassalle,” been received and
embraced so thoroughly and won such a large following. Jews and Germans
also share a “cosmopolitan aptitude” and the ability to “depart from the given
state of things [sich vom Gegebenen loszureissen].” Bamberger concludes:
“Both possess in common the mystery of speculation, in the philosophical
as well as the economic sense of the word, a profound term that covers not
coincidentally both these operations of the mind, the philosophical and the
mercantile.”55 Bamberger argues here in an idealistic way, as if the history of
Jewish settlement and migration were a function of the mutual attraction
or repulsion of “national spirits.”
Bamberger further claims that the Germans are “the most outstanding
merchants of the world,” held down only by “territorial-political fragmenta-
tion [Kleinstaaterei]” and “the arrogance of Junkers, civil servants or academ-
ics.”56 The reference to territorial fragmentation serves as a reminder that the
prospect of economic expansion was one of the main driving forces behind
national unification, whereas “the attack on the ‘merchants’ in general was
the logical opening of the campaign against the Jews.” Bamberger implies
that the attack on the Jews and their speculative-spiritual-commercial spirit
is ipso facto an attack on those Germans who—driven by the same spiritual
gifts as are the Jews—were the force behind German nation building. Anti-
business antisemitic sentiment is anti-national also.
Despite the far-reaching identity of the German spirit and the Jewish spirit
78 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

in the “mystery of speculation,” Bamberger also recognizes differences. “Depth

of thinking and wealth of feeling [Gedankentiefe und Empfindungsfülle]”
are more German, while “hot-blooded, witty humor merging into frivolity”
is more Jewish.57 He illustrates his conception of difference and affinity with
two examples of Jewish-German-ness: Heinrich Heine represents a “peculiar
blend” of the deep and the frivolous path to speculative transcendence. Those
who rejected Heine for being witty as well as deep actually acted against “the
German spirit”: they “granted German citizenship to the totally un-German
sentiment of chauvinism and ostracized the liberal, humane and truthful
spirit of our classic literature.”58 A contrasting model case of German-Jewish
spiritual blending is the liberal parliamentarian Lasker, whom Bamberger
portrays as a grave, ascetic idealist. Lasker’s character is linked to the political
framework defined by Bismarck: “When the great realist Bismarck managed
to move German politics from the world of German abstraction onto the
concrete grounds of power, he enrolled into his vast project the nation’s
idealistic drive for great creation and high legislative aims. This was Lasker’s
great time of fighting for German idealism with the brightest weapons of
Jewish dialectics while following the lead of realism.” Bamberger remarks
in a bitter tone that only after Bismarck turned against his “idealistic ally”
did the latter’s “slightly abstract moral indignation” that until then had
served the national project turn against its leader.59 Lasker was henceforth
reproached for the same things for which he had previously been praised.
Bamberger presents two very different German-Jewish individuals, Heine
and Lasker, in order to show that both were able to contribute significantly
to German culture and politics by combining the different strengths of the
two cultures: they managed in different ways to put their Jewish particularity
into the service of their German affinity.
Lazarus, too, argues that there is a “particularly profound and momen-
tous affinity between the Germanic and the Jewish spirit.” This found
particular expression in scholarly research on the Old Testament, which
blossomed in the context of German culture more than any other.60 Owing
to this affinity, Jews are so devoted to both reception and production of
German culture that “an inner separation from it appears to them totally
 German-Jewish “Mixed Culture” 79

unthinkable and incomprehensible.” Lazarus argues that “in all religions,

religiosity itself is the ultimate and the deepest and what is common to all
of them. It is what strives toward the highest in humanity.”61 He separates
Religiosität—being religious and feeling in a religious way—from the actual
content of any specific religion and argues that every human being can revere
the Religiosität of others irrespective of the specific content of their religion.
He concludes from this that although Jews might not directly take sides and
interfere in confessional debates and struggles within the church, they might
hope for and support the victory of “what will be the best of every church,”
namely, “whatever represents the higher, more dignified, more beneficial
stage of the religious development of humanity,” trusting in “reason and the
future.”62 The Jews “drink daily from the wellsprings of the German spirit,
one of whose deepest sources is Christianity” and would not therefore slan-
der Christianity. Lazarus argues that the animosity between Christians and
Jews is a residue of a conflict that goes back to the origins of Christianity:
“When, in the beginning, the new religious community split from the old
one, of course there were animosity and bitterness.” Lazarus suggests that
the animosity between Rome and the Reformation had the same psychologi-
cal origins as the earlier conflict between Jews and Christians, but asserts
optimistically that “this is over!”63 Likewise, Jews also have for a long time
now demonstrated that they consider Christian moral theory identical to
their own and have no hard feelings toward Christianity: “Would a mother
despise her own child?”64

The Jewish Economic Spirit and the German Spirit of Work

References to the economic role of the Jews tended to dominate many anti-
Jewish publications of the time and seem to have been one of the more populist
aspects of anti-Judaism and antisemitism. This includes both specific claims
about the Jewish role in the financial economic sphere or the alleged role of
the Jews in crises like the Gründerkrach as well as speculations about the
Jewish economic spirit in the widest sense.65 The topic figures remarkably
little, however, in Treitschke’s contributions to the Dispute: apart from one
mention of Jewish “cosmopolitan financial powers,” he dedicates to this issue
80 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

only one sequence in the first contribution, in the context of the discussion
of the harmful Jewish influence on German culture.66
Treitschke’s comment on the Jews’ influence on the economy shows the
cautious ambivalence typical of much of his discourse:

There is no German merchant city that does not count many honest, respect-
able Jewish firms among its number. But it cannot be denied that the Semites
have contributed a large part to the dishonesty and deception and the bold
greediness of the boom-time mischief [Gründer-Unwesen], and that they share
heavily in the guilt for the contemptible materialism of our age which regards
every kind of work only as business [Geschäft] and threatens to suffocate our
people’s ancient good-natured willingness to work [die alte gemüthliche Ar-
beitsfreudigkeit unseres Volkes]; in thousands of German villages there sits the
Jewish usurer who appropriates the possessions of his ruined neighbors.67

In this paragraph, Treitschke distinguishes three categories of Jewish eco-

nomic activity: first, honest and respectable Jewish firms in merchant cities,
that is, representatives of traditional merchant capital; second, dishonest,
deceitful, and greedy Jews involved in the largely unsuccessful Gründer-boom,
that is, representatives of portions of such capital that is being invested in
new economic enterprises at high risk—“speculation”; third, the classic
figure of the Jewish small-town usurer. Treitschke discusses all three types
of Jewish economic engagement in terms of “spirit”: the merchant capitalist
is characterized by honesty and respectability, the Gründer is characterized
by greed, and the usurer “threatens to suffocate our people’s ancient good-
natured willingness to work.” Arbeitsfreudigkeit—literally, “willingness to
work” or “eagerness to work”—has a resonance with Arbeitsfreude, which
means experiencing joy (Freude) in the working process.68 Gemüthlich (here
translated as “good-natured”) reinforces the “spiritual” connotation.69 Those
whose attitude has become “Judaized” see work only under the perspective
of Geschäft, that is, commodity exchange. Treitschke’s terminology points
to an idealized notion of work in an imaginary age when people would have
been working for the sheer joy of it. It is safe to assume that the necessity to
work has throughout human history been experienced as suffering (which
 German-Jewish “Mixed Culture” 81

is the primary meaning of the Latin word laborare, “to work”) rather than
joy. Ironically, against itself, and only on condition of its own negation, it is
capitalist modernity itself that has first opened the possibility of a human
world that would reduce the pains of laborare to the unavoidable minimum
and make the old dream of doing things for the sheer joy of them a real per-
spective for the many (rather than for those few elites who always found ways
to organize for themselves leisurely anticipations of a humane existence).70
Treitschke’s liberalism does not allow such a positive perspective on what
might one day emerge out of capitalist society, nor is he able to distinguish
capitalist from pre-capitalist forms of commodity economy: he ignores the
fact that medieval artisans also produced things in order to sell them. The
grain of truth in his statement is, though, that working is in many ways even
less a source of joy in modern times than it might have been before. Treitschke
blames this on the domination of production by Geschäft and describes
this as a problem of false, namely Jewish, “spirit.” He seems to understand
capitalism as a dictatorship of “business” over “production.” Again, there
is a grain of truth in this folly: it was one of the stages of the emergence of
the capitalist mode of production that production was subsumed under a
type of relations (the commodity form) that historically has emerged from
trade—however, this does not describe its essence at all.
An article in Deutsche Wacht from May 1880 is much more explicit than
Treitschke’s remarks, thanks to its use of the terminology of political economy.71
It argues that “legal equality of Jews and Christians is unethical [ethisch
unfassbar] and anti-national [antivolksrechtsthümlich]” because “the Jews
never aim at the production of ‘useful values’ but only for profit. . . . Jews as
socialists . . . have invented ‘capitalism’ as a historical-economical point of
attack in order to deflect attention from distribution and try to blame all
hate on industry.”72 While “capitalism”—a conceptual fabrication by Jewish
socialists—is a “smoke screen [Popanz],” the real “enemy of the nation” is
“egotistic commercialism [das selbstsüchtige Krämerthum],” namely, the
Jews.73 “In earlier times” (the author seems to be thinking of the period of
mercantilism), inviting Jews into the country was thought to be economically
advantageous because of the money the Jews would bring with them. This was
82 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

mistaken, however, because “they do not use money productively but only
for haggling [Schacher].”74 The tyranny of intermediate trade reduces general
wealth and therewith “increases the proletariat which is the greatest enemy
of any state order.”75 The author proposes that intermediate trade should be
content with “calculating the . . . costs for transportation, storage and loss of
commodities as well as the average interest to be charged on the stored com-
modity capital,” implying that such trade enriches itself by taking out more
than these, as it were, legitimate rewards and thus “destroys the balance of
production and consumption.”76 The import of foreign goods “tyrannizes”
the domestic market, destroys national consciousness, and “promotes the
international.” The article concludes that trade “is thus an enemy of state,
nation and society. . . . Not capitalism . . . but commercial capitalism . . . has
to be fought.” The author argues that only if the state regulated trade accord-
ingly could the Jews begin to “develop,” “overcome their faults,” and begin to
participate in “patriotic culture and greatness.” Only then could they “earn”
the emancipation that has been granted to them undeservedly.77
Treitschke’s liberal respondents comment widely on both his comments
on the Jewish part in the Gründer-Unwesen and on the wider issue of “the
contemptible materialism of the modern age.” Manuel Joël states that among
the Gründer there have been many Jews “simply because among the Jews
there are many merchants.” He adds that some of them “would be even more
inclined to become presidents, senior civil servant, staff officer, senior postal
civil servant etc.” if they only had a chance to. Joël argues that the claim of
a particular Jewish materialism is disproved by the fact of Jewish refusal to
convert when conversion would improve career chances: simultaneously
reproaching the Jews both for not giving up Judaism and for materialist greed
is therefore inconsistent.78 Oppenheim also writes that the Jews have been
involved in Gründungen merely to the extent of their share in the economy
in general.79 He argues, however, that due to their relatively higher economic
skills they did not typically belong to those who “came closest to overstep-
ping the mark.” He thus turns the stereotype of the Jewish superiority in
business into a virtue and argues that the most adventurous and speculative
enterprises were led by—less skilled and less solid—non-Jews.
 German-Jewish “Mixed Culture” 83

The tone of Harry Breßlau’s answer differs somewhat from the former in
expressing support for Treitschke’s attack on “the Jewish promoters [Gründer]
and usurers.”80 However, he adds that there are also many Christian Gründer
and argues that the higher proportion of Jews in the financial sphere in
general has its cause in medieval laws that excluded them from a number
of other occupations. “What I miss in your elaborations, though, is any
positive suggestion.”81 Breßlau accuses Treitschke of discouraging “those
decent men who—as you emphasize yourself—work against usury to the
best of their ability in their circles.” Breßlau seems here to accept silently
Treitschke’s notion of Jewish group responsibility, but he leaves open what
its practical relevance should be. (Why, for example, would a professor of
medieval history like Breßlau have a particularly good chance to convert a
“speculator” to “decent” banking practices just because both happen to be
Jewish?) Breßlau adds that “not a single Jewish or Christian usurer or pro-
moter would mend his ways because of an article like yours.”82 He suggests
that straightforward legislation would be most effective.
The Allgemeine Zeitung carried the translation of an article by “Valbert”
(i.e., the popular French novelist Cherbuliez).83 “Valbert” mocks: “When a
truly German cobbler makes a pair of shoes he does not only put his con-
sciousness into them but his soul, too, and even some poetry. Alas! Since
the German cobblers allowed the deplorable propaganda of the sons of
Abraham to corrupt them, they see in a pair of shoes only a business, because
for the Jews the world only consists of business and calculation.” Philippson
adds that Treitschke’s emotional rhetoric sits oddly with the fact that “since
1870, Treitschke kept preaching realism in politics” and demanding that
“idealist dreaming” end.84 Similarly, Oppenheim claims that the economic
idealism of Treitschke’s recent position brings him “into the realm of the
Kathedersozialisten”85 as well as that of the “apologists of the guild system
[Zünftler]” against both of whom Treitschke had been renowned for fighting
aggressively.86 Oppenheim asserts that work should be a “business” rather
than a “feudal or state service.” He rejects what “Treitschke and the Kathed-
ersozialisten” seemed to demand, that it should be “an ethical achievement
[Leistung].” Oppenheim admits that “everything has an ethical dimension”
84 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

but suggests that boots made by a cobbler “who goes about his work as a
business” are probably better than boots made from “ethical consciousness.”
Oppenheim states that even if it was true that trade and business have lost
their Gemüthlichkeit (“if there ever was any”) then it would be quite another
thing to prove that the Jews are responsible for this loss. He writes that even
the most conservative peasant has no problem seeing his produce as com-
modities “and his calculation of their prices is affected by neither the songs
of the lark nor those of a whole forest of German poets, whom he otherwise
might highly appreciate.” The mere fact that the product of work is a com-
modity does not make it more or less ethical. Oppenheim sees the “moral”
critique of capitalist production as a cheap excuse for lazy people who fail
to adapt to the standards and expectations of modern society: “The whin-
ing about the lack of pleasantness [Ungemüthlichkeit] of modern produc-
tion comes from the bunglers who fail to produce up-to-date products and
who would be saved if they could hide behind the privileges of a guild or a
system of protective customs.”87 Oppenheim points out that already in the
1770s when guilds in France were abolished under Turgot the guild masters
understood Gemüthlichkeit of work “to mean police protection for the right
to use force and exclusion [Zwangs-und Bannrechte].” He suggests that “the
fertile field of the joy of labor” lies in meeting the increasingly sophisticated
and diverse demands of the consumers rather than in backward-oriented
“reminiscences.” “Even now the apprentices’ question and some related is-
sues pose numerous serious problems because the crafts have lost their
ability to help themselves, having been spoiled and incapacitated through
centuries of privileges and police protection. I bet ten against one that all
those apologists of the guild system who seek their salvation in reaction-
ary fraternities and run to join Stöcker and sing the tune of ‘the evil Jews’
are incompetent and unreliable workers in their trade. . . . Does Herr von
Treitschke want to enlist these people for his Christian-Germanic brigade,
too?” Against Treitschke’s revisionism, Oppenheim defends the liberal mod-
ernizing thrust of creating dynamic economic relations by removing ancien
régime structures and regulations.
Like Oppenheim, Bamberger warns Treitschke against deviating not only
 German-Jewish “Mixed Culture” 85

from religious and cultural tolerance but also from freedom of property as
another tenet of liberalism: “Hopefully Herr von Treitschke, who used to
profess sound economic principles, will not intend making concessions to
the simplistic delusion—currently coming back into fashion—that those who
make money through their labor exploit society and do not through their
services make society so much richer.”88 Bamberger refers to the first section
of “Our Prospects,” in which Treitschke criticized—among other things—the
anti-German current in the political debate in Russia. Bamberger suggests that
“the Russian Treitschkes” declared the Germans to be “Russia’s misfortune,”
just as Treitschke declared the Jews to be Germany’s.89 Like the anti-Jewish
agitation in Germany, the anti-German agitation in Russia “merely decorates
ancient prejudices and passions with the tinsel of patriotic phraseology.” Their
historical point of reference is the immigration of poor Germans at the time
of the Reformation, who succeeded in Russia “through skill, industriousness
and moderation.” The Russian people “had to acknowledge these advantages
of the ‘intruders’ but despised them even more for that reason. Since those
times it remained an established truth in the thinking of the common man
that the Germans ‘destroy national religion and appropriate the riches of the
country.’ The more or less learned Moscow pan-Slavists have only recently
begun to repeat this notion with enormously pompous and cheap moral
outrage and scholarly flimflam.” Bamberger draws the analogy between
Germans in Russia and Jews in Germany: “The well-being of the Jewish
Germans no more prevents that of Christian Germans than industrious,
clever and economical Russians are prevented in Russia by Germans from
enjoying the fruits of their work and from becoming cultured and wealthy.”90
Bamberger presents the conflict in both instances as based on the different
economic attitudes of a traditional population and an immigrant group that
has a modernizing impact on economic life characterized by industriousness,
moderation and rationality. He states that the origin of national-religious
prejudice is economic and strongly affirms the modern economic spirit. He
asserts that the “activity and wealth of the German settlers in Russia benefit
Russian culture as a whole,” just as “the intellectual and economic activity of
German Jews benefits the German state and German society.”91
86 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

Bamberger’s emphasis on economic attitudes indicates clearly that liberal

opposition to antisemitic agitation took the latter’s “anti-capitalist” and
populist aspects very seriously.92 Treitschke, by contrast, clearly did not expect
(let alone hope for) any socialist side effects of antisemitism.
Treitschke chose not to articulate further the “anti-capitalist” side of anti-
semitism that he had displayed in a passage of his first contribution, silently
accepting the fierce criticism of fellow liberals such as Oppenheim and
Bamberger. It occupies much more space, however, and is further developed
in the contributions by Naudh and Endner.
For Naudh, it is a fact of history that the Jews invented “Manchester-
ism” two thousand years ago and that already back then an anti-Jewish,
anti-capitalist movement led by a man called Jesus struggled against it:
“Christianity with its imperative of love was the revolution against the Jewish
principle of arrogance and exploitation and indeed, like every revolution,
it started its struggle from within. Jesus confronted a Judaism that was
oriented toward worldly benefits—the religion of Manchesterism—with
transcendental communism and thus was welcomed first by the poor—
least, however, by the Jewish poor. A gospel of worldly uselessness did not
really appeal to their tastes.”93 For Naudh, the anti-Jewish movement of the
present is similarly motivated: “Although eighty Germans might be able
to feed one unproductive Jew, the burden is distributed too unevenly over
the country. In Berlin, for example—and Berlin shows not yet the most
unfortunate ratio—only eighteen locals have to sustain one Jew, who on
average might perhaps appropriate more than is left to his breadwinners
[Ernährern].”94 Naudh continues that out of these eighteen local Berliners
only five “at most” are fit for work, so that, according to his calculation,
“the Jew consumes at least a fifth of the productive power of the Berlin
population.” Because of the “infinitude of Jewish immigration,” which “ac-
celerates progressively,” the Germans will be “helots of the Jews” in another
twenty years. They will be “run down morally as much as economically.”
Naudh concludes that “it follows from the preceding that we can neither
allow the Jews active participation in the affairs of the state, nor—due to
their inherited hostile morality—can we tolerate them next to us in such
 German-Jewish “Mixed Culture” 87

[large] numbers.”95 In other words, exclusion of Jews from the state-political

sphere needs to be complemented by their exclusion from civil society.
Another economic aspect is emphasized by Wilhelm Endner—making the
Jews productive: “We would not mind, if Berlin’s Jewry (from Victoriastrasse
just as from Königstrasse) would head off and settle for example in the
Tucheler or Lüneburger heath, if Cohn became a ploughman, Abrahamson
a thresher, if Philippson would establish himself as a blacksmith, Jacob-
son as a locksmith, Levyson as a roofer, if Bresslauer became a tar-cooker,
Danziger a peat-cutter, Veilchenfeld a carpenter, Rosenbaum a bricklayer,
if Lilienthal would be working on the street, Löwe, Wolf, Bär and Hirsch at
the ram and so on.”96 Endner adds a whole list of suggestions how the Jews
should accelerate their assimilation.97 He is most adamant about the issue
of taking up productive occupations: “Most of all, make sure that the Jews
become members of the working classes in the same ratio as the Germans are;
that they produce instead of merely enrich themselves through trade. Then
the—until now justified—judgment that the Jews bleed the country white
will possibly change.”98 Endner, who writes that he finds both Treitschke’s
and Stöcker’s politics “too moderate,” is one of the less established, more
populist, and in that sense more “radical” antisemites. Two aspects are par-
ticularly interesting from that perspective. First, he rejects Breßlau’s claim
that the anti-Jewish attitude is “basically” about race. Endner stresses that
it is about cultural, economic, and social questions no less than about race,
and he puts particular emphasis on the economic argument that the Jews
are “unproductive.” For Endner, the “Jewish element” is to be “eliminated”
not so much because the Jews constitute another race (the Wends are also
of a different “race,” but Endner has no problem with them) but because
their racial difference manifests itself in specific cultural-social practices,
most prominently their being “unproductive.” Endner also seems to hold
that persons of non-Jewish (or non-“semitic”) “stock” also fall under the
category “Jews” (while “Semites” is for him the properly racial category) as
soon as they display cultural-economic “Jewish characteristics”: in a com-
ment on Breßlau’s and Treitschke’s argument about “mixed culture,” Endner
formulates explicitly: “Among the promoters and usurers, pawnbrokers and
88 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

repurchase traders, among all the bloodsuckers who understand just how
to avoid prison, there are also many of German descent. Those are called
‘Jews’ by the people—not by me—, they are representatives and the first
offspring of German-Jewish mixed culture.”99 For Endner, the problem is
not “race” but cultural—in particular economic—behavior, which is only
secondarily articulated or explained in the language of “race.” Although
Treitschke did not come back to the economic issue in the course of the
Dispute, it is revealing to see how he restated the issue a few years later: a
“wildly passionate drive for commerce” is “the most eminent trait of the
Jewish character,” and it is “plain obvious” that “a section of Europe’s large-
scale capital stands in an international alliance” whose aim it is to push its
interests against small-scale capital and landed property.100

The Jewish Contribution to German Culture

Many responses to Treitschke argue against his claim that the Jews failed to
contribute to German culture. Most comments on these issues emphasize
that the Jewish contribution to German culture and science is very high
given that the Jews had been institutionally excluded until only one gen-
eration before.101 Breßlau states that the seventy or so Jewish professors at
German universities (more than three times what could be expected from
their share in the population) “honestly work for the greater honor of the
German name and to the advancement of the greatest fame of our nation,
German scholarship.”102 He accuses Treitschke of uncritically replicating the
strategy of the ultramontane press to denounce the liberal press as Jewish by
hugely exaggerating the role Jews play in it.103 He reports that although there
might indeed be a great number of Jewish correspondents and reporters,
their representation on editorial boards and thus their influence on editorial
policy was actually minute. He adds that the existence of incompetent and
characterless “Catilinarian existences” among journalists is not a specifi-
cally Jewish problem and adds that not Jewry but the Catholic reaction is
unpatriotic.104 Breßlau underlines his own patriotism through the repeated
attack on ultramontanism’s orientation toward Rome. Furthermore, he re-
jects Treitschke’s comments on Börne and states that “acerbic self-criticism”
 German-Jewish “Mixed Culture” 89

has “always been a trait of the German character—and not one of its worst
traits.”105 He points as an example to Samuel von Pufendorf and argues
that “superior scorn” was not evidence of alienation but a mark of great
writers.106 Breßlau also stresses that Börne was very serious in his “burning
ardor of patriotism.”107 Treitschke replies to Breßlau that Christian editors
are dependent on “their Jewish correspondents in Paris and London” as well
as the money coming from Jewish advertisers.108 In other words, not only
are Jewish reporters able to dominate even their employers, but the fact that
there are non-Jewish editors who are not particularly anti-Jewish is in itself
proof of the dictatorial influence of Jewish money.109
To illustrate the evil influence of “neo-Judaism,” Treitschke adds a discus-
sion of Börne and Heine and “the days of Young Germany.” With hindsight,
as Treitschke claims, these days can now be recognized as “an era of moral
and intellectual decline”: “Alien, radical, abstract ideas invaded our life at
that time, and a slavish adoration of foreign ideas was preached in the
name of liberty. Up to the present day, our best minds have been laboring
to liberate the nation from the un-German ideals of that infertile epoch and
to lead it back to itself.”110 While Breßlau had likened Börne to Pufendorf,
Treitschke argues that Börne lacked what constituted Pufendorf ’s greatness,
namely, “superiority” and “thorough industriousness”; Börne’s patriotism
lacked seriousness. Treitschke compares Heine favorably to Börne because
of Heine’s “richer nature” and “most of all, because Heine was far more Ger-
man than Börne.” Treitschke distinguishes two dimensions of Heine’s work:
the “international jokes” for which he earned a reputation as being vraiment
parisien, and those poems—like “Loreley”—that display “straightforwardly
German” sentiment or even the “smell of the soil” from the Rhineland.
Dismissing the former but applauding the latter, Treitschke puts Heine in
a line with Jews who “recognized that they can achieve great works of art
only on the tracks of the German spirit.” By way of making a halfhearted
compliment, Treitschke turns Heine into a witness to his own argument.
Börne, however, unlike Heine, used the “abstract journalistic language of
education [abstracte journalistische Bildungssprache],” which is “never truly
German.” Treitschke concludes: “Only arrogant mediocrity opposes itself
90 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

with an air of imagined superiority to the knightly Germanic Esau. . . .

When we oppose such bad habits of the evil elements of our Jewry, men like
Breßlau should support us. I cannot find a serious and deep disagreement
between him and myself.”111
It is Bamberger who detects another one of Treitschke’s contradictions
and turns Treitschke’s claim that only a few Jewish talents are prominent
in the arts and sciences against Treitschke: if that were true, Bamberger
writes sarcastically, it should be a relief to him because it would lessen the
Jews’ chances of polluting German culture. Bamberger misses, though, the
pessimistic point of Treitschke’s argument: in contemporary culture, the
mediocre may dominate the truly great.
Within the discourse of the nation, the concept of culture assumes an
encompassing and mediating role; culture is the specific, separate sphere, a
part of the whole, that tends to present itself as the totality, the whole itself:
this can be read from the relevant passages in the Berlin Antisemitism Dis-
pute. There cannot of course be any such thing as a “cultural antisemitism”
distinguished from “economic antisemitism,” “racial antisemitism,” and so
forth. The following chapter will expand the discussion further, focusing
on the concepts of state, nation, race, and religion.
 Four. State, Nation, Race, Religion

Conflicting constellations of the concepts state, nation, race and religion are
at the heart of the Berlin Antisemitism Dispute and attracted a large number
of more elaborate treatments, including some by leading scholars of the
time: the political analyses by Treitschke, Breßlau, Bamberger, Oppenheim,
and Naudh were joined by the more scholarly contributions in particular by
Lazarus, Cohen, and Mommsen. These more theoretical statements differ
in style from most of the journalistic pamphlet material discussed so far
and deserve a more detailed presentation.

Patriotism as Staatsgesinnung
Two-thirds of Treitschke’s “Our Prospects” from November 1879 are not
about the “Jewish question” or any domestic, social affairs at all but about
international, or rather inter-Imperial, relations. Although this part of the
text is generally not given much attention, it contains important clues about
Treitschke’s overall political conception and allows an immediate contex-
tualization of his comments on the “Jewish question.” Treitschke makes
explicit that for him the two fields of discussion are closely related; he even
seems to indicate that the “domestic” problems (the “Jewish question”; the
relation of state, nation, and culture) receive their importance from the
“global” context.1
Treitschke writes about the final stage of the Balkan crisis and the outcomes
of the Berlin Congress of June and July 1878. On this occasion Bismarck
92 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

managed to establish himself as an arbiter between English, Austrian, and

Russian interests in the Balkans after a successful Russian military interven-
tion in a Serbian-Turkish conflict.2 Treitschke comments on the ill-feeling
between Germany and Russia that originated after the Berlin conference
when Russia had to sacrifice some of its military spoils from the Balkan war
to the “balance of powers” as brokered by Bismarck. He points out that the
two states are allies by tradition as well as by mutual benefit, and he blames
the temporary ill-feeling on the “blind spitefulness” rooted in the “mighty
national passions of the Russian people” or, rather, of influential parties among
them.3 Treitschke suggests that the “passionate desire of the nation,” “youthful”
and “immature,” and the “propaganda of pan-Slavism” had driven the czar
into conflict with the Ottoman Empire.4 Treitschke draws an enthusiastic
portrayal of Bismarck’s presidency of the Berlin Congress: Bismarck saved
the Russians the largest part of their spoils while Britain and Austria initially
aimed at annulling the results of the Balkan war completely so as to save the
territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire. The driving force behind the
German position was, according to Treitschke, the wish to see “the liberation
of the Balkan Christians from unbearable [Turkish] pressure.”5 The driving
force behind Russian popular mood was, by contrast, not sympathy for the
Christians of the Balkans but pan-Slavism. Russian public opinion opposed
the czar’s diplomacy after the war and even called for war against Germany
because the war aims of pan-Slavism were not fulfilled. Additionally, as
Treitschke notes, popular anger was fueled by the fact that the newly cre-
ated nation-states in the Balkans had “constitutional forms of state” which
Russia still lacked.6 The twofold disappointment after the military triumph
operated as a catalyst: “And just like the innermost secrets of man always are
betrayed in anger, so the pan-Slavists’ deep-rooted hate of Germans came
to the fore in measureless force.”7 While Treitschke shows himself less than
sympathetic to populist pan-Slavism, he applauds the majority of public
opinion in Germany for being sympathetic to the politics of the Russian
state. He adds that only some “isolated adherents of the old liberal school”
and some “dogged” progressives did not support Russia in the Balkan war.8
He argues for a renewed alliance of the “three imperial powers,” Germany,
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 93

Austria, and Russia, as long as pan-Slavism does not become official Russian
policy.9 Treitschke sees as the main result of the Berlin Congress that Britain
gave up its traditional position of defending the territorial integrity of the
Ottoman Empire. He takes it as a fact that the latter will be divided among
the European powers in due course: “In the age of the railway the ideas and
projects of the epoch of the crusades are resurgent.”10 Treitschke argues that
England and Russia as the main players should be able to come to a peaceful
agreement, because both had “to fear a common enemy in the fanaticism
of Islam.” “Unfortunately,” though, “reason alone does not decide about the
fates of peoples.”11 Conflict is unavoidable because of, on the one side, the
“enormous expansive power of Slavdom” and, on the other side, the “far
more insatiable greed for territory of English commercial policy” looking
for markets. Treitschke anticipates a European coalition to prevent British
hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean.
In this context he moves to a second element of the results of the Berlin
Congress, the incorporation of Bosnia into the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.
Treitschke’s assessment of this is ambivalent; he appreciates as an immedi-
ate benefit that the conquest has boosted national self-consciousness: “One
has started again to believe in the state and its good fortunes; one can hear
from Vienna articulations of a healthy patriotic pride, a vital Austrian state-
mindedness [Staatsgesinnung] more often now than since many years ago.”12
On the other hand, he points out the administrative problems of governing
this remote province, and the subsequent necessity for the Dual Monarchy
to be engaged in Balkan politics to make Bosnia economically viable.
Taken together, Treitschke’s comments on the political situation at large
allow for some first conclusions about his conception of state and nation. In
keeping with his background as a key proponent of kleindeutsche policy—as
opposed to pan-Germanism—he rejects pan-Slavism, too. The “liberation”
of Christianity from Ottoman rule has his sympathy, although this seems
not a priority. As in the case of Austria, he appreciates military success as
a contributor to “healthy patriotism,” which he defines as Staatsgesinnung,
that is, loyalty to and identification with a state, which in itself does not
necessarily imply an ethnic sense of nationality. He seems to support the
94 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

existence of empires as long as they are economically and administratively

viable and supported by “public opinion.” Since this is not the case for the
Ottoman Empire, the latter’s days are numbered. He discerns potential dif-
ficulties in the case of Austria-Hungary, while critical difficulties are already
apparent in the case of Russia. While Russia is characterized as a potential
troublemaker because of the popularity of the “dreamings” and “fairy tales”
of pan-Slavism, Treitschke speaks of England with hostility because of the
uniquely commercial character of its politics. All in all, Treitschke appears
here as a supporter of nationalism as state patriotism, that is, nationalism as
the basis of Staatsgesinnung. Economic viability is mentioned repeatedly as
a key category, although he refers also to Christianity and the culture of the
“Occident.” Only when a state does not manage to mobilize the necessary
patriotic support of its citizens, as in the Turkish case, does it appear as a
legitimate prey to destabilizing forces such as other nations’ nationalisms.

The Christian Nation

Although for Treitschke, patriotism translates as Staatsgesinnung, in his
discussion of the “Jewish question” he refers to Germany as a “Christian
nation”: “The moment emancipation was gained one insisted boldly on
one’s ‘certificate,’13 literal parity was demanded in all and sundry, forgetful
of the fact that we Germans are, after all, a Christian nation [ein christliches
Volk] and the Jews are only a minority in our midst; we have witnessed that
the removal of Christian pictures in mixed schools was demanded, and even
the celebration of the Sabbath.”14 The concept of christliches Volk blurs the
boundaries between, on the one hand, state, citizenship, and emancipation
and, on the other hand, morality and religion.15 Treitschke rejects any chal-
lenge to the Christian character of the nation. While he suggests that the
Jews make wholly unreasonable demands.16 But Treitschke also insists that
emancipation is crucial for the character of the German state: “Among those
who understand, there can be no talk of an abolition or even of a limitation
of the emancipation; that would be an obvious injustice, a betrayal of the
fine traditions of our state, and would accentuate rather than mitigate the
national divide which torments us.”17 Treitschke connects his argument
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 95

here to the liberal tradition that sees in the state a means to “harmonize”
civil society, “mitigating” its “divides.” He characterizes the German nation
as Christian, the German state as liberal.
In his third contribution, Treitschke claims that the relatively higher increase
in the size of the Jewish population warrants a “momentous change in our
social life.”18 He states that “this tribe” includes “apart from many honorable,
fully patriotic people also a bunch of unreconstructed Orientals” as well as
“a swarm of rootless international journalists,” “large cosmopolitan financial
powers,” “some simply anti-social elements,” and criminals.19 Although legal
emancipation has been “beneficial insofar as it took from the Jews all reason
for legitimate complaint,” it also “made the mixing of blood more difficult,
which has always been the most effective means of leveling tribal differences”:
“The numbers of conversions to Christianity have sharply decreased, and
mixed marriage between Christians and Jews will remain a rare exception as
long as our people holds its Christian beliefs sacred.”20 Treitschke reaffirms
his support for legal emancipation and for the “mixing of blood” as a means
of (national) amalgamation against tribal particularisms. At the same time,
however, he reasserts strongly the incompatibility of the two religions.21 From
among the four categories blood/tribe/race, religion, nation, and state, nation
and state appear as historical ends, the others as either means to these ends
or obstacles to be overcome: for the sake of nation building, blood/tribes/
races should be “mixed” and “amalgamated.” The problem with the Jews is
that their sticking to their old religion makes this amalgamation undesirable
for the Christians who in turn have to stick to their (more modern) religion
for the sake of nation-state formation. The continued existence of the Jews
as an ethno-religious group is therefore an obstacle for the constitution of
the nation-state. Treitschke continues: “The Jews owe gratitude to the new
Germany for the work of liberation because the participation in governing
the state is not at all a natural right of all inhabitants but is decided freely by
every state.”22 He complains that the Jews not only show a lack of gratitude
but even criticize Christian dogma. In some cases, he claims, they try to limit
the Christian’s freedom of belief “in the name of tolerance”—for example,
when Jews complain about Christian schoolteachers teaching that the Jews
96 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

crucified Jesus.23 Treitschke concludes that the beginnings of the “terrorism

of a busy minority” must not be encouraged through “cowardly patience”
on the side of “us Christians.”24 He seems here less concerned, however,
with the truth about issues such as who was responsible for the death of
Jesus than with the effects that questioning such truths may have on nation
building and state formation.

“Exaggerated Nationalism”
The rejection of Treitschke’s nationalism as “exaggerated” was a common
denominator of most critical responses. The notion of “exaggerated nation-
alism” presupposes—sometimes implicitly, often explicitly—a contrasting
notion of not-exaggerated, “healthy” nationalism or patriotism. A comment
in the Allgemeine Zeitung by Ludwig Philippson, who sees the “nationality
principle” as central to the problem, touches on many of the issues at stake in
the wider discussion.25 He presents himself as a supporter of the nationality
principle who has argued for decades that the Jews should assimilate to the
German nation, or whatever nation they happen to live among, and that this
would not at all affect their Jewishness. He warns, however, that the national-
ity principle, when it is exaggerated, creates hate and division, as the case of
Treitschke shows. According to Philippson, Treitschke argues for the extinc-
tion of all Jewish particularity because he interprets all Jewish particularity
as national. Philippson rejects this interpretation and holds that a degree of
particularity in one’s way of life is necessary for the reproduction of religious
particularity: no religion can exist without its specific institutional forms,
because “religion that existed only in three or four abstract sentences would
not persist.”26 He writes that “pseudo-liberals” like Treitschke share with the
ultramontanists the goal of bringing down the liberal principle that legal and
political equality override religion or confession, which is a “bulwark of the
constitutional state [Rechtsstaat].”27 He argues that the anti-liberal strategy is
to deliberately repeat the rhetorical attack on the Rechtsstaat again and again
until the general public has absorbed it “like a sponge absorbs dirty water.”
However, the fact that “in all religions and confessions countless individu-
als have transcended clerical dogmas and forms” and “the state in almost all
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 97

civilized countries [Culturländern] fights the armies of the churches” makes

this an anachronistic enterprise. Philippson warns that any violation of a
“great legal principle” will inevitably spread over the whole legal realm: “partial
violation”—such as abolition of civil rights only for the Jews—“abolishes the
principle as such.” Furthermore, he argues that “exaggerated nationalism”
becomes “despotism” as soon as it suppresses the development of individual-
ity within the legal framework. Out of “enraged delusion,” nationalism turns
against itself and mimics its opposite, which is socialism.28 Philippson rejects
the conservative attack on “modern civilization”:

We think it is a mistake to ascribe to modern civilization the drive toward

leveling out all differences between human beings [Nivellirungssucht]. From
antiquity and medieval barbarism large entities had developed that contained
a vast diversity of unrefined forms as well as delusions, superstitions and tyr-
anny. Civilization challenges these forms and their contents in order to destroy
them. In doing so, it calls the true essence and the intellectual wealth of those
entities to new life, which naturally also take on purer and more subtle forms.
Everywhere this process is governed by the same rules of reason, taste, the in-
corporation [of the particular] into the general, and into the demands of the
time. Civilization does not thus challenge the phenomena in themselves but
merely what they came to be under the conditions of barbarism: only the latter
brought them into contradiction with generality. Civilization rejuvenates and
refreshes the life and the vitality of these historical phenomena. This is what
also happened and continues to happen to Judaism.29

He warns that attempts to undermine the rule of law and freedom might
in the future unite into the foundation of a “Christian-Nationalist” party,
which would damage both Christianity and the nation. Treitschke’s argu-
ment already contained this possibility in nuclear form. Philippson ends
on an optimistic note implying that such “anachronistic” endeavors would
be but temporary.30

“The Jewish question the way it occurs today is not a religious question but
one of nationality [or], if you wish, one of race,” argues Harry Breßlau.31
98 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

As evidence he refers to Treitschke’s use of the phrase “baptized and non-

baptized Jews” and his demand for the Jews to “become Germans” while
“wanting to allow us [the Jews] to stick to our religion.”32 In his reply, the
antisemite Wilhelm Endner rejects Breßlau’s claim: he writes that race, “which
manifests itself in physical appearance,” was only one of a number of aspects,
which also included customs, opinions, and religion.33 Endner claims that in
everyday parlance “Jew” refers to any person—irrespective of “race”—acting
in a “Jewish” way. It is interesting that Endner, who (like Naudh) professes
an overtly racist antisemitism, at the same time insists that “race” is only
one aspect subordinate to a broader, cultural issue.
Ludwig Bamberger goes further than Breßlau in attempting to explain
the meaning of the category “race”: he argues that “exaggerated national-
ism” adopts the category of “race” in order to justify inequality when that
inequality can no longer be justified by religion. As a “historian and patriot,”
writes Bamberger, Treitschke should have studied the “peculiar phenomena”
that resulted from the “mixing of the Jewish element with modern national-
ity [Volkswesen].”34 “This surviving artifact from time immemorial in the
present”35 should have given the “historian and patriot” the opportunity to
study the “marvellous vitality based on such a strong individuality” as well
as “the manifold ways in which the liberated element36 has integrated itself
into the various nations.” Such examination would have thrown light on
“the characteristics of the German being [Wesen]” and how it deals with
social and political tasks. It would have shown that “the immortality of the
unfortunate divide” between Jews and Gentiles “is but a particular form of
that large German hereditary evil: self-destruction [Selbstzerfleischung].”
Bamberger suggests that the current anti-Jewish agitation is but a new instance
of what he calls “the old discord” that makes life difficult for the German na-
tion.37 Treitschke the historian failed to analyze any of these issues. However,
Bamberger’s argument has its ambivalence, too: “Jewry” is on the one hand a
“surviving artefact from time immemorial . . . peeping into the present,” that
is, an anachronistic element that stands in opposition to “modern nationality,”
and on the other hand it is a party in a conflict within the modern German
nation. Bamberger sees Treitschke motivated by three factors: tactical party-
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 99

political opportunism, Treitschke’s individual psychological makeup, and

the inherent propensity of “exaggerated nationalism” as a political doctrine
to “degenerate” into hatred of anything alien both within and without the
boundaries of the nation: “The cult of nationality more than anything else
carries within itself this temptation and it easily degenerates into making
hate of other nations a sign of authentic conviction. From this hate of the
alien beyond the border, it is only a [small] step to the hate of what can be
found to be alien within one’s own country.”38 Bamberger argues that “from
time immemorial” people created social divisions with reference to “the
privileges of birth.”39 He quotes as an example the party of the “nativists” or
“know-nothings” in the United States, who aimed to restrict the civil rights
of newly arriving immigrants. Unlike the American immigrants, however,
the German Jews have settled in Germany since Germany “entered history.”
Therefore, they cannot be attacked as immigrants. Bamberger either does
not distinguish between Jews who are in fact recent immigrants and the
established community or he has only the latter in mind.40 Anyway, it would
not make sense to demand “that today’s large national states should be puri-
fied according to the principle of absolute racial purity. As a matter of fact,
all civilized nations have been created from diverse tribes and have found
and expressed their power precisely in such assimilation.”41 The concept of
the “Semitic race” stems from the “garbage of physiology and linguistics.”
“The racial distinction” has been adopted in spite of its meaninglessness: “It
was adopted only when inequality of right could no longer be justified with
reference to religious denomination. But the weak surrogate cannot replace
this concrete and honest means of distinction. Being baptized or not, that
makes sense and has power; Semitic or Germanic cannot be used without
hitting the baptized with the unbaptized.”42 The category of race serves to
perpetuate inequality after the latter’s initial justification has stopped work-
ing. Bamberger points out that the 1878 Berlin Congress proclaimed the
equality of confessions as a fundamental principle of modern constitutional
law, a principle that Treitschke would not want to challenge.43 Bamberger
suggests, though, that the discontinuation of formal religious discrimina-
tion has not led to equality but merely to a change in the way inequality is
100 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

legitimized: “The impossibility of a denial of rights on the basis of religion

pushes the struggle in our country time and again onto the physiological
terrain of the inequality of races.” If the racial principle were to be taken
seriously and put into practice, then Jews—baptized or not—would have
to be expelled together with second- or third-generation descendants of
Jews as well as children of mixed marriage. For Bamberger it goes without
saying that such a monstrous endeavor would be a practical impossibility:
his pointing to the enormous implications of invoking the category of “race”
at all is for Bamberger a reductio ad absurdum of the racial discourse itself.
It was then not conceivable that anyone might possibly find these practical
implications quite reasonable (as was the case only a few decades later).
Bamberger brushes “race” from the table and concludes: “Why should one
torture oneself with all these threadbare pretexts! Let us admit honestly:
we are dealing with an ancient antipathy that has been handed down from
generation to generation for centuries and has become a fact of nature so
much that in many people even the strongest logic cannot challenge the
power of habit.” This antipathy “originated essentially from the conflicts of
religious confessions.” Once people have learned that “there are many homes
in the house of God,” religious antipathy is “destined to disappear,” and so
“the racial divide” will finally be overcome by “humanity and education.”
“Until then one has to take into account the undeniable fact of a sentiment
which is unable to take account of itself.”44
Bamberger’s position is based on the conceptual distinction between
“modern nationality” and “the cult of nationality,” the latter of which easily
“degenerates” into racism. Modern, well-measured nationalism and the exag-
gerated “cult of nationality” (by implication something unmodern) appear
as distinct entities, as the latter’s inherent racism is merely a “threadbare
pretext” for religious discrimination in a time when religion has ceased to
appear as a legitimate discourse in itself: racism is merely the misleading
packaging of an anachronistic and outdated phenomenon, religious ha-
tred. Bamberger not only underrates the modernity of the discourse of race
but also fails to explain why religious discrimination should now need the
racial pretext. In his account, religious belief and its specific forms seem
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 101

to change and disappear spontaneously: people “learned” to tolerate each

other’s beliefs, and the divide “is destined” to disappear. The slow but finally
victorious march of “humanity and education” remains unaccounted for.
Despite his suggestive and often brilliant formulations, his general con-
ception does not allow Bamberger to address the crucial questions of why
“religious antipathy” took on the disguise of “racial divide,” and why one
should expect both to disappear.

The Nation as Product of the National Spirit

It is of obvious significance that the title of one of the first public responses
to Treitschke’s first article was “What Does National Mean?”45 Moritz La-
zarus argues that the German Jews are Germans, and he engages for this
purpose in a detailed discussion of the concept of the nation.46 He compiles
a comprehensive list of categories that he argues are not in themselves ele-
ments of a sufficient definition of the nation: forms of settlement, morals,
and customs are not crucial parameters that define a nation because they
are not generic within any single nation, and the same forms of settlement,
morals, and customs can be found in the contexts of different and unrelated
nations. Territorial separation and community are “the basis of political
unity,” but members of different nationalities can share the same territory,
while members of the same nationality can be found inhabiting different
territories. One territorial unit can contain several state structures, and
one nation-state can consist of different noncontinuous territories. Most
importantly, though, territorial borders change and “depend on subjective
perspective.” Lazarus argues that “the separation of peoples is for themselves
beyond doubt, but the borders of the country are object of nearly intermi-
nable struggles.” He claims that while the state (in its territorial and political
borders) is contingent, national-ethnic (Volks-) boundaries are fixed and
self-evident. Citizenship does not define a nation, because only “in earliest
times” did the borders of states coincide with the boundaries of nations.47 The
same is true of religion. Descent is “not at all the true mark” of nationality,
since no nationality in Europe is “of pure descent.” Nations emerge either
through mixing of lines of descent or through their splitting up.48
102 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

While all of the above are elements of nation formation, Lazarus singles
out language as the most important “objective element of the formation
of national unity.”49 Language “connects all members of a nation to a spiri-
tual community.”50 Its importance is underlined by the fact that language
was created “in the first human community through the need for mutual
understanding and continued [in turn] to create the conditions for this
understanding.” The child “develops the ability to think in the language of
the family” first. Communication and exchange lead to the development of
“manifold forms of what in its innermost core is the same.”51 Lazarus does
not stop, though, at a definition of the nation as a community of language.
The main thrust of his argument is based on his refusal to acknowledge
that what he calls “objective” categories (including language) are in the last
instance at all decisive. The question “what is a nation [Volk]”52 ought not
to be answered with “a classification of the human species in the style of
natural history53 according to its varieties54 and its less and less numerous
differences and forms.”55 Such an approach might be appropriate for the
classification of plants by a botanist who has to ask what degree of similar-
ity is necessary to group two plants into the same family, but the concept
of the nation cannot be conceived in such a way, because it “is not formed
from the corporeal, zoological aspect, but from a spiritual [geistigen] one.”
Although language is the most important objective element, the objective
elements in themselves do not make a nation.
An important element of Lazarus’s conception is his differentiation be-
tween the “content” and “form” of consciousness.56 “Content” is constituted
by sentiments, notions, concepts, and the feelings attached to them, “form” by
“the moving of these contents through [the faculty of] consciousness or [in
other words] the combination of their elements.” All elements of “national
consciousness [Volksbewusstsein]”—religion, customs, constitution—are
“thought content.” Form as well as content of language are subject to “na-
tional specificity [Volkseigenthümlichkeit]”; form, though, is affected by
national specificity “in a finer, more tender and more intense way” than
content is. Words are the unity of “idea [Vorstellungsinhalt]” and “thought
form [Gedankenform],” while “movement of thought” is represented in
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 103

inflection as well as syntax. “Language not only contains the worldview of

a people but also represents the perceptive activity itself.”57 Lazarus employs
here a conceptual mind/body dialectic that separates “material” or “objec-
tive” from “spiritual” or “subjective” aspects, the latter of which transform
and transcend the former:

The true nature and the essence of nationality can only be understood as
residing in the spirit. . . . Spirit, freedom and history intervene in the natural
distribution of the human species according to races, tribal groups, tribes,
clans, families. They separate what by nature would belong together and mix
and assimilate what by nature would be different. Spiritual community and
difference are therefore independent from genealogical community and dif-
ference. The concept of the nation is grounded on spiritual, historical constel-
lations intervening into naturally given differences; and what makes a nation
a nation are not objective conditions such as descent or language as such but
the subjective ideas of the members of the nation who are joined together in
considering themselves a nation.58

Lazarus concludes that the researcher can determine human beings’ be-
longing to race and tribe with the same objectivity with which a natural
historian classifies plants. Talking about the nation, however, is different:
“We ask human beings which nation they see themselves belonging to.”59
Although the nation is not independent from material conditions, it “does
not have anything that could be called—except by analogy—its body.” It is a
“spiritual creation of the individuals who constitute it; they are not a people,
they constantly create one.”60 “The nation is the first product of the national
spirit. The individuals do not create it as individuals but only by overcoming
[aufheben] their isolation. The awareness of this self-transcendence [Selbst-
aufhebung] and of the [individuals’] dissolution into a general national spirit
[Volksgeist] expresses itself in the notion of the people. The national spirit
creates the notion and with it also the actuality of the nation.”61 Lazarus
rejects a “scientific”—in other words, a positivist—approach and advocates
what could be called a “hermeneutical” or “interpretative” approach: “Our
task is therefore not to develop out of an examination of objective givens
104 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

our own definition of the nation as a discrete, objective concept as if corre-

sponding to a concrete object, but we have to interpret the existing subjective
definitions that nations implicitly give of themselves.”62 Every nation has
an individual conception of itself that “will always base itself on objective
conditions such as descent, language, political life and so on,” and which in
turn is an aspect of its particular actuality as a nation.63 However, “the crucial
issue, namely the light in which the self-consciousness illuminates itself, is
the subjective, free act of self-awareness [Selbsterfassung] as a whole and
as a people.” Lazarus concludes that “the subjective connection in the spirit
of a nation” is “based on, developed and experienced” through the nation’s
“history in the widest sense”—its “common destiny”:

Insofar as an individual—or an individual with his family—over generations

participates in history passively and actively, the subjective bond of belonging
grows. When illness and famine hit a country they do not ask after religion,
descent or language but as common destiny they unite the minds. The blessings
of peace and the burdens, sorrows and sacrifices of war are shared by all, and
all share as well the virtues that war has demanded and strengthened. Fighting
shoulder to shoulder, the men grow hearts fit for the unity of the historical deed.
Even separate and hostile tribes proceed toward national unity. Will—that most
personal, most character-forming element of the human mind—alone the will
of the tribes decides. In the German Reich, will alone, proven in deed, has made
those who less than a decade ago had fought each other as mortal enemies, a
unity. Not least, as we Germans know best, the common history of intellectual
life joins individuals and tribes together to form the unity of the nation.64

Shared subjects and levels of education, mutual support in exploring the

same things, and exchange in exploring different things, “in short: the flow
of spirit and intellect that forms the inner life creates in everybody, accord-
ing to the degree of their participation, the consciousness of their national-
spiritual unity.”65 Similarly, while it is an objective anthropological fact that
“nature” has “planted into our hearts the inclination to join a defined group
of fellow creatures,”66 it has left open for the individual humans to decide
what kind of group to join or to build: “The motives for acting thus [die
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 105

Gruppierungsmotive] have been left open to us and we see them change

through all ages.”67
The “natural underpinnings of human sociability”—spatial community,
language, exchange of means of subsistence, geographical and hereditary in-
fluences—constitute an “intertwining of interests and customs to which higher
relationships can easily attach themselves.” They do not, however, constitute
“the bond of minds [Band der Gemüther]” that is the basis of the nation:

Not every birthplace is a homeland [Heimat], not every land of the fathers is a
fatherland. I can be chained through the community of state and law to people
whose language I do not understand, whose customs, culture and belief are
alien to me. Human freedom again stands above all these individual powers of
attraction. I can break away from it all, join strangers and talk to King David’s
ancestress: Your people be my people and your God be my God.68 The concept
of the nation is not objectively defined but also depends on subjective sentiment.
My nation are those whom I consider to be my nation, whom I call my people, to
whom I know myself joined by unbreakable bonds [unlösbare Bande].69

Lazarus makes a distinction between a more emphatic concept of the nation

and a more casual one. He presents the emphatic concept in a formulation
by Rümelin:

Our mind . . . will always feel a silent longing for a full, unitary community
of life. It will aim at the ideal of a central group that encompasses all matters
of life, the pivot of all particular motives for getting together, in which we
have a complete sense that these are our people, the kin by whom we stand,
with whom we endure, whose fate we share, from whom to part would be an
intolerable thought.
Our German word Volk in its deeper meaning refers to this ideal aim of
the universal group of the full community of life, without, though, excluding
those less perfect forms that are constituted by the individual main charac-
teristics.70

On the other hand, Lazarus argues, “we have to accept” that there is also a
more casual use of the term: this usage refers to every group that wants to
106 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

distinguish itself from its neighbors with reference to descent or language, or,
on the other hand, “every multitude that is governed by a state” as a people
or a nation. Paradoxical statements such as that “the Belgian people consists
of two peoples” follow from confusing the two ways of using the term Volk.71
Lazarus proceeds to integrate “objective” and “subjective” elements into a
comprehensive definition of the ideal concept of the nation:

A country large and fertile enough to feed a dense, numerous population, fit

to defend itself against all its neighbors, varied enough to warrant a multiple
development of economic and intellectual life; on this soil, a linguistically uni-
fied population that works it and has struggled for it and knows itself united in
common deeds and sufferings; this multitude protected and ordered through
a unified state sprung from its womb and intertwined with its interests and
memories; based on secure statehood, the flowering and cultivation of all those
ideal goods of humanity and of intellectual, moral and religious life [growing] in
free and manifold forms, including contradictions and struggles that strengthen
a sense of community spreading in sovereignty and reconciliation—this is what
it means to be a nation.72

For Lazarus, the prevalence of nation over race is part of the prevalence of
spirit over matter, and the victory of a “subjective” concept of the nation over
an “objective” one is part of the struggle of “idealism” over “materialism.” He
opposes his idealist concept of the nation—which has the “national spirit”
transcend its material conditions and actually make the nation—to racial
conceptions of the nation: “This blood-and-race theory is in its entirety
a product of a general coarsely sensualist-materialist worldview.73 Those
who—on the one hand—argue for a revival of ideality are critically wrong
if they do not—on the other hand—recognize that materialism has to be
fought lock, stock and barrel and replaced by a higher and purer world-
view.”74 Lazarus writes that the idea of culture being determined by blood
is inconsistent with subscribing to “the victorious power of the idea.”75 He
sees “the arousal of racial or tribal hatred” as a necessary accompaniment of
materialism. Racial hatred is “the lowest [form of] antagonism.”76 Although
the actuality of race and tribe are not denied, they are but aspects of matter
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 107

and have no role to play in the realm of spirit and sociability. Bringing race
and tribe as points of reference into the realm of spirit and society means
undermining the human effort to spiritualize existence.
Although for Lazarus commonality of religion is one of the “objective
elements” that constitute the material substratum of a particular nation, he
rejects the idea that any one religion as such could have a national character:
there is no such thing as a “German religion.” Therefore he rejects Treitschke’s
claim that Judaism “was not German.”77 Judaism is just as much (or as little)
German as Christianity is: “Today, every nationality comprises several re-
ligions, every religion several nationalities. . . . Individual-civil [individuell
bürgerliche], political and national activity of any human being, including the
Jew, is independent from religion.”78 Lazarus adds that Judaism in particular
is a religion that “neither grants to nor demands anything from any power
or dominion,” and concludes from this that it “can never come into conflict
with the state.” He supports this claim with reference to the dictum by the
Talmudic sage Mar Samuel, which he argues is crucial to Jewish religious
and state theory, stating that “the law of the country’s government, of the
state power, is the law for the Jew.”79 Lazarus argues that this formulation is
based on a notion that has been pivotal to Judaism from its very beginnings:
the belief that God commands the fate of the world, and so every legitimate
government is ipso facto legitimized by God. Lazarus claims that his own
understanding of nationality is in keeping with a line of traditional Jewish
thought that “has never been challenged”: since German Jews have become
German citizens, they share the fate of the German nation, are therefore
Germans, and accept the German state as legitimate.
Lazarus adds that the Germans have only recently become “a nation in the
genuine, true sense of the word,” a process in which the Jews have fully taken
part, and he underscores the participation of Jews in the German-French
war of 1870–71. “Whatever we do we do as Germans,” he writes. “When we
earn fortunes on the world market—something people like to point out
so much—then we increase the wealth of the [German] nation.” Lazarus
concludes that “the heightening of the national feeling [Nationalgefühl] is a
serious issue . . . for the German as well as for any other people.” One cannot
108 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

contribute to this aim by arousing antagonism (Widerwillen) in one part of

the population against another one, and particularly not by “alarming the
imagination with a strong fear of facts that are—not facts at all.”80
Central to Lazarus’s conception is the categorical distinction between
“material”—as it were, corporeal—aspects of the nation, as the worldly
“intertwining of interests,” and the nation’s “spiritual” aspects. Language
is the mediator between them, standing with one leg in the material world
(warranted by its practical, functional aspects) and with one leg in the realm
of self-consciousness, freedom, human will, and the making of history. While
the material world constitutes races, tribes, clans, and so forth, only the
spiritual world—the “bonding of minds”—constitutes nations.81
“Unfortunately,” responds Treitschke to Lazarus, he has to disagree. Tre-
itschke concedes that “the essence of nationality is to be found not merely
in descent or language, but in the unquestioned and lively consciousness
of unity,” but he reproaches Lazarus for not dealing with the problem how
such “consciousness of unity” would be possible among people who hold
differing religious sentiments: “That living consciousness of unity that con-
stitutes nationality cannot usually be formed among people who think in
fundamentally different ways about the highest and most sacred questions of
emotional life.”82 While different denominations are a lesser problem, differ-
ent religions can coexist in one nationality “only as a transitional state,” and
only as long as one religion “clearly predominates” while believers of other
religions are “a minute minority.”83 Treitschke also rejects Lazarus’s claim that
“today, every nationality includes several religions”: “I am not a follower of
the doctrine of the Christian state, because the state is a secular order and
has to exert its power with impartial justice also against non-Christians. But
without doubt we Germans are a Christian nation.”84 Treitschke argues that
Christianity is intertwined “with every fiber of the German people,” while
Judaism is “the national religion of a tribe that initially was alien to us.”85 Art,
science, “even disbelief,” and “all healthy institutions of state and society” of the
German people have been “fertilized” by Christianity, whereas “the Germans
never had any part” in the development of Judaism, and vice versa. Judaism
remained restricted to the “Jewish tribe” because it was “more suitable for
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 109

defense than for proselytizing.” Treitschke also rejects Lazarus’s disconnecting

religion and nationality with reference to other nations: “The most civilized
[bestgesitteten] nations of the present, the Western European nations, are all
Christian nations [Völker].” He concludes: “Just imagine that one half of our
nation would renounce Christianity: no doubt, the German nation would have
to fall apart. Everything we call German would fall to pieces.” He reproaches
Lazarus for not distinguishing between “religion” and “denomination” and
argues that while different denominations can coexist within one nation,
different religions cannot. Crucial to this step in Treitschke’s argument is
the ambivalent use of the concepts Staat, Nation, and Volk and their relation
to each other. He argues first that the state should be beyond religion as a
“secular order,” although this is followed by the assertion that in the case of
Germany “all institutions of the state” are essentially Christian in their spirit.
Also, all Western nations are “Christian nations.” Nation and Volk seem to
be used as synonyms (as in Lazarus). The argument that all German state
institutions are Christian seems to presuppose that national culture informs
(and to some extent precedes) state institutions. It follows from this that the
initial (normative) statement—the state should be secular—is contradicted
by the subsequent (positive) statement that the state is always informed by
religion as one crucial constituent of nationality. The normative claim for the
nation-state’s secular character necessarily stands in contradiction with its
actual constitution, which involves a particular religion. This contradiction
affects the guarantee given by Treitschke that the (secular but Christian) state
“has to exert its power with impartial justice also against non-Christians”: “Just
because a tiny minority of Jews lives among them, the Christian peoples of the
West have not become mixed Christian-Jewish peoples. They might grant that
minority all civil rights and complete freedom of religion; but despite having
granted emancipation to the Jews they remain entitled and obliged to remain
in the upright stance of their Christian culture86 and to preserve the Christian
character of their institutions.”87 The Jews’ claim to cultural equality beyond
legal emancipation appears so “monstrous” to Treitschke because of their tiny
number: Lazarus’s “principal mistake” is that he ignores “the modest status of
exception that befits the Jews in the Christian cultural world.”88
110 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

Treitschke writes that the nation is Christian but not the state. The ques-
tion is, then, if the nation is Christian and the state is not, how can the state
be a national state, that is, a state based on the nation? In other words, is the
secular nation-state—a central project of liberalism—not a contradiction
in terms? This is the question that Naudh in particular will ask.
Hermann Cohen, who regrets “to admit” that his statement was caused
and motivated by Lazarus’s claim that “there is no German religion” and that
Judaism is just as German as Christianity is, comprehensively rejects Lazarus’s
position.89 He attacks four crucial claims by Lazarus: that the link between
nationalism and religion is rather loose; that race is of little relevance to the
nation; that nationalism should be linked with and, as it were, balanced out
by universalist ideals; and that diversity is an intrinsic good. Cohen asserts
that “a nation that wants to found and to reinforce its existence as a state
needs to take care of its religious foundation.”90 All (potential) members of
the nation have to participate in its religious foundation, “confessional dif-
ferences related to history and tradition” notwithstanding.91 He rejects the
idea “that religious form was a matter of no political relevance and should
not be the concern of the state” as “a flawed liberal slogan, which unfor-
tunately has been taken onboard by many Jews.”92 Against Lazarus, Cohen
holds that “the German people, and that includes us Jews, breathe out of
the culture of Christianity.” Cohen agrees with Treitschke’s claim that “the
coexistence of several different religions can only be a transitory state” and
can last only “if one religion predominates and the followers of the other
religions are the exception and by far a minority.”93 However, he holds that
this argument cannot be used in support of antisemitism: Christianity,
which is in the “world-historical” process of “struggling for that purer form”
of religion, can easily accommodate a minority that holds “a belief so pure
and free of all paganism” as the Jews’.
The concept of the “coexistence of several different religions” does not sit
comfortably with Cohen’s Kantian definition of the term, which recognizes
only one (universal) religion but many different Glaubensarten (confessions,
or ways of believing). In this context, a multiplicity of Glaubensarten is held
never to be a problem for the state as long as all of them can be interpreted in
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 111

the sense of the generic concept of Religion. In the present passage, however,
Cohen’s stressing the “purity” of Judaism implies that a less “pure” religion
(more precisely: Glaubensart) would indeed constitute a problem. Further-
more, the formulation by Treitschke that Cohen approves of clearly implies
that the “minority” believers do not enjoy equal cultural currency, while
Cohen argues for the equality in value of Judaism and Protestant Christianity
in the “struggle for that purer form of religion.” Admission to the national
community appears here as a reward for “purity” from “paganism”—in
other words, compatibility with Protestantism.
Cohen underpins his discussion of the concept of “race” with a meth-
odological critique: he accuses Lazarus of both empiricism and one-sided
idealism. Cohen is not interested in asking (as Lazarus does) whether race
is empirically a constitutive element of nations as they actually exist: he
acknowledges that Lazarus’s discussion is valid in the context of an empiri-
cal account of the actuality of existing nations. However, Cohen subscribes
to a normative concept of nationality that differs from that formulated by
Lazarus: “without hesitation” Cohen affirms that racial unity of a nation
is desirable and “to a certain minimal extent necessary.”94 Similarly, “the
ideal politician . . . will say: I aim toward a more intimate and higher unity
for my nation than what the statistician is able to abstract from the given
empirical material. I aim toward a representation of my people that respects
its physical characteristics and develops its racial type most magnificently.
This wish and this ideal measure for the evaluation of national processes
and misfortunes are natural and legitimate.”95 Cohen refuses to limit the
theoretical argument merely to approximate to a given reality but argues
that it should project a potential state of things that could become real under
ideal conditions. This ideality consists for Cohen in a state that would allow
the inherent racial characteristics of any nation to develop fully. A racial ideal
should serve as the natural and legitimate touchstone for national politics.
Cohen adds: “Treitschke did not say: the Jews are Semites and are therefore
not allowed to retain German citizenship, but he said the opposite,” namely,
he urged them to become more German rather than less.
Cohen rejects Lazarus’s rejection of racialism as “vulgar materialism”
112 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

and argues that the concept of race is compatible with an overall idealist
conception: “Whoever appreciates and loves the bodily substance [leibliche
Substanz] of a national soul [Volksseele] in and for its particularity, is not
therefore a materialist.” With this remark, Cohen implies that Lazarus’s
conception is one-sidedly idealist, while for Cohen (arguing dialectically)
a soul appears to be necessarily linked to a material substratum. The bodily
equivalent of the “national soul” is the “racial substance.” Cohen adds that
“whoever loves his nation with natural spontaneous love does not have to
fear shriveling [verschrumpfen] into a narrow-hearted cosmopolitan [eng-
herzigen Weltbürger].” He also takes issue with Lazarus’s formulation that
“we aim at a Germanity that is free of any felony against received traditions
as well as against universal human principles [allgemeine menschheitliche
Prinzipien].”96 Cohen rejects both sides of this statement: developing and
extending traditions is more important than keeping “received” ones, and
the admonition to respect “universal human principles” is out of place: “It
is not necessary to recommend this advice too dearly to the hearts of us
Jews; if this was only possible to say without ridiculous embarrassment and
clumsy indiscreet intrusiveness, I should suggest that spontaneous cultiva-
tion of pure Germanity [naturwüchsige Pflege des puren Deutschthums]
would be to the benefit of all of us.” “As we are human beings,” we “feel and
think differently from what Lazarus suggests.” Cohen asserts that “we have
to love our nation” not because it is “worth loving” but “because it is our
nation.”97 “What would the English or French Jews say,” he asks sarcastically,
if the German Jews loved Germany (in Lazarus’s words) “because we think
that it struggles most fervently for the fulfillment of a universally human
ideal”? Cohen rejects universalistic and liberal rationalizations of patriotic
love—such as those advocated by Lazarus—and asserts straightforwardly:
“We all love our nation because it is our maternal soil [Mutterboden], be-
cause we love our home [Heimath], because we consider Palestine worth
at best a journey; because in the fatherland our German mother tongue is
spoken: that first sound I ever made, my sweet first mother-word!98 Because
we are just humans, and every human being wants to have a fatherland.”99
Cohen rejects Lazarus’s search for good, rational, and universalistic reasons
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 113

to love one’s particular nation and puts forward the notion that patriotic
attachment is in itself reason enough, as it is an anthropological universal.100
In an almost ironic sense, there is a rationalist edge in Cohen’s rejection of
rationalizing one’s patriotism: unlike Lazarus, Cohen looks for a categori-
cally universal concept of patriotic love. If all members of all nations in the
world tried to find equally good and convincing reasons for loving their
respective nations, trouble would be looming. The members of a nation
that can reasonably claim, for example, “that it struggles most fervently for
the fulfillment of a universally human ideal” (as Lazarus suggests is the case
with the Germans) may easily feel superior to the members of a nation that
can only claim that it is good at cooking or, let’s say, football. Except within a
strictly relativistic framework (which neither Cohen nor Lazarus embraces)
there would inevitably be a hierarchy of good or not-so-good reasons for
loving one’s country. Some nations must be more worth loving than others,
an inevitable source of conflict. Cohen’s argument implies that being proud
of striving for particularly universalist ideals actually brings in particularism
through the back door. Patriotism without specific reasons is in this sense
less dangerous than an “enlightened” patriotism that has learned how to
enroll the concept of “humanity” in its services. This element of Cohen’s
rejection of Lazarus’s idealism is almost a “critique of ideology.”101
Cohen demands that German Jewry’s “evil, slippery ambivalence” about
patriotism “be rooted out completely.”102 Together with the religious Jew-
ish question (the converging of Protestant Christianity and Judaism to the
“purer form of religion”), the racial question (“insofar as it is a question
at all that poses itself to human consideration”) will solve itself automati-
cally.103 Cohen admonishes the Jews not to be deceived by the “malicious or
obscure” character of the antisemitic attack into a general rejection of the
category of “race”: “We have to acknowledge that the racial instinct is not
at all straightforward barbarism, but it is a natural, nationally legitimate
desire. It only becomes barbarism when it degenerates into the political
or national exclusion of those fellow citizens who do not have, nor want
to have, another fatherland. In itself, it is a spontaneous and good psycho-
logical motive, and indeed it can be developed into a useful corrective and
114 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

regulative that is worth considering; never, though, must it be given validity

as a moral norm.”104 The “racial instinct” is for Cohen an aspect of the general
human longing to belong to a nation. The thrust of his argument is that the
German Jews should channel this longing unequivocally into the desire to
become Germans by any means. He claims that “all of us wish we simply
had the German, the Germanic appearance.” Therefore it is just a matter of
time until physical assimilation will have happened. The important point,
however, is that “it has to become the most holy of desires to tune into the
natural tone of the people with whom we want to amalgamate.”105 The
Jews are therefore obliged to strive to rid themselves of any peculiarities: “If
we take pride in our tribe as a constant feature of our living religion, this
must under no sentimental excuse—except for defense—be mistaken for
an innocent private obsession [Privatliebhaberei]. National ambivalence
[Doppelgefühl] is not only an immoral, but an impossible thing.”106 Cohen
asserts that the reprehensible “miscreation”107 of national “ambivalence” is the
exclusive product of a “transitional period in which even the best of the Jews
still count just for a Jew.”108 In other words, it is nothing but an indication
that surrounding society has not yet completely conceded emancipation.
Cohen admits that the necessity of defense justifies temporary expressions
of “tribal” attachment, but the temptation has to be resisted “to turn the
excitement of the time of defense into a permanent attitude for the time
of peace.” The point is not to let this temporary necessity seriously inter-
rupt the process of assimilation, but to keep in mind that “complete and
unconditional Germanization [rückhaltlose, unbedingte deutsche Natural-
isierung] in no way inhibits Israelitic religion.” Cohen accepts Lazarus’s claim
that “true culture” lies in “diversity” (adding that universal human unity is
equally important) but claims that this is only so “from a bird’s-eye view.”
For “human beings from blood and flesh, who want to found a state down
here” seeking “to unite themselves into a unity of state and people [zu einer
Staats-und Volkseinheit],” diversity might be an “illicit burden [unerlaubte
. . . Zumuthung].” Cohen contrasts “humanity” and its “ends,” which are mere
“concepts of philosophy of history,” with “national unity [Volkseinheit],”
which is “a moral task [sittliche Aufgabe].”109 Aiming toward ever more
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 115

intense “unity of being and consciousness” is a “duty.” On these grounds, he

rejects Lazarus’s notion that it is a “permanent task of the Jews” to take part
in all particular national cultures as a distinct element promoting universal-
ism. The only task of the Jews is, according to Cohen, “the preservation of
monotheism” until the “purer form of Christianity” has been attained. “For
diversities other than this one, I have no time and I cannot grant asylum.
A people’s civilization is national, or at least aims at being national. Within
a national community there can be individual morality, but no particular
morality is desirable that is embodied in any religious groups or sects.”110
Cohen insists that the Jews should react to the antisemitic attack without
deviating from the path of assimilation.111 Once legal emancipation has
been fully translated into respective administrative policy, “odd behavior
[Anstössigkeiten des Benehmens]” will gradually disappear and render the
question of “race” irrelevant. Whether or not one “sticks to a certain par-
ticularity of mores,” what matters first of all are emancipation and, more
generally, the political and state sphere:112

For belonging to a state is not something external or mundane; it demands

the whole innermost man. One has to love its institutions as one loves those of
religion; . . . service to one’s state must count as holy, like service to God.113 But
let the natural traits of the nation—love of which lives in you no less [than in
gentile Germans] as soon as your cultural consciousness has reached maturity—
grow and develop without self-censure or restraint114 in all aspects of your way
of life—in the nation’s pleasures as well as its warfare. Even when you maintain
your belief in positive difference, you must not lose sight of the fact that the
foundations of your religiosity oblige you to hope and struggle for amalgama-
tion into national unity [Volksgemeinschaft] with the Christians.115

Differences of positive religion are to be tolerated, but they are irrelevant in

social and political matters. Religiosity in a more fundamental and general
sense, which is—or should be—shared by Jews and Christians alike, is the
spiritual foundation of the “ethical” order of the state. As his drawing a
parallel between state service and service to God suggests, Cohen’s (neo-
Kantian) ethical-religious approach gives to the state a spiritual halo no
116 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

less than Treitschke’s approach does. Although Cohen is explicit about the
disgust he feels for Treitschke’s ideas, the demand for the Jews “to become
Germans” has a strong supporter in Cohen.

The Defense of German Nationality against Jewification

In his response to Lazarus, Naudh reminds Lazarus that he “could have
learned” from Hegel’s Philosophy of History that “‘religion stands in the
closest connection with the principle of the state: the concept of God is the
general foundation of a people.’ He could also have learned this from the
disintegration of European Turkey, where a population using the same lan-
guage cannot live within the same state because some are Muslims and the
others are Christians.”116
Naudh reflects on the relation of church and state in the specific context
of modern—national—society: “Since nationality has come back to life
within the peoples, the talk about the separation of state and church has lost
its meaning.”117 He seems to imply that the separation of church and state
had a meaning as long as “nationality” was not the hegemonic principle of
social cohesion. Having Germany in mind, he might refer here to the time
from the Reformation until 1871. Naudh adds that “for us, anyway” (i.e.,
today), all Christian denominations have “the essence of Christianity” in
common, implying that this has not necessarily always been so.

Religion is the supreme expression of the civilization [Sittlichkeit] of a people

and God is the embodiment of its consciousness of right. . . . Right, mores and
religion originate from the same source. . . . Church and state are not hostile to
each other but exert the same task in different spheres. In the sphere of the state
lie the deeds: these, though, have first been thoughts and had to negotiate with
mind and conscience, which lie in the sphere of the church. It is better and safer
that the church educates conscience than that the state punishes deeds. The
church does work in advance of the state in the world of thoughts, while the
state merely needs to catch up with what might have escaped the church.118

Naudh makes here a statement on the relation of state and (national and
religious) culture that is crucial to the debate. For him, church and state
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 117

differ in the functions they exert in society, but together with Sitte (moral-
ity) and Rechtsbewusstsein (consciousness of right) they emanate from the
same source. Naudh seems to suggest that Sitte and Recht (right) are not
cosmopolitan categories (as in Kant) but emanate from the Volksgeist (the
general national character), a notion that reflects influences from Burke,
Savigny, romanticism, and the historicism of the Historische Rechtsschule
(Historical School of Law). Although arguing for the common origin of
church and state, Naudh is not at all a religious thinker. For individuals
with a “will to freedom,” he writes, the church is neither a good nor a bad
thing but simply irrelevant. For society as a whole, however, it is relevant as
a complement to the state that integrates “thoughts” and “deeds.” Naudh
argues that “the church rules only those who need it” and that “the mere
will to freedom” as well as “the consciousness of not needing it anymore”
are sufficient for liberating oneself from it.119 One does not have to fight
the church: one either needs it or one ignores it (on the individual level).
Naudh concludes that those who choose to fight the church must be moti-
vated either by the intention “to replace one church with another church”
or by “profane secret agendas.” This is an attack on the liberals who fought
the influence of the church on the state: what they wanted, according to
Naudh, was to replace the synagogue with the church. “For these reasons
we have to agree completely when Herr von Treitschke says, ‘the Jews are
our misfortune,’ but we can only regret that he has not much earlier been
engaged with us in the attempt to prevent this misfortune.”120 Naudh sug-
gests that “nationality and liberalism are strict opposites” and considers
the name of the National Liberal Party “paradoxical.” He suggests that this
party was too dependent on the approval of the Jewish press and so “it had
to end as a sacrificial animal on the altar of Judaism.” National Liberalism
did not understand that the equal participation of “two elements of such
different culture [Sittlichkeit] as the Germans and the Jews” would neces-
sarily prevent the “healthy development of a state”: “Political freedom can
only be national. It can only mean the freedom of a people to live and to
develop according to its natural characteristics.”121 Naudh suggests that “the
Jews” dragged the National Liberal Party into the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf
118 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

because the doctrine of the separation of state and church was instrumental
in removing the most important obstacle for their achieving hegemony.
“Church influence on the state,” he argues, is “the best protection for the
Germans,” while the separation of state and church actually meant making
the state Jewish.122
When Naudh mentions “natural characteristics” he understands these,
differing from Treitschke and the other interlocutors, in an unequivocally
racial sense. Naudh argues, for example, that the lack of a sense of “honor”
that gives the Jews an advantage in competition with Aryans in civil society
is grounded in their physical “organization,” which has been kept identical
through millennia of “in-breeding.” He also rejects Treitschke’s notion that
intermarriage was one possible strategy to achieve “amalgamation”: “Products
of racial mixing would not share the characteristics of both parents to equal
degree, but would be predominantly Jewish by far. Experience from animal
breeding shows without doubt that constancy and hereditary predominance
are directly relational to the duration of how long a race has propagated
through pure in-breeding.”123 In any case, Naudh finds that intermarriage
on a larger scale is unlikely. Only a very poor “German girl” would be able
to overcome the moral repulsion at the “unnatural obscenity” of marrying
a Jew. Because the Jews regard marriage—like everything else—as a mere
matter of money, no (male) Jew would be interested in a poor German girl.124
The likelihood of the reverse case—an impoverished German man marry-
ing a rich Jewish woman—is negligible, and apart from that there are only
some “rare cases of pathological deviation.” Naudh adopts the discourse of
“race” to explain and “naturalize” phenomena that he holds can be observed
in society (specifically Jewish economic practices and a generic “disgust” of
Christian Germans for Jews), while Treitschke claims to have observed the
same phenomena without explicitly adopting the terminology of “race.”
On the other main topic discussed by Naudh, his dissent seems also to
be one of degree rather than of principle: while both Treitschke and his
liberal critics stick to the quintessential liberal principle of the separation
of church and state, they all—including Naudh—agree on the necessity for
some kind of cultural-moral cohesion that underpins the state while not
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 119

being part of the state: national culture. Further, everyone—including the

Jewish authors—seems to agree that this culture is—in the German case—
more or less Christian. While Naudh differs in emphasizing the common
origin of state and religion in national character and its Sittlichkeit (civil
culture providing moral norms), his notion of a division of labor between
state and church is not incompatible with the conceptions held by Treitschke
as well as his critics. The partly critical and partly affirmative way Naudh
relates to Treitschke also mirrors that of some of the other contributors. Like
Breßlau,125 Naudh expresses the hope that Treitschke will recognize where
the “true nature” of his overall political framework is rooted. However,
while Breßlau and others oppose liberal patriotism to illiberal nationalism,
Naudh claims that nationalism is incompatible with liberalism and denies
any consistency to the patriotic, National Liberal argument. For Naudh,
religion is constitutive (although not exclusively) of national culture to such
an extent that religious difference by necessity undermines national unity
and the viability of the national state. Although all the liberal contributors
to the Dispute see the national state as rooted in some form of national
culture, they tend to accord less relevance to religion in this context. Naudh
challenges this assumption and claims that the national community can-
not tolerate contradictions within national culture. He implies that the
mistaken liberal belief that minor contradictions would not undermine the
nation is motivated by the particularist interests of a small, selfish section
of society: the “ethno-class” of the capitalists/Jews who stand behind the
liberal creed.126

The Costs and the Pains of Becoming a Nation

For Theodor Mommsen the nation has been created by “the sentiment of the
larger community,”127 although there might still remain a feeling of “closer
sympathy” (based on memories and feelings) toward the “so-called closer
compatriots” on the level of “the various German tribes [Stämme].” The
nation is based on solidarity between and “in a certain sense, amalgamation”
of those tribes. The “diversity” of their skills and characteristics should be a
cause of enjoyment and is also functional for the necessities of a large state.
120 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

Mommsen implies that “the status of the Jews within our people” is not
essentially different “from that of the Saxons or Pomeranians.”
Mommsen quotes the French anthropologist Jean Louis Armand Qua-
trefages, who had argued that only some central German states were of
mainly Germanic descent, while the Prussians, for example, were mainly
Slavonic.128 This difference has become irrelevant, says Mommsen, once
they have marched together on the battlefield: “Anybody who is really fa-
miliar with history will know that transformation of the nationality—a
gradual development with numerous and manifold transitions—is not a
rarity. Historically as well as practically only the living is everywhere in the
right. Just as the descendants of the French colony in Berlin are by no means
Frenchmen born in Germany, so their Jewish compatriots are nothing less
than Germans.”129 In this paragraph Mommsen formulates a general his-
torical observation (nationality is not a stable phenomenon but changes
in the course of historical development), backs it up with a more general
aphorism (“Historisch wie praktisch hat eben überall nur der Lebende Re-
cht”),130 and gives two historical examples: the French colony in Berlin and
the German Jews. He argues that the present is not determined, nor can it
be validated, by the past. The particularisms of the past have to disappear
and give way to the new social form, the patriotic order that is “in the right”
against the residues of the past because it is constituted by “the living” and
sails with the winds of progress and historical dynamic. Mommsen’s point
is that the origins of a group of persons do not and cannot—or rather,
ought not—determine the present status of its members. As this is true—by
definition—of the legal status of citizens, he formulates here a fundamental
element of liberal thought. However, the formulation omits that the actual
social status of the empirical individual in society is—to a greater or lesser
extent—indeed determined by the past: society is as much the present as it is
the past in crystallized form. In the structures as well as the specific dynamics
that together constitute society, the past does exert some degree of power
over the present; even the particular achievements, talents, or productiv-
ity of a (present) individual owe more to the totality of achievements and
sufferings that have happened in the past than the individual might be able
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 121

to realize. On closer inspection, Mommsen’s throwaway remark reveals a

crucial paradox of his (i.e., the liberal) concept of history and the nation.
The new order—the present social order as well as the present form of
state—preserves the memory that it has been born out of the struggle against
the particularisms and injustices of the old order, pointing to the latter’s
historicity. At the same time, however, the order that rules in the present
claims to be “in the right” not only against the past (“historically”) but also
against competing claims in the present (“practically”). This sentence is
highly ideological in the strong sense of the word: not only is the meaning of
the word praktisch obscure, but it would be difficult to say who exactly “der
Lebende” is. In reality, there are many different Lebende, and they all claim
to be “in the right.” A singular and non-antagonistic subject who is “in the
right” is a phantasmagoria: it can only be understood within the context of
the bourgeois imagination that finds bourgeois society exists as a perfect
(natural, as it were) “equilibrium.” (In a bourgeois society undistorted by
troublemakers, including socialists, Jews, monks, particularists, suffragettes,
etc., the only remaining form of conflict would be “competition,” which in
the classless society of burghers is a peaceful mechanism that merely helps
distribute the wealth that has been produced collectively by all productive
members of society in harmonious unity. This is the liberal utopia.) This
implication of Mommsen’s conception of history is crucial to his view of Jew-
ishness as particularism: it ought to disappear just as much as “Saxonianism”
is disappearing. The question needed to be raised whether the anachronistic
element, the remainder marginalized by progress, may not to some extent
be in the right against the victorious present, if only as a reminder of the
historicity of the present and its finite, contingent character. An alternative
concept of history that allows the defeated of the past to be “in the right” and
that throws light on the cynicism of Mommsen’s “positivist” (or “presentist”)
remark is the driving force of the famous poem by Ferdinand Freiligrath
from July 1848, “Die Todten an die Lebenden” (The Dead to the Living), in
which the revolutionaries who had been shot on the Berlin barricades in
March 1848 speak to those who survived them.131 Freiligrath makes very clear
that the dead are “in the right” against those who (between April and July
122 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

1848) squandered the historical chance, opened up by the revolutionaries,

to topple the Prussian monarchy.132
After this programmatic statement, Mommsen discusses the situation of
Jewry in modern as opposed to ancient times. The “essential difference” is
that “the old world did not know what we call today the national state”: “In
antiquity one did not conceive of the citizenry as homogeneous and roughly
coextensive with linguistic area, the concept that is now fundamental to any
politics.”133 Because of the non-national character of the state in antiquity, the
Jews managed to maintain “a certain national identity [nationale Geschlos-
senheit]” “even beyond the demise of their state.”134 Although they tended
to use the prevailing world languages and were immersed in the respectively
valid standard of education and culture, their best writers were “totally
Jewish, conscious representatives of Jewry.”135 Mommsen argues that such
a phenomenon does not exist anymore: “All eminent works created by Jews
in modern times are of the culture of the nation, of which this particular
Jew is a member. . . . [T]he German Israelite stands in the middle of German
literary life just as the English Israelite in the middle of the English one.”
He concedes that Graetz’s “Talmudic history scribblings [talmudistische
Geschichtsschreiberei]” are an exception, but they are marginal to Jewish
literary life.
The failure to grasp the difference between modern and ancient conceptions
of state, nationality, and culture is “the real location of that delusion which
recently has gripped the masses” and of which Treitschke is the “prophet.”
“What does it mean that he [Treitschke] demands that our Jewish compatriots
become Germans? They are Germans already, just as I am, and just as he is.
He may be more virtuous than they are; but do virtues make a German?”
Mommsen argues that even if certain defects were actual characteristics of
fellow citizens “of this or that category,” this would not warrant “removing
them from the ranks of the Germans.”136 He stresses that “it must not at all be
denied” that the peculiarities of “the persons of Jewish descent living among
us” are stronger than “those of other tribes and even nations.”137 This is a result
of “the millennial suppression of German Semites by German Christians,”
which has been “equally pernicious for either side”—although Jew-hatred
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 123

may have at the same time also provoked and developed the talents of Ger-
man Jews. Mommsen rejects both the cult and the fear of the Jews, which
he sees as reciprocal.138 Both are “most simple-minded confusions.” In the
case of the Jews, as elsewhere, “light and shadow are mixed.”
Central to Mommsen’s argument is his reappropriation of a formulation
famously coined by him in his Römische Geschichte which Treitschke had
quoted in his most recent statement: “Without doubt the Jews are an ele-
ment of tribal decomposition in Germany just as they once were an element
of national decomposition in the Roman state. This is why in the German
capital, where the tribes actually mingle more thoroughly than anywhere
else, the Jews hold a position for which they are envied in other places.”139
Mommsen likens “national decomposition”—to which the Jews contributed
in the Roman Empire—to “tribal decomposition”—to which the Jews now
contribute in the German Empire. The building of Rome, which was not a
nation-state, was based on the decomposition of nations; the building of
Germany, which is a nation-state, is based on the decomposition of tribes.
“Processes of decomposition are often necessary, but they are never pleasant.”
Mommsen proceeds here to the key statement of his argument:

I am not so estranged from my homeland, however, that I would not painfully

feel [the loss of] something I used to have and that my children will miss. But
the happiness of children and the pride of men [Kinderglück und Männerstolz]
do not go together. A certain amount of mutual grinding down [Abschleifen]
[of their peculiarities] on the part of the tribes is demanded unconditionally
by the current situation, i.e., the formation of a German nationality that is not
identical with any particular tribe [Landsmannschaft]. The big cities, and first
of all Berlin, are its natural protagonists. I do not consider it at all a misfortune
that the Jews have been active in this direction for generations. It is my opinion
that Providence, much more than Herr Stöcker, has understood very well why
a few percent of Israel had to be added to form the Germanic metal.140

Mommsen formulates here a programmatic view of the process of nation

building, and in this framework he defines the role of the Jews. He invokes
the transition from tribal particularism to national statehood as a necessary
124 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

and welcome historical process involving both gain and loss. On the side of
loss is the “happiness of children”; on the side of gain is the “pride of men.”
This characterizes the nation-building process as one of maturing and grow-
ing up. Männerstolz, the “pride of men,” underlines that this is imagined
as a male affair. The trope of “growing up” presents the process as natural
and led by objective, not arbitrary, forces and legitimizes the loss of the
“happiness of children.” A second element of the imagery is taken from the
productive processes of handicraft or industry. Like fine wooden furniture,
the tribes have to “grind down” their edges and the rough surfaces of their
particularity; like a solid metal, they have to be smelted and amalgamated
in a determinate ratio. Only as an ironic aside against the clerical Jew-baiter
Stöcker does Mommsen refer to “Providence” as the subject of this process:
the one who does the smelting and who knows the correct formula. In se-
riousness, the liberal historian would not need “divine Providence” to refer
to—the objectivity of the historical process itself is authority enough.141
The notion of the loss of the “happiness of children” connects the arti-
sanal metaphor of the “grinding down” to the notion of “growing up.” It is
implied that growing up is a process of adaptation and subordination to an
adult world. The grown-up man is allowed—perhaps even expected—to
have melancholy and nostalgic feelings about the lost happiness of child-
hood, but these feelings must be mastered for the greater benefit of adult
manhood. The building of the nation is imagined as the growing up of a
boy: the grinding down of the childish particularities of the tribes “is de-
manded unconditionally by the current situation.” The pre-national (tribal)
memory has to be mastered and sublimated to regional folklore. The man
(and likewise, the nation) who is not able to control and sublimate his (and
likewise, its) tribal memory and master his (its) melancholia reveals his (its)
immaturity. He will not be able to hold his own in the modern world. As
for the Jewish question, the conclusion is: it might be “painful,” but a few
percent of Jews have to be in that national melting pot to help make that
German metal nice and strong.
In his response to Mommsen, Treitschke holds that the Jews promoted
“homeless cosmopolitanism [heimathloses Weltbürgerthum]” and rejects
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 125

Mommsen’s claim that the Jewish contribution to the “decomposition of

the German tribes” was beneficial to the process of German nation building.
Those “elements of Jewry” who “do what they can to destroy the Germans’
national pride and pleasure in the fatherland” are “hostile to all German
being.”142 Treitschke also reaffirms his view that religion mattered in the
political debate. While Mommsen—according to Treitschke—disregards the
relevance of religious difference, Treitschke states that “maturing civilization
will lead our deeply religious people back to purer and stronger ecclesiastical
life.” Treitschke sees therefore polemics by Jews against Christian theology
as “attacks on the foundations of our culture [Gesittung].”143
The main point in Treitschke’s response is that Mommsen confirmed Tre-
itschke’s central contention: “I have acknowledged that many of our Jewish
fellow citizens long ago became good Germans, and I have merely regretted
that others still keep themselves principally in a distance from our national
life. Mommsen responded: ‘the Jews are Germans as much as he and me,’
but then proceeds emphasizing that some of these ‘Germans’ fancy them-
selves in a national-Jewish segregation [Sonderleben]. Alas, he says in other
words exactly the same as what I say. I believe, though, that my expression
was more accurate.”144 Since Mommsen—according to Treitschke—does
not disagree in substance, Treitschke asserts that Mommsen merely “finds
my intervention in the Jewish question inopportune.” However, articulating
freely “a social problem that all the world feels to exist” is more appropriate
than politely keeping silent about it.
Treitschke’s strategy of defense against Mommsen consists of three ele-
ments. First, he shows that Mommsen’s argument is inconsistent in itself.
He exploits Mommsen’s failure to distinguish clearly enough a normative
claim to legal equality from an account of actual (sociocultural) equality
or difference, while both Treitschke and Mommsen presuppose that legal
equality would or should reflect (or rather, be a reward for) actual (so-
ciocultural) equality. Second, Treitschke points out disagreement on the
relevance of religion for nation building and on the actual distribution
of power between Jewish and Christian Germans. Here he merely repeats
unwarranted claims about the power of the Jews. Third, Treitschke claims
126 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

that he and Mommsen agree in substance while his own position differs
merely in being more straightforward and honest than Mommsen’s. Playing
down the disagreements, he reduces the thrust of Mommsen’s criticism to
the tactical question of whether or not Treitschke’s intervention has been
“opportune.” The overall effect of Treitschke’s response is the implication
that Mommsen lacks the courage of his opinions.
In this reply, the two faces of Treitschke’s attitude are as clearly pronounced
as in his original contribution: a nationalism that demands complete social
and cultural assimilation is intertwined with a phantasmagoric vision of a
deeply hostile and immensely powerful Judenthum. The way the latter is
pictured makes assimilation appear neither possible nor really desirable;
these two basic elements of Treitschke’s position constitute an unresolvable
contradiction.

The Eternal Hatred of the Jews

One important element of Treitschke’s construction of an unchanging (i.e.,
quasi-racial) Jewish identity is the longevity of the Jews’ persecution. The
defenders of Jewish emancipation have conversely tended to deny that there
is such a thing as an “eternal” Jew-hatred. Treitschke states that “since Tacitus
once complained about the odium generis humani” there has always been and
there will always be “an abyss between occidental and Semitic being [Wesen],”
and some Jews will always be merely “German-speaking Orientals.”145 As-
similation will never be complete. Any claim about the “eternal” character
of an “abyss” between Jews and non-Jews obviously stands and falls with
the validity of references to authorities from past times. Therefore, several
respondents found the Tacitus quote worth discussing in some detail. Graetz
and Cassel point out that Tacitus wrote that the Christians, not the Jews,
had been “convicted of hate of the human species” under Nero.146 Cassel
suggests that Treitschke might have mixed up Annales 15.44 with book 5 of
Historiae, which has a much more clearly anti-Jewish tendency.147 Naudh,
who claims an uninterrupted continuity of “Jew-baiting”148 from Exodus
through classical and medieval to modern times, also quotes a passage from
Historiae (5,8) as evidence of Tacitus’s anti-Jewish attitude.149 In his response
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 127

to Graetz, Treitschke reasserts his view that the very long history of anti-
Jewish attitudes rules out the possibility of a “complete amalgamation of
Jewry and the occidental peoples.”150 He asserts that the Romans at Tacitus’s
time saw the Christians as just another Jewish sect: the Christians were
accused of “hate of the human species” as Jews. Roman anti-Christianism
represented nothing but a specific case of anti-Judaism.151 Treitschke claims
that “almost all writers of late antiquity” agreed in their “hatred of Jews”152
and concludes:

Whoever has at least an elementary grasp of our discipline must concede

straightaway: it is totally inconceivable that a struggle of two thousand years
should know only cruelty, tyranny, greed on one side, on the other side only
suffering innocence. The question cannot be denied: why did so many noble and
highly gifted nations vent the base and—I do not avoid the word—diabolical
drives slumbering in the depths of their souls exclusively on the Jewish people?
The answer is simple. Since its dispersion over the whole of the world, Jewry
existed in an unresolvable inner contradiction; it suffered the tragic fate of a
nation without state. The Jews always wanted to live under the protection of
Occidental laws, take advantage of the busyness of the Occident and yet claim
to be a strictly separate nation. Such an attitude always had to provoke new
struggles because it stands in such fierce contradiction to the hard necessity of
the unity of the state [zu der harten Notwendigkeit der Staatseinheit].153

Treitschke states that “cruelty, tyranny, greed” cannot be the sole motivations
of an (allegedly) two-thousand-year-long struggle: the “other side” involved
in this history cannot be innocent. He takes for granted that there has been
a continuous “struggle” between two “sides” whose identity through history
has been uninterrupted. Treitschke presupposes “occidental history” as one
continuing historical process154 whose main protagonist—“the occidental
peoples”—faces an eternally unchanging enemy, “the Jews.”155 He does not
merely state that hatred of the Jews has “always been there” but also gives
what he thinks is the reason: Jewry suffered for two thousand years “the tragic
fate of a nation without state,” an account that seems taken from Treitschke’s
own historical experience.156 Being a “nation without state,” the Jews had to
128 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

preserve their distinctiveness in terms of religion and culture, which had to

bring them into “fierce contradiction to the hard necessity of the unity of the
state.” It is telling that Treitschke, who puts great emphasis on the Christian
character of the German nation, sides with Tacitus—a representative of Ro-
man imperial raison d’état—against the persecuted Christians and excuses
the imperial point of view with the assumption that the Romans might have
seen just another Jewish sect in the Christians. Treitschke could not declare
more explicitly whose side he is on and why: the decisive category is “the
hard necessity of the unity of the state.”
In his second reply, Graetz insists that Tacitus had referred exclusively
to Christians, not to Jews. He argues that in Nero’s time, the Christians in
Rome were “almost exclusively Gentile Christians,” that is, converted Greeks
and Romans rather than from ethnic Jewish background.157 Jews at the
time were not generally “unruly,” while actually many loyal Romans prac-
ticed Judaism, which therefore was not an “ethnic” but a religious category.
Graetz concludes that Treitschke’s “drawing ethnographic conclusions from
[single] ill-disposed sentences by Roman writers is rather unhistorical.”158
Graetz’s rebuke does, however, not quite get to Treitschke’s point. Treitschke
had quoted Tacitus as evidence that writers in classical antiquity generally
despised the Jews, which is part of his “no smoke without fire” type of ar-
gument: because the Jews have been persecuted for such a long time, there
must be a reason for it and therefore they should continue to be viewed with
suspicion. However, while Graetz’s response refers to how things actually
were, Treitschke’s argument was on how Tacitus saw them. In the light of
the further sources Graetz is quoting, Josephus and Dio Cassius, it looks
like Graetz is probably right on the historical facts, but Treitschke seems to
be right on reading an anti-Jewish sentiment in Tacitus (although wrong
on exactly what kind of anti-Jewish sentiment that was).
Cassel follows a completely different strategy in his reply. Brushing aside
the historiographical subtleties, he argues that everything Tacitus held against
the Jews was just as true of the Christians, no matter what Tacitus actually
intended to say. He argues that Jews and Christians found themselves on the
same side opposed to imperial arrogance then and they should acknowledge
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 129

that now. He argues that “thanks to God” the “Semitism” of the apostle
Paul has brought “all the sins of the Orient to Rome”159 so that “the Jordan
now flows into the Tiber.” While Treitschke identifies with Tacitus’s invo-
cation of imperial raison d’état, Cassel suggests an alliance of Mosaic Law
and apostolic teachings against a “pagan-modern frenzy of licentiousness
[heidnisch-modernen Unzuchtstaumel].”160

The Relationship between Christian and Jewish Religion

Treitschke discusses religion almost exclusively under the aspect of its rel-
evance for the state. Only when Lazarus and Cohen use what they see as the
close affinity between Judaism and Christianity as evidence for the cultural
affinity between German Christians and Jews does Treitschke respond with
some remarks on the issue. However, even these remarks are more of histori-
cal than of theological character.
Lazarus, however, argues in a long and detailed scholarly discussion that
Christianity is both historically and theologically closely related to Judaism
and that there is a close affinity between Judaism and the concept of the
modern state. The starting point for both strands of his argument is the
destruction of the Temple, the “enormous defeat” of the Jewish people.161
The Jews were lifted “out of the ashes of the Temple on Zion” by a “Phoenix”
which was the “ideal concept of humanity” of Christian religion as first
formulated by its Jewish founders.162 What distinguished the Christians
among other groups of Jewry was that they “deliberately withdrew from
the [Jewish] national struggle” and thus arrived at a position where they
were able to reformulate the original Jewish concepts of monotheism and
of the unity of a single humanity (expressed in the image of one universal
flock led by one shepherd). These two central motives that are common to
Judaism and Christianity are also pivotal to the Jews’ relation to the state
(especially the modern state). Lazarus gives a long quote from declarations
agreed on by the first and second Israelitic synods.163 These stress that
Judaism respects and embraces the “principles of the new society and the
constitutional state” and emphasizes that they go back to the same univer-
salist principles of humanity and equality.164 The second synod emphasized
130 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

that “the consciousness of humanity as a whole” is increasingly filled by

“true knowledge of God” and “pure morality.” It interpreted these as an
approximation to the aims that always have led Judaism on its path through
history.165 Lazarus rejects Christian polemics against the Talmud—he men-
tions Eisenmenger, Pfefferkorn, and Rohling—as misleading because they
one-sidedly overemphasize the formalistic characteristics of the Talmudic
literature and ignore that there is now a “new Rabbinism” that has overcome
many defects of the old one.166 Lazarus points out that a mother does not
have to die “after she has given birth to a child,” a metaphor for his rejec-
tion of a mechanistic concept of historical progress according to which an
older historical form was not legitimized to continue to exist alongside a
newer historical form.167 In the same mold, Judaism ought to continue to
exist, and without even being reduced to its motherly function to remind
Christianity that it is not yet what it might or should become, to “advance
the education of Christianity through its criticism.”168 Lazarus argues that
it is a “genuinely Christian conviction” that Jews are not inferior. 169 To
support this claim, he quotes several long passages from Luther’s writings.
Luther’s later anti-Jewish statements can be explained, he writes, by his
disappointment about the Jews not converting to the “purified” religion
of the Reformation.170
Against the concept of a close affinity between Judaism and Christianity,
Treitschke holds that after “the Jews crucified Jesus,” Christianity “overcame”
Judaism: “Every young spiritual power that is victorious against an older one
is itself the offspring of its adversary. The greatness of the Christian doctrine
that originated from a Semitic people lies in its having overcome Semitism
and having become the universal church [Weltkirche].”171 “Semitism” is
here almost a synonym for ethnic particularism. Treitschke concedes that
Christianity originated from Judaism but insists that Christianity’s specific
identity lies in its difference from the defeated precursor—whom it must
continue to fight in case it should recover. Treitschke argues in not a theo-
logical but a secular historical-philosophical way. His interest is less with
the actual content of the two religions than with Judaism and Christianity
as “spiritual powers,” that is, as historical agents in a vaguely Hegelian sense.
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 131

He does not see continuity between Judaism and Christianity but rather
a life-and-death struggle and the overcoming of the former by the latter.
While his view has the merit of taking the actuality of the Christian-Jewish
conflict more into account than, for example, Cassel’s integrative theology
seems to do, Treitschke simply takes the positivity of historical victory as
evidence of truth, reason, and legitimacy.172
Treitschke’s view of antagonism and rupture between Judaism and Chris-
tianity is shared by Naudh, who reformulates it in a language that includes
the rhetoric of “race” as well as a socioeconomic dimension. Naudh argues
that it was a “mistake” of Christianity to refer to “the Jewish legend,” as if
a historically independent actor “Christianity” had existed then and had
arbitrarily chosen to “refer to” some aspects of Judaism. Naudh seems to
see the actual content of religion as consisting of “legends” that are chosen
by movements which in turn are essentially socioeconomic in nature.173 He
denies the originality of central aspects of Judaism: according to him, not
even monotheism was specifically Jewish but was generally Mediterranean.
While Moses “brought his God from Egypt,” monotheistic elements could
even be found in the concept of “fate,” as, for example, in the Iliad.174 The
essential difference between Judaism and Christianity became apparent in
the course of the latter’s evolution: Christianity mostly “developed within
the peoples of the Aryan family,” among whom he includes Greeks, Romans,
Celts, and Germanic and Slavonic peoples. He adds that within these peoples,
Christianity actually is more pervasive than the Christian church, because the
church carries too much “Jewish ballast”: he names fanaticism and intoler-
ance as the aftereffects of the Jewish influence on the church. Nevertheless,
despite the church, Christianity is the “expression of Aryan conscience and
idealism” while it never really managed to “win over” the Jews.
Among all contributors, Cohen pays the most attention to the actual
content of the two religions.175 He writes that Treitschke’s position most
significantly differs from other anti-Jewish texts in having thrown up (again)
the issue of religion.176 The thrust of Cohen’s argument is the assertion
of commonality between “Israelites” and Christians, while rejecting at the
same time the pressure on the former to convert. He relates that the (anti-
132 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

Catholic) Kulturkampf had been criticized for lacking in “positive religious

thought” and asserts the necessity to discuss religion—in its own terms—in
the context of national history.177 He stresses that “the German people” has
been and will remain “a religious one” and that “national history” since the
sixteenth century had been driven by the “religious spirit of the German
people.” The pivot of Cohen’s argument is his opposition of two alternative
pairs of concepts: “religions” versus “denominations [Konfessionen]” (as used
by Treitschke), and “religion” versus “forms of religion [Glaubensarten]”
(as used by Cohen drawing on Kant). Cohen asserts that “the distinction
between religion and denomination” helps Treitschke to construct a close
affinity between the two Christian denominations as mere denominations
within the same religion (downplaying the brutality of their actual mu-
tual history) while at the same time excluding Judaism as “the religion of
an alien tribe.”178 This construction rules out the possibility that Judaism
could amalgamate together with the Christian confessions into what in the
“messianic-humanistic” conception had been envisaged as “a purer form
of Christianity.”179 This possibility, however, is just what Cohen argues for.
Cohen introduces Kant’s distinction between Religion as a universally
valid and unitary concept and “forms of religion [Glaubensarten]” as the
historically specific, diverse, and contingent “vehicles” of Religion.180 Cohen
asserts that “Israelitic monotheism” and “Protestant Christianity” are differ-
ent as “vehicles” but identical as Religion. Therefore it is possible that they
eventually will converge into “a purer form of religion.”
Cohen’s argument interconnects Israelitic and (Protestant) Christian theol-
ogy with the concepts of modern ethics and the modern state. In the center of
this web of connections sits Kant’s critical philosophy, which mediates these
elements with each other and—being in turn crucial to German national
consciousness as Cohen understands it—with German national history.
Cohen names “the spiritual character of God [Geistigkeit Gottes]” and “the
messianic promise” as the two defining features of Israelitic monotheism.
These two notions concern the nature of God as well as the “ethical ideal of
the human species being.”181 Cohen emphasizes that the Prophets already
had a universalistic concept of the Israelitic God as a fatherlike shepherd of
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 133

all of humanity, not merely of the people of Israel. “One issue though failed
to come to full expression in this deepening of the concept of God,” asserts
Cohen: this “one issue” has been contributed by Christianity, drawing on
“the Greek spirit”: “The idea that God has become Man has rendered the
notion of the relationship between Man and God internal. As the dogmatic
form of the humanization of God, it realizes the cultural-historical mission
of humanizing religion.”182 Without this “mission” having been fulfilled, the
“autonomy of the moral law, the freedom to submit under its unconditional
imperative,” would be inconceivable. “The idealistic concept of morality,
. . . the holy of holies of Kantian teaching . . . which we Germans appreciate
as the ultimate treasure of national wisdom against all modern peoples,” is
rooted in the enthusiasm and rigorism of the ethics of the Prophets. Even
the Kantian concept of the free will is anticipated in the Talmud when it is
stated that “everything is in God’s hand except the fear of God.”183 However,
“the derivation of the moral law [Sittengesetz] from the concept of legislating
reason [gesetzgebende Vernunft],” which is fundamental to Kant’s concept
of autonomy, cannot historically be understood “without the Christological
form of humanizing the divine.” “This kind of Christianity is shared by all
modern Israelites, whether we [Israelites] are aware of it or not.” However,
there is no need for the Israelites to convert, since “we know that—the
necessity to humanize the moral notwithstanding—a core of the old God
of the Prophets has to remain exempt from humanization.” In this aspect,
which is “not only cosmological,” “all Christians are Israelites.” Matters are
even, as it were: the Christians will always remain Israelites just as much as
“modern Israelites” are Christians. In Cohen’s theological-philosophical-
historical argument, there is neither a need to convert nor any fundamental
obstacle for both Glaubensarten to converge in the future.
After these more general considerations, Cohen turns more specifically
to the German situation. He argues that the religious development of the
Jews, and in particular that of the German Jews, “proceeds in the historical
tendency of German Protestantism”: “For the first time since the apogee of
Jewish spirit in the Arab-Spanish period, the Jewish tribe has developed
again a universal cultural life within the German people.”184 Cohen mentions
134 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

that Jews were among the first to embrace Kantian philosophy and that
they “realized their religious development through participation in German
culture, so manifesting their being Germans.”185 The “deep commotion of
the mind” when listening to Bach is not a mere matter of aesthetics. Com-
monality in being touched by Bach’s music and poetry “is commonality in
religious feeling—as far as such commonality is necessary . . . in a modern
civilized people.”186 With Kant’s philosophy and Bach’s music, Cohen refers
to two crucial instances of German (Protestant) culture that exemplify his
concept of Religion as transcending the differences of Glaubensarten. Jewish
Germans have been crucially involved in the development of both.
In Cohen’s conception, religion and nationality are closely intertwined.
Although the nation remains central to his argument, he asserts that the
“Jewish question” is essentially a religious one. He argues that “the back-
wards trend in religion is the real determining cause of the attack that we
are suffering in the new Reich.”187 He pleads that dealing with the Israelitic
religion “as a religion” seems the best and most honest way of contributing
to “the solution of the Jewish question in a national sense.” Cohen admits a
decline of religiosity among Jews but holds that it is less pronounced than
such a decline among Christians. “If we are to amalgamate into the German
people,” which presupposes a “community of religious foundation,” religi-
osity as (each group’s) “specific contribution to the national community”
has to be “preserved and cultivated”: nation needs religion.188 In whichever
vehicle it may come, religion needs to be cherished and furthered in the
interest of nation building. Cohen rejects Lazarus’s suggestion that religion
is not one of the objective factors whose common subjective appropriation
constitutes nationality. For Cohen, religion (in the sense of religiosity) is as
much an objective factor as the others in Lazarus’s list (descent, language,
statehood). Furthermore, every single one of Lazarus’s objective factors is
neither necessary nor sufficient, while all are overruled by “objective con-
viction of commonly existing religious foundation” as it defines “a modern
civilized nation.”189 This “conviction” is for Cohen not a mere subjective
feeling or opinion but a “sensual object [fühlbar Ding].”190 The common
experience of (objective) religiosity can easily make up for the lack of any of
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 135

the other criteria from Lazarus’s list, including “common descent.” Cohen
asserts that this common religiosity exists between Christian and Jewish
Germans, denials by “spiteful or bigoted people” notwithstanding, and it
“will grow and blossom to the greater honor of the German name and to the
best of German morality [Sittlichkeit].”191 The “backwards trend in religion”
that underlies the anti-Jewish campaign is for these reasons anti-national.
In the same vein, Cohen admonishes the Reform Jews192 against mistaking a
denigration of (Jewish) religion as a proof of “being German” and demands:
“Respect and learn to understand your Israelitic monotheism, preserve it
in your mind and make it the religious touchstone of your existence that all
human beings need: then you will feel as one with what modern culture calls
the spirit of Christianity, and the differences in the form of catechism will
not disturb that commonality of religious foundation that is necessary for
a unified and spiritually harmonious national community [eine einheitli-
che, im Gemüthe harmonisirte Volksgemeinschaft].”193 Since the identity
of Protestant spirit and that of modern Judaism is “the most effective ‘glue’
for an intimate national amalgamation,” he also urges his Jewish readers to
show “respect and piety” toward Christian religious dogma.194
Among those who refute Treitschke’s claim that the Jews corrupted the
Germans’ religiosity are Bamberger and Joël. Bamberger holds that “surpris-
ingly few” Jews had a part in the critique of religion of the Enlightenment,
while Fichte (whom Treitschke quotes as “one of the most pure and powerful
representatives of Germanic essence”) predicted the imminent replacement
of Christian religion by reason. He concludes that although the Germans
were without doubt a Christian people, as Treitschke claimed, they were
less Christian than others. Bamberger quotes Treitschke himself pointing
to growing disbelief among large sections of the German people.195 In a
similar vein, Joël, “being a teacher of religion” himself, states that he shares
with Treitschke the “pain” about the fact that “large sections of the people
fell prey to disbelief.” However, the sources of disbelief in Germany are not
Jewish: Joël points to Hegel’s “so-called pantheism,” which is a “disguised
atheism.” Hegel’s students, including the “young Germany,” are “men idol-
izing themselves.”196 Schopenhauer, “a fanatic of atheism,” not only was not
136 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

a Jew but hated the Jews as “the Swiss Guard of theism.”197 Joël argues that
Strauss, Hartmann, and “Häckel-Darwin” have been more influential than
the “occasional tactlessness” of any Jewish writers. This leads him to point
out a contradiction in Treitschke’s argument: “You present yourself as a pious
and ecclesiastically minded man. I am indeed the last person who would not
find that worth applauding. But why then do you accept the arguments of
atheism against the Jews?” He argues that being Christian necessarily means
allowing that the “Semitic spirit” and the “Germanic spirit” are mutually
compatible; after all, the “Germanic spirit” is no longer the spirit of Arminius
but has “organically assimilated” (Semitic) Christianity. Joël denies that there
is a general tendency in modern Jewish literature to dismiss Christianity,
whereas “in the most noble books by Christian scholars . . . one will find
the most dismissive comments whenever Jews and Judaism are the issues.”
He argues that it is only natural that sometimes anger is also expressed on
the side of the Jews: “What function does Jewry have other than serving as
a foil? . . . You are preaching us tolerance? Is this not mockery?”198

The Nationality of the German Jews

Joël states sarcastically that he found himself “sympathetically touched” by
Treitschke’s observation that “the nation underwent a deep soul-searching”
and “without mercy pronounced judgment on itself.” However, “the nation,”
according to Treitschke, located the evil only in the Jews, “making them a
scapegoat.” Instead of judging itself harshly, “the nation” only judges “a
small fraction of the nation and at that one whose belonging to the German
nation you [Treitschke] even want to deny.”199 This process, writes Joël, can
hardly be described as self-criticism of the nation, because the “self-criticism”
constitutes the criticized part of the “self ” as not-self. Joël adds that the Jews
are “a nationality that was defeated almost two thousand years ago . . . whose
descendants nationally belong to the most diverse peoples and show the
most diverse languages and customs, who do not have anything in common
but the same religion and who are meant to be marked and preserved by
force as a separate body [Sonderkörper], abscesses in the national organ-
ism through such [i.e., such as Treitschke’s] ‘just and moderate’ assessments
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 137

of their ‘undeniable weaknesses.’”200 Joël’s comment pinpoints Treitschke’s

ambivalence about the nationality of the German Jews: they are accused of
fancying themselves wrongly as non-Germans when they actually ought to
feel German like their fellow compatriots, while at the same time they are
also accused of dressing up as Germans when they are actually aliens.
Treitschke’s second contribution, “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” was
almost exclusively concerned with the issue of the German Jews’ nationality.
Treitschke targets especially Graetz “because reflecting on the thoughts of this
writer will give me the welcome opportunity of showing to the readers with
utmost determinacy what this debate is essentially about”: nationality.201 The
long section on Graetz begins with a confession of methodological relativism
(or rather “cultural insiderism”):202 one has to belong to a “great people” in
order to understand it, only Jews can understand Jews, and only Germans can
understand Germans.203 Treitschke writes that he does not want to challenge
what Graetz has to say about Jewish history—German history, however, falls
outside Graetz’s proper domain. Graetz’s misjudgments of German issues
cannot surprise Treitschke, who concedes that some of Graetz’s bitterness
and sense of injustice is “understandable” since he has to deal with “so much
sadness” in his Geschichte der Juden.204 But “we are allowed to demand two
things from him: his polemics against the religion of the overwhelming
majority of his German compatriots should not completely overstep the
limits of moderation, and he should speak with some respect and reserve of
the people whose mild legislation protects him.” This formulation betrays
the ambivalence that is fundamental to Treitschke’s argument. On the one
hand, he demands that Graetz show “moderation” when talking about the
religion of his “German compatriots,” implying that the demand for mod-
eration follows from Graetz’s being a fellow citizen; on the other hand, he
demands that he show “respect” for those same “compatriots” who “protect”
him with “mild legislation.” The formulation “mild legislation” can only
refer to specific legislation that protects the Jews from being discriminated
against; Treitschke is not talking about national solidarity between equal
compatriots. If the Jews were full citizens or “compatriots,” they would not
need to be “protected” with “mild legislation.”
138 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

Graetz does not meet Treitschke’s “modest demands.” Treitschke quotes

Graetz dismissing Christian influences on Jewish religious life (such as the
impact of Schleiermacher’s writings)205 as well as, for example, the liberal
politician Gabriel Riesser: “Herr Graetz freely admits that he does not regard
Germany as his fatherland; he portrays the excellent Gabriel Riesser as the
peculiar example of a Jew who ‘completely merged into his fortuitous place
of birth.’”206 Treitschke claims he did not object to Graetz’s “admonishing his
tribal fellows to ‘take pride in their ancestry’” but accuses him of not granting
the Germans the same right.207 He expresses his disagreement with Graetz’s
claim that the greatest German poet was Lessing, and disagrees even more
when Graetz continues that “Börne was more than Lessing.”208 Treitschke
complains: “So we have the pleasure of admiring in Börne the very greatest
son of German soil, but we are immediately interrupted in this pleasure
when the author expressly declares that Börne was not at all a German but a
Jew.”209 Treitschke takes issue in particular with the following formulation by
Graetz: “The recognition of the Jews as full members [of society] is already
widely accomplished; the recognition of Judaism, however, is still heavily
disputed.”210 Graetz’s formulation “the recognition of Judaism” could be
understood in different ways. Treitschke claims that “Judaism as religious
community has long been recognized” and that Graetz can therefore only
be understood to refer to the recognition of Jewry “as a nation within and
next to the German nation.” Since Treitschke’s claim is factually untrue, his
conclusion is also untenable.211 He (mis)reads Graetz’s demand for recognition
as a religious community as a demand for national emancipation, which he
strongly rejects: “To such a claim every German who holds his Christianity
and his nationality [Volksthum] holy cannot but respond instantly: never!
Our state has never seen in the Jews anything but a religious community
and cannot under any circumstances give up this legal concept—the only
one tenable.”212 Treitschke makes here three points: first, the Jews are not a
nationality but merely a religious group; second, Germans who hold their
Christianity and Volksthum “holy” (which is by implication what they ought
to do) cannot accept the claim of a group of fellow citizens for recognition as
a distinct nationality; and third, neither can “our state.” Since the Germans
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 139

and the “we” that constitute “our state” are the same people, the German
people simultaneously hold their Christianity and Volksthum “holy” and
form a state that recognizes religious minorities but not national minorities.
By the look of this argument, the only problem with the Jews seems to be
that some of them (such as Graetz) allegedly claim that Jewry constitutes
a separate nationality: “Our old culture is rich and tolerant enough to bear
many strong contradictions: the followers of that church that thinks of itself
as the only one that guarantees salvation live together peacefully with her-
etics, and so we can accept with equanimity that some of our fellow citizens
silently consider themselves the chosen people. If however this racial arro-
gance [Rassendünkel] steps out onto the marketplace, if Jewry even claims
recognition for its nationality, then the legal ground on which emancipation
is founded collapses.”213 Although Treitschke previously argued that German
national culture is young and not yet self-conscious enough to afford the
luxuries of the liberal mind, in this sequence he seems confident enough
to grant a free rein to the marginal peculiarities of Catholicism, assorted
heretics, and Jews—as long as these oddities take place “silently.” However,
should the “racial arrogance” of the Jewish minority come out of the closet,
Treitschke recommends “emigration and foundation of a Jewish state” some-
where else, which could then search for national recognition: “On German
soil there is no space for a double nationality.” He adds that “until the most
recent past the Jews did not participate in the millennial effort of German
state formation.” Nor did they contribute to the formation of German cul-
ture in any significant way: “At the time they started to have significance in
state and literature” of Germany, they found “the foundations of Germanic
culture” ready-made and had to assimilate individually in order to achieve
something. While many did so, “Herr Graetz and his kind move into other
directions.”214 Treitschke adds here a third motive, that of historical merit:
the Jews did not contribute significantly enough, so they do not deserve to
be recognized as a second nationality on the same “soil.” He turns the for-
mulation that Graetz made with reference to Gabriel Riesser against Graetz
himself to the effect of his virtual disenfranchisement: “I ask now: can a man
who thinks and writes like that be considered a German himself? No, Herr
140 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

Graetz is a stranger on the soil of his ‘fortuitous place of birth,’ an Oriental

who does not understand nor wishes to understand our people.”215 Taking
advantage of an ambivalence in Graetz’s argument between the democratic
demand for emancipation without enforced assimilation and intimations
of a “proto-Zionist” nationalism, Treitschke portrays Graetz one-sidedly as
a Jewish nationalist and anti-German, anti-Christian separatist who would
claim “Germanness” for himself only for tactical advantage. He suggests that
Graetz has attempted to “prove with continuous mocking invective that the
nation of Kant was really educated to humanity by the Jews only, that the
language of Lessing and Goethe became sensitive to beauty, spirit and wit
only through Börne and Heine.”216
Graetz replies that Treitschke has quoted him out of context and selectively.
He points out that he spoke more favorably of the beginnings of Christianity
than Reimarus, Goethe, Strauss, or Renan ever did.217 He argues that when
he said that many converted Jews “joined the enemy camp,” he was refer-
ring not to Christianity but to the camp of Jew-haters.218 As for his view
of the German nation, Graetz points out that the eleventh volume of his
work had been written before 1868: “The glorious victories, the unity that
was accomplished through ingenious leadership and Germany’s ascendancy
took place after that date.”219 Having made this compliment in Bismarck’s
direction, Graetz asserts that for the English translation that was currently
in the process of being published he cut his earlier condescending remarks
on the German nation “which had been true before 1870, but became untrue
after that date.”220 He stresses that his presentation of the relation between
Christianity and Jewry in his Geschichte der Juden represents a balanced
account and is sympathetic to early Christianity, if less so to its later devel-
opment.221 Rather than expressing hatred for eminent Germans, he merely
argued that one could have expected “a powerful assertion of humanity”
with respect to the Jews from “two men of the first rank” like Goethe and
Fichte. Both, however, made anti-Jewish remarks.
Philippson, who had been on the editorial board of the publishing house
that published the first ten volumes of Graetz’s Geschichte der Juden, points
out that the eleventh volume had been rejected by the (liberal) publisher,
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 141

which did not want to take responsibility for Graetz’s style and was particu-
larly critical of Graetz’s rejection of religious reform.222 He stresses that the
decision was made because the book should not be published in a place that
could be seen as representative of German Jewry; anyway, large sale num-
bers do not necessarily mean that buyers agree with everything an author
writes.223 He concludes that “both Treitschke and Graetz are partisan and
romantic historians,224 keen on having particular views and tending toward
speculation.” Philippson sees their dispute as a personal affair that is of no
relevance to the Jews in general.225
Nadyr quotes the literal wording of Graetz’s remark on Börne and Heine,
with which he finds nothing wrong: “Börne and Heine gave wit and spirit a
home within German literature, qualities of which then—apart from Less-
ing—only a few in Germany had a proper understanding.”226 Joël cautiously
defends Graetz; he remains, apart from Nadyr, the only contributor to the
debate to do so: “Graetz has the wrongs of his virtues”; it is only passion for his
subject, Joël writes, that leads Graetz to the occasional overstatement.227
Treitschke’s claim that his portrayal of Graetz was representative of the
spirit of the German Jews (when it was hardly even representative of Graetz
himself) was thus rejected unequivocally by those German Jews who replied
to his intervention. A formulation by Lazarus makes the essential point:
“Gentlemen, we are Germans, nothing but Germans. When talking about
the concept of nationality, we belong to only one nation, the German one.”228
Similarly, Seligmann Meyer holds that the Jews cannot become Germans
because they are Germans already. He mentions the Jews’ achievements and
contributions to German national history and adds that the Germanic tribes
migrated from “the East” just like the Jews did.229 Oppenheim judges Graetz
much more harshly, calling him an “indiscreet and zealously one-sided man,
the benefit of whose great scholarship is spoiled by the absurdity of his con-
clusions.” However, this is not a problem of the Jews: “The Jews are as little
responsible for Herrn Graetz as the kingdom of Saxony for the confusions of
Herrn von Treitschke.”230 Bamberger also remarks that Treitschke’s implicit
claim that the German Jews are not “good German patriots” is supported
merely by “some formulations by Graetz.”231
142 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

Lazarus recommends that “we [German Jews] should keep silent” and
just wait until “what is called once more the Jewish question” has run out
of steam.232 “For us as Jews” there is no such thing as a “Jewish question” but
merely a “German question,” namely, the problem of the Germans achieving
the humanity that consists in granting humanity to others. For “the Jews as
Jews” there is nothing to do in this affair. However, “we are Germans, [and]
as Germans we have to talk.” “On our cheek burns not the red of anger of the
Jew but the red of shame of the German.”233 Lazarus asserts that the Jews of
Germany are German in all the ways that he described in his discussion of
the concept of the nation—language, country, state, culture, fate—except
one: descent.234 But the Germans do not share common descent anyway,
since many non-Jewish Germans are also of only partly Germanic descent.
All groups that constitute today’s Germans, including the Jews, have im-
migrated at some point earlier or later in history. The Jews came “searching
for a homeland and a homeland is what they found.”235 They have been
united with the other groups of the German population through “seven
generations of . . . common fate.”
Lazarus ends his speech on a particularly patriotic tone and with a refer-
ence to the two attempts on the life of the kaiser in 1878:

Today we are not lacking the art of the prophetic word but its bloodcurdling
power. If as monstrous a deed of moral degradation as the attempts on the
most honorable head of the nation would have happened in the times of the
Prophets, sounds of enormous power would have arisen, whose ringing we would
still be hearing today like we still today hear the penetrating call of Jeremiah
and Isaiah. Perhaps somewhere in a German mind a spark of that ardor might
still be glowing under the ashes of the centuries; it might light up—even if less
bright—and illuminate for us the path of justice and clemency and be to the
benefit of the whole German people: may God bring that to pass!236

Lazarus’s speech shows a strong sense of Jewish identity—after all, it is

dedicated to “self-clarification” among Jews and was first given to a Jewish
audience. Nevertheless, it also strongly emphasizes the German nationality
of the German Jews. Cohen articulates—more strongly than Lazarus—his
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 143

reluctance to accept the fact of being addressed and being obliged to reply
as a Jew: those replying to Treitschke tend to feel strongly and painfully the
fact that responding as a Jew means giving recognition to the appellation
as a Jew. Cohen writes as the first sentence of his response to Treitschke
and Lazarus: “So after all, we arrived again at the point of having to confess
[to being Jewish]”; Cohen would have preferred not “having to confess.”237
Echoing Treitschke, Cohen refers to the historical experience of a specific
generation. As Treitschke invokes the generation that had fought for na-
tional unification, Cohen invokes those who had fought for emancipation
and assimilation: “We, the younger generation [Wir Jüngeren],” had been
allowed to hope to be able to assimilate into “the nation of Kant.” There had
been hope that “moral politics” and “historical understanding” would level
out differences and would allow German Jews to express their “patriotic
love” and their pride to contribute to the nation’s tasks without second
thoughts.238 This hope has now been shattered, because “one of the leaders
of the national party” has chosen “to raise the race issue against us.” Cohen
underlines that this attack did not come from “forces inimical to [liberal]
civilization” but from a man “to whom we, the younger generation, owe so
much in understanding and inspiration.”239 Cohen’s argument underlines
how closely national unification and Jewish emancipation/assimilation had
been felt to be the same process, which is reflected in reverse in the particular
weight carried by a nationalist attack on emancipation. Without using the
word, Cohen implies that Treitschke is guilty of treason.
Cohen adds several very polemical remarks on Graetz, whose student he
had been240 and whom he associates with “the Palestine faction [die Partei der
Palästinenser].”241 He reproaches Graetz for a “perversity of moral judgment”
and asserts that “there is nothing sound” in the direction Graetz was going.
Cohen warns about “being only excited and touched by Jewish tribal issues”
and ignoring the “pride and dignity of the German spirit.” Significantly, he
asserts that “the same fallacy” also underlies Lazarus’s position, although
the latter is formulated more abstractly.
Philippson agrees with Cohen that the Jews “should become more Ger-
man” but reproaches Cohen for directing this demand only at the Jews.
144 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

The Christian Germans had to become more German, too; alluding to ul-
tramontanism, he asks rhetorically: “Does not a large part of the Germans
adhere to religious convictions that put the church higher than the nation,
in particular a church that has its gravitational point beyond the moun-
tains?”242 Further, many Germans still swear by their being Saxonian, Bavar-
ian, or Austrian. In their professions, though, Christians and Jews follow
the same ends and tendencies irrespective of their different religions.243 He
also reproaches Cohen for failing to say what the Jews should do in order
to become more German.
Apart from Joël, only Oppenheim refuses to discuss whether or not the
German Jews are German enough in the first place. Oppenheim points to
two contradictions in Treitschke’s position. First, Treitschke accuses the
Jews of threatening to destroy German culture, while on the other hand he
writes that the “hard German heads” cannot become accustomed to alleged
Jewish values.244 Second, Treitschke accuses the Jews of not wanting enough
to become German, while on the other hand he accuses them of “insisting
on their certificate,” that is, on emancipation. Oppenheim writes that “either
of these would be bad” but both accusations are “fortunately wrong”: the
struggle for (or defense of) emancipation, assimilation to German culture,
and German national consciousness are three sides of the same process. He
points out that since emancipation the German Jews have become involved
in all areas of the public sphere beyond their share in the population, and
he suggests that Treitschke resents precisely their involvement and, by im-
plication, their assimilation rather than their alleged separatism, “because
Jews who swear on Treitschke’s colors are rare indeed.” Oppenheim thus
suggests that Treitschke’s concern is with the specific political convictions
of the Jews, not any lack of Germanness at all.
“What does national mean,” then? The elements of consensus and dissensus
on this central question will be assessed in chapter 7; at this point it is only
stated that first of all, the question is posed only in the context of the state:
if not for the state, nobody would even ask what “national” means, not even
those who emphasize its cultural aspects. Culture is addressed as national
only when its relation to the state comes to appear problematic. Patriotism
 State, Nation, Race, Religion 145

is first of all Staatsgesinnung, a healthy measure of loyalty to a particular

state; the fact that this is emphasized by Treitschke, whose thinking is at the
same time ethnic, racial, and culturalist enough to repudiate the evidently
very staatsgesinnten German Jews, makes this more than clear.
The question of the state, though, must lead invariably to the question
of right, especially in a context heavily shaped by post-Hegelian and post-
Kantian liberalism. This is the subject matter of the next chapter.
 Five. Emancipation, Assimilation, and the Concept of Rights

On several occasions, Treitschke rejects the idea of challenging the legal

emancipation of the Jews in the German state. The principal formulation
is the following:

Today the unfortunate struggle is settled, civil equality [bürgerliche Gleich-

berechtigung] of the Jews has long been achieved in all civilized states, and in
all of Germany I do not know one sensible politician who would want to over-
throw this accomplished deed. The German Jews enjoy unrestricted freedom
of worship; no one interferes with their old customs and traditions or with
their distinct cosmopolitan scholarship [eigenthümlichen kosmopolitischen
Wissenschaft]; civic life [der bürgerliche Verkehr] even widely respects their
Sabbath, although this is undeniably for us Christians a very inconvenient
institution. With emancipation achieved, however, the old Jewish claim to
separate nationhood has also become totally obsolete. In the present century
of national state formations, the European Jews can have a role that is peaceful
and conducive to civilization only if they decide to dissolve into the civilized
peoples, whose languages they speak—as far as religion, tradition and tribal
characteristics [Stammesart] allow this to happen.1

In this crucial paragraph, Treitschke makes four distinct statements. First,

all “civilized peoples” have granted “civil equality.” Since by implication this
is part of what makes them “civilized,” one ought not attempt to challenge
this. Second, although the fact that the Jews enjoy the same civil equality as
 Emancipation, Assimilation, and the Concept of Rights 147

other groups seems to be grounded in universalist liberal values, Treitschke

mentions some of what seem to him particular characteristics of the Jews:
the Jews continue to stick to their “peculiar cosmopolitan scholarship” and
to the Sabbath. The fact that he finds it necessary to mention these things
in the context of his adherence to universal liberal rights underlines that
these rights do not go without saying: the universality of civic rights in-
cludes Jews despite their “peculiar” and “inconvenient” characteristics. Third,
“with emancipation achieved,” Jews have traded in and forsaken the right
to make claims to separate nationhood. Treitschke demands they dissolve
in the “civilized peoples” now that they have accepted the terms of trade
of emancipation. By implication, everything short of an active policy of
dissolving Jewish separate identity counts as Jewish nationalism.2 Fourth,
there is still a limit to the extent to which the Jews can have a positive role
in modern European history (which is characterized as a history of nation-
state building): that limit is their ability to assimilate. Their culture and
“tribal characteristics” do not allow for complete assimilation, and thus
by implication neither for a completely positive role in modern history. A
residue of ethnic characteristics will remain unassimilable and alien to the
world of modern European nation-states.
Treitschke’s position on this issue is deeply ambivalent. First, he claims that
“the unfortunate struggle”—namely, the conflict between “the hard necessity
of the state’s unity” and the Jews’ claim to both equality and difference—
”has been settled” with the achievement of legal emancipation. However,
the remainder of the paragraph implies that struggle and conflict continue.
The exhortative (and discreetly threatening) tone of his discourse in these
sentences clearly has a “pragmatic” dimension: urging the Jews to make “a
decision.” His own words make more than clear that the case that he claims
has been “settled” is actually not so settled. Treitschke’s ostensible defense of
(legal) emancipation is contradicted by his pointing to the insurmountable
limits of assimilation due to “religion, tradition and tribal characteristics.”
If assimilation cannot be complete, neither can equality. Treitschke’s claim
that the struggle is over is part of the ongoing struggle. In his view, eman-
cipation has been granted to the Jews as an advance installment—thanks to
148 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

the self-forgetful tolerance of the Culturvölker (nations of culture)—but the

Jews still have to deliver their part. They still have to decide to “dissolve into”
the latter, as far as it is possible for the alien “tribe” that they are. Treitschke
admits that “a part of the German Jews has long taken this necessary deci-
sion” to assimilate, but he claims that another “very influential part of our
Jewry” does not even intend to.
It was left to Treitschke’s interlocutors, however, to spell out in more
theoretical language what underpinned the controversy about the meaning
and implications of Jewish emancipation. Manuel Joël comments on Tre-
itschke’s formulation that “the moment emancipation was gained the Jews
insisted boldly on their ‘certificate.’”3 Playing on the double meaning of the
German word Schein (certificate, document, voucher; appearance, illusion),
Joël rebukes: “So the certificate [of legal emancipation] was meant to remain
an illusion?” Treitschke’s formulation throws light on his understanding of
legal emancipation: emancipation is received in the form of a certificate, the
use of which one can “insist” on more or less “boldly.” Exchange etiquette as
Treitschke seems to understand it demands the Jews not to make too much
use of their right, which leads Joël to pun on the double meaning of Schein: a
certificate that one is expected to use only discreetly or partially is not worth
its nominal value—this form of emancipation is illusory (Schein).4
Joël remarks sarcastically that human rights cannot be “granted” to the
Jew, because “the Jew is as it were also a human being.”5 This implies that
having rights is a property of the human being as such (jus naturalis); natural
rights (as opposed to privileges, libertates) cannot be subject to any form
of trading or dealing. Philippson, Cohen, and “Börne” elaborate on this
issue further.
Philippson writes that “all those who currently act as enemies of the
Jews intend to reverse emancipation.”6 If some of them (such as Treitschke)
claim not to have such an intention they argue in bad faith, hiding be-
hind the notion that the state had the liberty to grant, or not to grant, civil
and political rights, gifts given as so many acts of tolerance. Philippson
states that Treitschke was the first to use this tactic, and he quotes a recent
pamphlet by one Brake that makes explicit what had been merely implicit
 Emancipation, Assimilation, and the Concept of Rights 149

in Treitschke’s argument: “The granting of civil rights and religious freedom

to the Jews has certainly not been the self-evident acknowledgment of their
natural and human rights but merely a declaration of the positive will of the
state in a specific case. Therefore the state has not renounced its inalienable
sovereign right in every single case to decide anew and on its own about
the admission of any new religious community and its compatibility with
the state’s general purposes and the overall culture of its subjects as they
exist.”7 Brake (and likewise Treitschke) does not seem to deny the existence
of universal rights tout court, but he claims that the state has granted eman-
cipation to the Jews only because their religion is not too different from the
Christian religion and because their number is (then) small enough so as
not to endanger “the unity of the moral and religious foundations of our
population.” Emancipation is based on these conditions. Brake concludes
that the state has the duty both to consider itself to be Christian as long as
the majority of its population is such, and to guarantee toleration to the
Jewish minority.
Philippson holds against Brake that conditional emancipation means
failure to acknowledge the concept of individual rights and is as such dan-
gerous and in opposition to the Rechtsstaat. He admits that a state has a
right to allow (or deny) religious freedom, and he further grants that it is
debatable whether and when the state has the right to grant or not grant
naturalization to a person who was not born within the territory of that
state. However, he holds that under no circumstances can a state deny civil
and political rights to anyone born within the country to parents who were
also born there. Further, the state has a duty not to allow religion to have any
impact on a person’s possession of rights: “Humanity has progressed. Human
society has developed. Legal concepts have become clarified, and right has
assumed a large and far-reaching power. However much the sophists tease
their brains, whatever the crooked lawyers ruminate: what has generally been
acknowledged as right has to persist and will persist.”8 Cohen also asserts
that the anti-Jewish campaign at least implicitly intends to reverse legal
emancipation: “If one ‘deliberately’ decides to grant emancipation, one is
naive to complain about the falling number of conversions. However, if one
150 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

is already working toward the logical conclusion that emancipation should

be reversed, one must not continue to complain that the Jews are not willing
to become Germans.”9 He takes issue with the political voluntarism implicit
in Treitschke’s formulation that every state decides deliberately about who
has “the right to participate in its leadership.” However, unlike Philippson,
Cohen does not refer to “natural and human right” in a strict sense. He argues
that legislation is the “emanation of general national culture.” While the na-
tion can expect the emancipated to show gratitude for emancipation, it does
not have the right to demand gratitude: the state’s “freedom of deliberation
has its limits not in so-called natural law (which is a rather vague concept)
but in the respective nation’s concept of the moral law [Sittengesetz].”10
Cohen here equates “general national culture [Gesittung]” with the “nation’s
concept of the moral law,” reconciling the Kantian positing of a universal
Sittengesetz with a nationalist perspective, in which the particular view of
the Sittengesetz taken by a nation is decisive.
Cohen suggests that making participation conditional on a particular
positive confession will provoke “lies and pretense.” Therefore, sittliche admin-
istration of the state has to be based on “a religious ground that is indepen-
dent from contested dogmas,” that is, on Religion rather than any particular
Glaubensarten. In a typical Kantian move, Cohen asserts that “it is through
such ethical insight that the state’s deliberation gains its freedom.”11
A quite different perspective is taken by the anonymous author of a pam-
phlet who masqueraded (or rather, ironically pretended to masquerade) as
Ludwig Börne and borrowed the latter’s radical-liberal language.12 “Börne”
repeatedly points out that he has said it all fifty years ago, so that the conti-
nuity of the adopted identity is meant to indicate an identity of the debate
across the different contexts: for “Börne,” the earlier Hep-Hep movement
and the current anti-Jewish movement are cut from the same cloth. “Börne”
bases his polemic—perhaps most straightforwardly among all respondents
to Treitschke—on Enlightenment liberal thought. First, he ridicules the
failure of Treitschke and his ilk to differentiate between feelings and rational
considerations about state and society: “You do not love the Jews. It is bad for
the Jews that even educated Germans are subject to the relentless government
 Emancipation, Assimilation, and the Concept of Rights 151

of their hearts. Even to be just, the German needs to love.”13 Treitschke has
failed to emancipate himself from the “relentless government” of his heart.
“Börne’s” sarcastic remark that “even to be just, the German needs to love”
implies that issues of justice are (or should be) of a different categorical order
from issues of love—a crucial distinction that allowed liberals not to like
(let alone love) the Jews but still to argue (or even fight) for them to receive
“justice.”14 By implication, Treitschke’s emphatic and irrational rhetoric is
unpolitical and as such not part of a modern, bourgeois liberal discourse.
“Börne” continues his line of argument with a simile: “The storm and the
sun had an argument about who was more powerful. The storm tried to
snatch away a coat from a wanderer—in vain; the more it blew the more
the wanderer wrapped himself into the coat. The sun came out in its light
and mildness—the wanderer took off the coat. The Jews are such wander-
ers, Rabbinism is their coat, you are the storm—but the sun has started to
shine!”15 The sun, an obvious symbol of the Enlightenment, “has started to
shine” and thus makes the old coat of Rabbinism (which might have been
useful in the past but is no longer so in modern times) anachronistic and
superfluous. Significantly, the storm and the sun compete over reaching the
same goal—snatching away the coat. The storm against which the coat is a
defense does not reach this goal, while the sun does because it removes the
actual reason for wearing a coat. The simile used by “Börne” on the one hand
makes the realistic and farsighted point that not authoritarian hostility but
actual social and political improvement will almost casually and effortlessly
overcome antiquated forms of consciousness; on the other hand, though,
it displays some wishful thinking: “the sun has started to shine!” (note the
exclamation mark) is—in hindsight—perhaps a strange watchword for
the year 1880. Taking up his previous argument that justice does not need
to be based on love for the Jews, “Börne” adds an attack on the “world of
commerce” and its lack of morality: “I do not have to defend the world
of commerce. I profoundly hate its Jewishness [Judenthümlichkeit]—that
manifestation of the demon of money, this rising fury of greed, this bodily
devil of gold—whether it comes in Hebrew, Muslim or Christian shape.”16
He adds that even if the Jews are more successful in commerce than the
152 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

Christians this does not mean they are responsible for the phenomenon
as such.17 “Börne” seems to be taking up a current manner of speech in an
ironic way in order to undermine its implicit claims: if the devilish “fury
of greed” comes in “Hebrew, Muslim or Christian shape” and has not been
initiated by Jews, it is of course not really “Jewish” at all.
In the body of his pamphlet, “Börne” discusses the concept of “civil rights.”
He rejects the notion that “human rights and civil rights, as well as religious
and political toleration” are so different from each other that “one could
have claims to the one while not to the other.” He argues that Treitschke
uses this conceptual distinction as a secondary legitimization or a smoke
screen for a dislike of Jews that is ultimately motivated by economic fac-
tors: “Basically you have always been a hater of the Jews, but intellectually
you have made progress: now you try to justify your hostility. You do not
hate the Jews because they deserve it [weil sie es verdienen]; you hate them
and then you try to prove as well as you can that they deserve it. And you
hate them—because they earn [weil sie—verdienen].”18 “Börne” argues that
what Treitschke wants to offer as “human rights”—that is, human rights
without civil rights—are merely “animal rights,” namely, the right to physi-
cally reproduce: “Only civil rights are human rights: for Man becomes Man
only in civil society. This is where he is born, and he is born a citizen. This
is the principle of England, France and any free state.”19 “Börne” argues that
a meaningful conception of “human rights” must be embodied in “civil
rights.” Ultimately, the two concepts are identical because Man becomes
Man only in bourgeois society, that is, as a citizen: “denn der Mensch wird
erst in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft zum Menschen.” “Man” outside society
would be an animal, and the “rights” that such a creature could lay claim
to would be not more than the “rights” that animals have, that is, strictly
speaking no rights at all.
The equation of Man with citizen is a two-edged sword, however: on the
one hand it is inclusivist, as it claims that no one who is born within the
boundaries of society can be denied full membership of that society, that
is, no one can be given human rights without civil rights being included
in the package; on the other hand it is exclusivist, as it implicitly denies the
 Emancipation, Assimilation, and the Concept of Rights 153

humanity of all human beings who—for whatever reason—are not actually

members of “society.” The equation of Man and citizen implies the equa-
tion of bourgeois society and human society; those inhabiting other-than-
bourgeois/civil societies, who appear to the latter as “savages,” cannot be
considered humans if Man becomes Man only in bourgeois/civil society.
On the domestic level it implies that categories of people who are for vary-
ing reasons not considered full citizens (strangers, women, children, the
propertyless, paupers, handicapped) lose also the safety valve of the “human
rights.” Bourgeois society created the distinction between human and civil
rights not without reason; the concept of “human rights”—as a promise,
reminiscent of Catholic universalism—makes sense only in its specific dif-
ference from the rights of a citizen; it is something to fall back on for those
who are not full members. (Hannah Arendt argued, of course, that the his-
tory of the refugee problem in the twentieth century teaches that one tends
to lose the human rights in the very instance that one would actually need
them, namely, after losing the rights of the citizen.)20
In the next sentence, “Börne” shifts his argument by stating that one be-
comes a citizen only when one comes of age, not when being born.21 This
seems to imply that, for example, minors—who are not citizens—are ipso
facto also not humans: one comes of age when the intellectual powers are
“fully developed,” which is presumed to coincide with the bodily powers
“appearing mature.” “Börne” mocks the fact that the Jews are being denied
citizenship “because nature had condemned them body and soul to eternal
childhood” and suggests sarcastically that immature Christians should also
be treated as children and be denied citizenship.22 While for him, citizenship
is the same as human rights, he accuses Treitschke of reducing citizenship
to membership in a civil corporation. He points out that in Treitschke’s
understanding, only in death do all members of society become equal in
their human and civil rights: “the shroud is your toga [i.e., the sign of being
a citizen], and you turn into social beings only in your graves!”23 “Börne”
argues that the enemies of the Jews only adopted the language of religious
toleration after they ceased caring about religion; what they do care about is
that “Jewish haggling does not outperform Christian haggling”: for “Börne,”
154 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

economic competition is at the heart of anti-Jewish attitudes. The language

of religious toleration, however, is compatible with and ineffective against
the more modern form of Jew-hatred, which is no longer bound up with
religious forms of consciousness.24
Matters of rights, citizenship, and emancipation are closely bound up
with that of the nature of the state. The issue at stake here is basically how
the notion of individual, natural, and universal rights survived the shift of
Enlightenment liberal thought to liberalism as a political practice in the
context of the national state? Not too well. Cohen’s position most clearly
expresses the dialectic at the bottom of this problem: jus naturalis may even
be admitted to exist, but the nation and the state cannot do other than act
on their specific, historical version of what is right, which in turn is shaped
by this nation-state’s “national culture.” After the general turn to a histori-
cal view of political, social, and intellectual forms, itself already part of the
legacy of Enlightenment liberalism, unmediated natural right seems too
metaphysical. In this context it can hardly surprise that emancipation is
also subject to “the hard necessity of the unity of the state,” or what different
proponents of it believe to be such.
 Six. The Riddle of Treitschke’s Intentions

One asks oneself: What does Herr von Treitschke want?—m a n u e l j o ë l ,

“Open Letter to Herrn Professor Heinrich von Treitschke”

The preceding chapters have been concerned with how Treitschke and his
respondents used a number of crucial political, social, and historical concepts
in differing (or not so differing) ways. This final chapter of textual analysis
looks at what Treitschke explicitly wrote about how he wanted to see the
“Jewish question” resolved, and what some of his respondents thought his
intentions were.
In the final section of his first contribution, “Our Prospects,” Treitschke
makes specific suggestions as to how the Jews should behave in the face of
Germany’s developing into a proper nation-state. He points toward examples
such as “Jewish societies against usury which silently do much good” and
the “work of intelligent Israelites who have recognized that their tribal fel-
lows [ihre Stammgenossen] must adjust to the customs and ideas of their
Christian fellow-citizens” (to whom, by implication, such things as “usury”
are completely alien); he concludes: “Much remains to be done in this di-
rection. It is not of course possible to change the hard German heads into
Jewish heads; the only way out therefore is for our Jewish fellow citizens
to make up their minds without reservations to be Germans, as many of
them have done already long ago, to their advantage and ours.”1 Treitschke
considers it self-evident that “German heads” and “Jewish heads” cannot
156 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

coexist next to each other without the latter adapting to the former. He
sounds confident here that this process is under way and merely needs to
be continued consistently. His tone changes slightly when he discusses the
remaining obstacles: the Jews “who talk so much about tolerance” should
“become truly tolerant themselves and show some respect for the faith, the
customs and the feelings of the German people which has long ago atoned
for old injustice and given them the gift of human and civil rights.” The lack
of this “respect” on the side of “a section of our commercial and literary
Jewry” is the “ultimate reason” for the present anger. This anger, Treitschke
concludes, might not be “a pleasant sight” but is merely the accompaniment
of “boiling-up unfinished ideas” and thus not a bad thing: “May God grant
that we come out of the ferment and unrest of these restless years with a
stricter concept of the state and its obligations and with a more vigorous
national consciousness.” The antisemitic movement is a phenomenon of
the more general process of bringing about the maturing of Germany into
a modern nation-state, to which it is necessary but merely instrumental.
This implies that antisemitism will disappear once this process is success-
fully completed.
In the concluding section of his third contribution (his response to Breßlau,
Lazarus, and Cassel), Treitschke develops the one point in his original con-
tribution that he claims has been “strangely ignored” by all commentators,
although he had intended it to be the main issue: his (self-)criticism of the
“complicity of the Germans in the power of Jewry”: “We have allowed our-
selves to be misguided by the great words of tolerance and Enlightenment
toward some mistaken decisions on schooling that now threaten to damage
the Christian education of our youth. . . . Tolerance is a wonderful thing but
it presupposes that one already has a firm religious conviction oneself. . . .
It is the duty of the state to take utmost care that our school pupils are not
taught indifference toward religion under the cover of tolerance.”2 Since
Treitschke sees toleration and legal emancipation as benevolence that the
victorious party can afford to show only after a decisive and final victory,
any doubts about the finality of the victory would be reason enough to call
toleration and emancipation into question. For Treitschke, such doubts
 The Riddle of Treitschke’s Intentions 157

seem to be raised by the lack of religious enthusiasm on the part of “our

youth.” It seems that Treitschke would be happy to “grant” all liberal rights
to the Jews (“a wonderful thing”) were it not for a lack of “firm religious
conviction” on the Christian side. According to Treitschke, society can afford
tolerance only on the condition of general “firm religious conviction.” It is
difficult to imagine, though, how religious conviction, if it is “firm” as well as
in power (which is the only place from where toleration can be “granted”),
could be anything other than patronizing. This comment by Treitschke
touches the heart of the paradoxical problem of the status of religion in
liberal society. Treitschke adds: “The state could also give more protection
against the tyranny of usury, which is committed by the unclean strata of
Jews and Christians in a sad competition.”3 This is the only legal-practical
step Treitschke suggests. Having criticized the lack of determination on the
side of the state, he turns to society:

However, the attitude of the nation itself is always more important than all the
measures taken by the state. Our carefreeness and slowness could learn a lot
from the economic virtues of the Jewish tribe. Instead, though, we have been
only too receptive to the weaknesses and illnesses of the Jewish character. Our
cosmopolitanism was beneficial to theirs, our thirst for dispute wallowed in
the scandal-loving outpourings of the Jewish press. . . . Most of all, though,
Jewish arrogance has been nurtured by the unfortunate disunity of our clerical
life, by the compulsive mocking and materialism of so many Christians. In the
frivolous, infidel circles of Jewry it is a strongly held belief that the huge ma-
jority of educated Germans have long broken with Christianity. The time will
come, though, and perhaps it is close, when urgency will teach us again to pray,
when modest piety will regain its proper place next to the pride of education.
In the last instance, every grave social question leads the serious observer back
to religion. The German Jewish question will not come to a rest completely . . .
before our Israelite fellow citizens will be convinced through our attitude that
we are a Christian people and want to remain so.4

This paragraph shows that Treitschke’s attack on the Jews is also an ef-
fort at disciplining potentially unruly or disloyal Germans of any religious
158 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

background. The “Jewish question” appears here as a mere symptom of

what counts for Treitschke as a crisis of German society in general. Jewish
“pride” is presented as an indicator for the lack of Christian identity on
the side of the Germans—with all its implications for civil obedience and
Staatsgesinnung. In this section of the text, the underlying logic seems to be
that disciplining the Jews helps in disciplining the Germans.
In a subsequent text Treitschke reasserts that no one currently considers
taking back emancipation, but he also says that no options exist for the
state and the political sphere to address the “Jewish question” and to chal-
lenge the particularism of Jewish “tribal consciousness” and its “provocative”
manifestations. The “Jewish question,” though, still undeniably exists and its
discussion is legitimate, although preferably it should be discussed without
rousing too much passion. From this Treitschke concludes that it is “solely
up to civil society, and in particular to the Jews themselves, to overcome
gradually the existing discord that cannot be denied anymore.”5 Rather than
indicating how “civil society” (as opposed to the state) should respond to the
issue, he puts the responsibility on the Jews. He follows this with the claim
that there are no signs that the Jews are ready to undertake any steps toward
solving the “Jewish question”: they respond even to moderate critique with
“angry diatribes”; they mobilize Jews in the foreign press “against their fellow
Germans”; they exert “open terrorism” against supporters of the antisemitic
petition; they “conspire to damage Christian fellow citizens whom they dis-
like”; and they continue to publish pamphlets that scorn Christian theology.6
Treitschke follows this catalog of offenses—unreasonableness, treason, ter-
rorism, conspiracy—which owes a lot to traditional anti-Jewish stereotypes,
with a conclusion that contradicts his earlier affirmation of emancipation:
“Is it not obvious that this slippery slope will necessarily lead one to call
emancipation into question once more? For the strongest argument of the
enemies of emancipation used to be that ‘the Jews are and remain a nation
of their own; if we grant them full civil rights they will form a state within
the state.’ If Jewry continues to go down the road that they entered recently
we will witness the emergence of this state within the state, and then we
should inevitably hear the Christians shout: away with emancipation!”7
 The Riddle of Treitschke’s Intentions 159

Unless those Jews who feel themselves to be “good Germans” manage to

prevent “their coreligionists” from “dangerous arrogance and separation,”
Treitschke warns, “our soil might perhaps come to witness savage eruptions
of uncanny hatred that would not do any credit to the Germans, Christian
or Jewish alike.”
Thirteen months after his remarks in the same publication had triggered
the Dispute, Treitschke relates that (anonymous) enemies of the emancipa-
tion have said that the existence of a separate Jewish nationality inevitably
would make emancipated Jews a “state within the state”—the antisemitic
reversal of the Enlightenment pro-emancipation argument that had seen the
unemancipated Jews as a status in statu that needed to be abolished. Treitschke
uses in this passage rhetorical techniques very similar to those adopted in
his first contribution: the reference to anonymous skeptics and their collec-
tive shouting make the author appear as a detached observer. He suggests
that the “Jewish question” consists in the particularistic consciousness and
arrogance of the Jews. While German Christian society has granted them
emancipation against the warnings of the skeptics, the Jews have frustrated
the optimistic expectations of their benefactors. While at the moment the
state is still well advised to remain patient, it is the assimilated Jews’ respon-
sibility to speed up the process of assimilation and to overcome the anomaly
that there are emancipated but not wholly assimilated Jews. Unless the Jews
manage to disprove the growing and—as Treitschke implies—legitimate
discontent on the side of the Christian Germans, they might provoke not
only the loss of legal emancipation but also the possibility of new pogroms,
quasi-automatic or natural reactions to Jewish misbehavior. He concludes:
“My pronounced intention has been to remind the fully German-minded
Jews that the attitude of some of their coreligionists does not meet what
any great nation has to demand from its citizens.”8
Bamberger concedes that Treitschke had indeed intended to make a con-
structive patriotic intervention and acted with “the best intentions”; Tre-
itschke’s pamphlet is not “an antisemitic harangue.”9 Its effects, though, proved
“deplorable” because the antisemites were able to appropriate it. Bamberger
acknowledges that Treitschke ruled out both reversal of emancipation and
160 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

expulsion of the Jews and argued for a politics of “reconciliation.” Moreover,

Treitschke’s “demands” would have been received favorably had he opposed
the agitation of those who “search for new legitimation for old unreflected
ill-feeling.”10 In fact, however, Treitschke’s “conciliatory” conclusions follow
from “a chain of unreasoned assertions each of which actually works against
the intended effect.”11 His inconclusively argued accusations “cannot but
make the accused believe that Treitschke is one of those persecutors who
choose plausible pretexts according to time and circumstances in order to
justify their own feeling of dislike which has become second nature to them.
Should there still be many Jews in Germany who do not think of themselves
as Germans, then Treitschke’s indictment would only alienate them further.”12
If the tone and manner of persecution are more “spiteful and cynical” in
Germany than in France or England, Bamberger suggests, it cannot lie “in
the nature of the persecuted” but only “in the nature of the persecutors.”13
He asserts that Treitschke provided the antisemites with “a whole torrent of
most detrimental slogans”: “This proceeding that contradicts its professed
intention [of reconciliation] can obviously be explained by the fact that in
the author himself the inner drives of a certain intellectual tendency have
been stronger than those undoubtedly good intentions. He himself stands
most of all under the domination of the hereditary antipathy, and where he
wants to be doctor he is patient.”14 Bamberger points out that Treitschke’s
position is contradictory, and he understands the contradiction as that be-
tween an adequate and legitimate side (liberalism, as shared by Bamberger)
and an anachronistic side (illiberalism; hereditary antipathy).
Bamberger argues that polemical criticism is characteristic of German cul-
ture itself. He enumerates a long list of German writers who attacked Luther,
Goethe, Hegel, or Fichte and includes in the same breath Richard Wagner,
“who cannot admit that Felix Mendelssohn was a German composer,” and
Eugen Dühring for his attack on Helmholtz.15 For Bamberger the antisemitic
persecution is part and parcel of a longer tradition of German-German
discord. Treitschke “attributes the severe criticism of German character and
of German personalities to some Jews in particular,” whom he sees “only as
tolerated guests violating the rules of hospitality.” Treitschke misrepresents
 The Riddle of Treitschke’s Intentions 161

criticizing German characteristics, which is part of the German character

itself, as Jewish lack of gratitude.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Bamberger’s contribution is his
comment on Treitschke’s concern with religion:

Herr von Treitschke, who fights socialism, takes the position of those who hope
to be able to fight the evil at its root by restoring religion. If the restoration of
religion is feasible,16 this approach would be legitimate17 insofar as socialist ideas
are undeniably linked to irreligious ones. The instinct of the ruling classes of
England, France and America has established a form of existence of the church
as necessary for respectability and essentially based on the awareness of that link
between religion and order. This is not the place to discuss whether something
similar or better can successfully be developed in Germany. However, should
it be attempted, the Jews certainly will not stand in the way. They have no par-
ticular interest in the realization of the big socialist redistribution of wealth.18
Only, they find one could use other means of reinforcing Christianity than
arousing hate and contempt of the Jews.19

No other commentator related Treitschke’s support for antisemitism so

directly to the most prominent aspect of Treitschke’s publishing at the time,
the polemic against “socialism.”20 Bamberger sees here the principal concern
of Treitschke’s politics, and this is also the only passage of the text where
Bamberger signals some agreement with Treitschke. Bamberger claims that
“the Jews” stand—with Treitschke as well as Bamberger—on the side of the
defense of order and property and are opposed to socialist redistribution.
He concedes that the restoration of religion is a possible means toward
that shared goal, although he does not clearly argue for or against the use
of this weapon.21 He seems indifferent to any aspect of religion other than
its socially stabilizing function. His main point is, however, that neither the
principal political goal—fighting off socialism—nor one of the possible
weapons—restoring religion—necessitates anti-Jewish agitation: quite to
the contrary, it puts off a potential ally.
“The point is,” writes Theodor Mommsen, to get “from confusion and
disunity toward secure principles of practical agency.” It is the duty of every
162 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

individual German to “prove whether we are a free people able to govern

itself as well as its moods and to improve on mistakes that have been made.”22
Mommsen links here the concepts of “freedom” and “self-control” to an ethical
argument. He makes the German “people” appear as a moral personality that
has to give evidence of its maturity for freedom. Such evidence would, for
example, consist in being able to discuss “the idiosyncrasies of the particular
nations and tribes with moderation and forbearance,” as it is demanded
by the necessity of national peace. “All potential truth and goodwill [of
strong critique of tribal idiosyncrasies] notwithstanding,” its unavoidable
generalizations cause bitterness and would not lead to improvement any-
way. “Above all, this is what the grave wrong and the immeasurable damage
done by Herr v. Treitschke consist in.”23 Mommsen repeats that Treitschke’s
articles “certainly have been meant benevolently” and “are certainly based
on much truth”, but

the sentiment of difference between the [Jewish] part of the German citizenry
and its large majority has been held down so far by the strong feeling of duty on
the side of the better part of the nation that understood that equal duty asks for
equal rights and drew the consequences. Now, however, Herr v. Treitschke has
proclaimed that this sentiment is the “natural reaction of the Germanic popular
feeling against a foreign element,” “the eruption of a deep and long-suppressed
anger.” These have been the words of Herr v. Treitschke, the one among all her
writers to whom the German nation owes most gratefulness during her recent
grave crises, whose pen was, and still is, one of the best swords in the struggle
against the old hereditary enemy of the nation—particularism—a struggle
that has been turned around but not yet completed.24

Mommsen stresses that he does not hold Treitschke responsible for the
unintended effects of his interventions.25 Leaving the question of intentions
unanswered, Mommsen sticks to discussing the (unintended) effects of Tre-
itschke’s intervention. He reproaches Treitschke for “preach[ing] civil war”
because “every Jew of German nationality could not but understand the article
as saying that he [Treitschke] views them as second-class citizens, at best as
a reformable punishment battalion [besserungsfähige Strafcompagnie].”
 The Riddle of Treitschke’s Intentions 163

Treitschke “might have intended a merely Platonic civil war; but unsurpris-
ingly, it took the same turn that Platonic love tends to take.” Treitschke’s
intervention deepened the gap and made “rabble of all classes fall eagerly
on the defenseless prey” while even “the better ones” ended up “confused
and wavering in their attitude.” Mommsen strongly conveys his anger about
Treitschke’s intervention: it has been detrimental to what had been both men’s
common political concern in the past, German nation building. Mommsen
rules out, however, that Treitschke might simply have intended what he
effectively did, to promote antisemitism. The behavior of the old comrade
and colleague remains a mysterious and inexplicable disappointment for
Mommsen. He expresses the hope that antisemitic agitation will soon give
place to a return of tolerance. He argues that “tolerance of the synagogue
. . . goes without saying” and demands “the more essential tolerance of the
peculiarity of the Jews which is not their responsibility but given to them by
fate.”26 Mommsen seems to find “tolerance against religion” not threatened
even by the antisemitic agitation. Tolerance against (by implication: ethnic
or racial) “peculiarity,” however, does not go without saying but seems to
be a property of the educated classes: “the strong sense of duty of the better
part of the nation” has to “hold down” the “sentiment of difference” held by
the not-so-good parts of the nation.27
Mommsen admits that there is a “particularity of German Jewry in good
things as in bad” but insists that these things have to be discussed “in a way
that is acceptable to the sensible Jew.” The nation has the duty to protect
the Jews’ equality both legally and administratively: “And this duty, which
we first of all owe to ourselves, is by no means dependent on good conduct
of the Jews.”28 Mommsen defends here the abstract universality of legal and
political equality as irrespective of the particular actuality of individual
subjects or groups of subjects. In the next sentence, however, he shifts from a
statement about the state and citizenship (where the Jews are to be defended
as equals) to one about civil society:

But we cannot defend them from the sentiment of strangeness and difference
held still today by the Christian German against the Jewish German which—as
is shown by the current situation once more—carries a danger for them just as
164 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

for us: the civil war of a majority against a minority, even as a mere possibility,
is a national calamity. This is though, in part, the fault of the Jews. Today the
word “Christianity” [Christenheit] might no longer mean fully what it used to
mean; nevertheless it is the only word which still defines the entire international
civilization of our day and in which millions and millions of people recognize
themselves as intrinsically united on our highly populated globe. It is possible
to remain outside these boundaries and yet live within the nation, but it is dif-
ficult and dangerous. He whose conscience—be it positive or negative—does
not permit him to renounce his Judaism and accept Christianity will act ac-
cordingly and will accept the consequences; deliberations of this kind belong
in the private chamber, not in public debate.29

Mommsen adds the “notorious fact” that many Jews are kept from conversion
not by conscience “but by quite different emotions, which I can understand
but not approve of.” He cites the existence of numerous “specifically Jew-
ish societies” that are not concerned with strictly religious issues: “I would
never join a philanthropic institution obliged by statute to support no one
but people from Holstein.”30 Mommsen takes up here again his view of the
Jews as one of many German “tribes.” However, he admits a small difference:
“And while I respect the endeavors and achievements of these societies, I view
their separate existence only as an aftereffect of the times before emancipa-
tion when Jews had the status of a group protected by the princes.” Respect
notwithstanding, the existence of these societies is anachronistic:

If those aftereffects are to disappear on the one side, they will have to disappear
on the other side as well; and on both sides there is still much to be done. The
admission into a large nation has its price. The people from Hanover, Hesse
and we from Schleswig-Holstein are in the process of paying it, and we do
feel that we are giving up a part of ourselves. But we make this sacrifice to our
common fatherland. The Jews, too, will not be led by another Moses into the
Promised Land; whether they sell trousers or write books, it is their duty to do
away with their particularity as far as they can do so without offending their
conscience, and with a firm hand to tear down all barriers between themselves
and their German compatriots.
 The Riddle of Treitschke’s Intentions 165

Mommsen mirrors the bifurcated structure of Treitschke’s argument, which

defends legal emancipation and does not explicitly demand the state to
“solve” the “Jewish question,” but envisages the need for civil society to
find a solution. Mommsen does not refute Treitschke’s argument about
civil society, but he rearticulates it, including the demand for the Jews to
“become Germans.” His argument in these paragraphs distinguishes three
groups of persons—or else three positions of agency—in German society.
The first group or position is “we,” which refers back to “the nation.” “We,”
“the nation,” have “the duty” to defend the legal equality of “the German
Jews” (or “the Jewish Germans”; the second group), but “we” cannot de-
fend “them” against the “Christian Germans,” who appear to form a third
group. Although it is also implied that all three groups together form the
nation and will suffer together a “national calamity” if antisemitic agitation
prevails, the development of the argument implies that the entity referred
to as “we” is the nation in a more substantial sense than the totality of the
three groups is. It is evident from the context that “we” refers to the liberal
members of the educated classes who show a strong patriotic commit-
ment. The statement that an antisemitic “civil war of a majority against a
minority” would be a “national calamity” that would affect the Jews just
as much as “us” seems to have the secondary meaning that it brings into
danger the liberals and their parties in particular—which was at the time
already clearly visible: the antisemitic campaign coincided with the end of
the cohabitation of liberalism and Bismarck’s state. If “we” have to defend
the Jews but the Jews are themselves “partly” to blame for “the Christian
Germans” forming a noisy rabble, then “we,” “the nation,” have to act as a
worried, fatherly authority, looking after self-harming minors.31 As far as
the defense of the Jews coincides with liberal self-definition—namely, in the
realm of the state and citizenship—the nation “owes” this engagement to
itself and its principles; the defense of the Jews as abstractly equal citizens
goes without saying. Beyond this, however, “the nation” is regrettably not
in a position to offer much help: there is nothing that “we” could possi-
bly do to change or alleviate “the sentiment of strangeness and difference
held still today by the Christian German against the Jewish German.” The
166 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

subsequent statement on the concept of “Christianity” gives indirectly a

reason for this. Although its religious content seems less than relevant in
the modern world, the concept of “Christianity” “still defines the entire
international civilization of our day.” While Treitschke defines the German
nation as intrinsically Christian—that is, non-Jewish—Mommsen defines
“the entire international civilization” as such. The fact that “the nation”
is unable to defend “the Jewish Germans” against the “sentiment” of “the
Christian Germans” seems to imply that “the nation” is intrinsically part of
that global Christian “civilization”; in other words, it is Christian, although
“merely” in a cultural, not (anymore) in a strictly religious sense. While
behind Treitschke’s claim that the nation-state needs to “have” a religion
sits the horror of particularism and social atomization, Mommsen seems
to imply that a world order of (nation-)states needs a unified global “civi-
lization” to avoid general carnage—both of which are fully justified fears.32
Nonconverted Jews, although formally equal citizens, place themselves
outside global civilization. Mommsen argues that it is “possible” but “dif-
ficult and dangerous” to do so. He implies that Jews obviously know that;
if some of them make such a risky choice they can be assumed to have
urgent enough reasons. Mommsen names two possible reasons, only one of
which he finds legitimate: one is religion, a private affair that ought to take
place exclusively in the “private chamber”; the illegitimate reason is Jewish
particularism and proto-nationalism.33 Mommsen’s position is clear: differ-
ence and particularism are acceptable and do not put into question equal
rights even if one places oneself outside the allegedly global civilization of
Christianity. Nothing of that sort, however, should ooze out of the private
chamber into the public realm. Particularism in public is an anachronistic
leftover of the pre-bourgeois past. The precarious process of nation build-
ing rests on the readiness of all citizens to sacrifice public particularisms
and restrict their idiosyncrasies to the private chamber.
Manuel Joël points to the contradiction between the massiveness of Tre-
itschke’s argument and its rather thin conclusions. He suggests that the
only consistent conclusion from Treitschke’s argument would have been
the revocation of legal emancipation, a conclusion that “an elegant author”
 The Riddle of Treitschke’s Intentions 167

leaves for others to formulate.34 Philippson puts a positive spin on the same
observation, writing that the German Jews can be optimistic because the
Jew-haters do not have any practical suggestions to offer.35 Naudh was one
of those others whom Joël had on his mind: he made indeed practical sug-
gestions, which he supported with a gloating reference to two speeches
made by Napoleon in 1806.36 Naudh points out triumphantly that his sug-
gestions for how to revoke emancipation come from no lesser authority
than the “birthplace of the ‘Rights of Man’” and the “glorious principles
of 1789.” According to the translation used by Naudh, Napoleon called the
Jews a “contemptible nation” that needed to be treated as “a distinct people,
not a religious sect,” since they formed “a nation within the nation.”37 The
Jews, the “robber barons of modern times, veritable swarms of ravens,” ap-
propriated whole villages.38 Since they are “no real citizens” they must be
treated according to state law, not civil law. Collective measures would be
legitimate, because “whatever evil Jews do, does not stem from the faults of
individuals but from the basic character of this people,” according to Na-
poleon, according to Naudh.39 Naudh also quotes from the Napoleonic law
of March 17, 1808, which contained mostly business regulations intended
to cancel as well as prevent particular types of financial claims of Jewish
creditors.40 Naudh is gloating about being able to quote Napoleonic law
that he uses as the model for his own list of anti-Jewish measures. In ad-
dition, he suggests a halt to immigration, a ban on Jewish entry to all state
or communal office and the Jews’ removal from such posts (in exchange
for compensation), the abolition of active and passive vote, expropriation
of real estate (also with compensation), ban from the stock exchange and
from running public bars, homogeneous distribution of all Jews over the
country, and a numerus clausus to the effect that surplus numbers of Jews
have to emigrate. All discriminations are meant to apply also to “baptized
Jews” and to descendants from mixed marriage into the third generation
“at least.” Two of his suggestions are only indirectly targeting the Jews: all
newspaper articles ought to be signed by the actual author, and the advertis-
ing business has to become a state monopoly.41
Not unlike Mommsen, Harry Breßlau writes that when he first read about
168 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

the recent antisemitic agitation he felt no urge to intervene. The statement

by Treitschke, however, with whom he used to stand in “friendly collegial
relations,” sharing “essentially a common standpoint in political affairs,”
he could not leave unanswered.42 He expresses the wish to convince Tre-
itschke of the inaccuracy, unfairness, and harmfulness of his intervention,
while stressing that he is not “an unconditional apologist of our Jewry [Ju-
denthums].”43 Breßlau states that it has always been “popular to look for a
scapegoat” and that in Germany the Jews tend to form a “convenient whip-
ping boy.”44 Treitschke, however, given his academic and political position,
could be expected not to repeat “accusations heard a hundred times before”:
instead he should “say what should happen in order to solve” the “Jewish
question.” Breßlau writes: “I miss such positive suggestions. . . . You reject
abolition or restriction of our emancipation as impossible and unworthy,
but finally you restrict yourself to moral exhortations and for the lack of
any other suggestion you put the solution of the problem into the hands of
the Jews themselves, whom you call out to be Germans.” He points out that
Treitschke’s intervention contributed “to make the barriers that still exist
between Germans and Jews higher and stronger” and then formulates his
own “positive suggestions” that focus on changing the public image of the
Jews. Breßlau suggests that representations of the Jew are most often modeled
on their “lowest elements” and that these representations are responsible
for the generally held prejudice about the Jews: “The Jews that are presented
in literature or onstage are either noble and good characters, who, though,
are presented as exceptions, or they are junk dealers, peddlers and usurers
whose language triggers the laughter, and whose mean behavior triggers the
moral outrage of the multitude.”45 Against this cliché, “every single Jew . . .
has to conquer his civil and social position anew ever and ever again” only
to be seen as a mere exception anyway.46 “Christians are rather unfamiliar
with the great mass of the urban Jewish population who live in quiet civil
industriousness [in stiller bürgerlicher Arbeitsamkeit] without either the
pompous luxury of the financial aristocracy or the rotten dirt of the exis-
tence of usurers and peddlers. . . . If one could succeed in assembling the
concept of the Jew from the characteristics of that middle class without being
 The Riddle of Treitschke’s Intentions 169

influenced by those higher or lower exceptions, I reckon the so-called Jewish

question would be significantly closer to its solution.” A man like Treitschke,
“so extraordinarily gifted with the talent of the word,” could have made an
essential contribution to such a project.47
Breßlau deals with the problem of anti-Jewish sentiment as a case of
prejudice. He seems to suggest that the search for scapegoats is a universal,
quasi-natural reaction to social crisis, while the matter of who will be the
scapegoat is a result of false or selective representations of social reality.
He suggests that misleading representations of the Jew should be changed.
Breßlau suggests a counter-strategy of media representation that would
deemphasize the Jewish poor as well as the very rich and make the public
image of Jewry more middle class. However, he does not indicate how he
thinks his “positive suggestion” to change the public image could be imple-
mented. One might wonder, how could writers, journalists, and scholars
be persuaded to make the image of Jewry more middle class? Which social
dynamic would be the basis of such a shift? Apart from that, a uniformly
middle-class image of German Jewry would still have to stand comparison
with a not-so-uniform social reality. Furthermore, it is probably not true
that the German media of the time excluded representations of the Jewish
middle classes; the widely read liberal Gartenlaube, for example, seems to
have done so quite effectively.48 It is also notable that Breßlau’s “quiet civil
industriousness” is not very far from Treitschke’s ideal of “ancient good-
natured willingness to work.”
Breßlau concedes to Treitschke that despite disagreements on a num-
ber of issues, “there can be no disagreement between us about what is evil
and mean and therewith worth fighting” within Jewry.49 Breßlau assures
Treitschke of his cooperation in this fight, adding, however, that “this fight
cannot be fought in public” and that the offer of cooperation is conditional
on Treitschke’s supporting the Jewish “defense of our honor that is being
slandered” and “the defense of our fatherland that some want to take away
from us.”50 Breßlau demands that Treitschke declare himself clearly in sup-
port of emancipation of those Jews who are, or want to be, proper Germans:
“I may hope that we in turn can also count on the support of my colleague
170 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

in this just struggle of defense . . . and I am sure that when the leaders of
this movement delude the German people into thinking that Heinrich von
Treitschke was their ally, it does not happen with his consent.”51 Judging
from the context, Breßlau does not seem to be sarcastic.
A satisfying answer to the question “What does Herr von Treitschke want?”
has not been found yet.
 Seven. Dissent and Consensus in the Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

Treitschke formulated the positions that triggered the Dispute in the context
of his analysis of the growing precariousness of international relations. The
continued existence of the kleindeutsche nation-state is the supreme value
underlying his analysis. The international situation makes enforcing national
cohesion, including religiosity and moral culture (Sittlichkeit), more urgent,
and this is the framework for his discussion of antisemitism. Treitschke
claims antisemitism is a “symptom” of a general anti-liberal trend. While
he expresses ambivalence about the demotic elements of the antisemitic
movement, he strongly welcomes the “deeper” reality to which the symptom
is said to refer. His position on the concept of the nation is complicated by
a tension between on the one hand his reference to Volksgeist as a central
analytical category, and on the other hand his elitist and hierarchical con-
ception of society: he celebrates ethnos but demonizes demos. While earlier
forms of Jew-baiting (especially the events of 1819) are dismissed as “medi-
eval,” liberal anti-antisemitism is denounced as merely reversed Jew-baiting,
equally anachronistic and illegitimate. The current anti-Jewish campaign is
characterized as a legitimate and considered reaction against the negative
(side) effects of Jewish emancipation. Treitschke emphasizes that the “Jew-
ish question” is more acute and of a different character in Germany than in
neighboring countries and that it cannot be suppressed easily: antisemitism
is an authentic expression of a general anti-liberal tendency of the Volks-
geist (although articulated in different ways by members of different social
172 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

groups). While he rejects some specific articulations of antisemitism, he

welcomes the general tendency.

Antisemitism: Demagoguery, Pretext, Upper- or Lower-Class Phenomenon,

or Resulting from a Lack of Liberty?
Graetz, Meyer, Breßlau, and Joël reject Treitschke’s interpretation of anti-
semitism as a “symptom” of a change in the Volksgeist. They assert that the
antisemitic movement is a marginal phenomenon and merely a product of
demagoguery and manipulation, in particular by enemies of Bismarck, of the
Reich, and of National Liberalism. Naudh supports Treitschke except for two
significant aspects: he identifies current antisemitism with all previous forms
of Jew-hatred and argues that there has been an uninterrupted continuity
of “eternal” antisemitism since the time of Moses. Further, he defends the
more populist forms of antisemitism against Treitschke’s bourgeois elitism
and—elaborating on a remark made by Treitschke himself—develops a
nationalist-populist criticism of the bourgeois concept of Bildung.
Bamberger and Oppenheim, like other liberal commentators, agree with
Treitschke’s view that antisemitism is a partial aspect of a wider anti-liberal
agenda. Bamberger suggests that it originates within the educated class and
is less significant in the lower classes, but despite being a minority view he
believes it should not be underestimated. Oppenheim goes as far as calling
antisemitism a “pretext.” He holds responsible the triumph of realpolitik
and the brutalization of political culture, partly as an effect of the experience
of warfare. Although he warns that civilizational progress can be reversed,
he remains all in all optimistic. Cassel adds a different perspective with his
remark that the Jews are “begrudged” the benefits of emancipation because
society as a whole does not enjoy liberty.

Antisemitism: Nationalist or Anti-Nationalist?

While Cassel denounces antisemitism as an “exuberance” of nationalism, in
the “Declaration of the Notables” it is argued that antisemitism is parochial
and particularist and that it threatens national unity. All those who can
make beneficial contributions should be integrated and assimilated into the
 Dissent and Consensus in the Antisemitism Dispute 173

nation. Out of all the documents, the Declaration asserts most unequivo-
cally the link between the defense of Jewish emancipation and that of the
liberal socioeconomic order. It is significant that Treitschke fails at first to
understand that the Declaration is directed against himself, among oth-
ers. Mommsen asserts that the success of national unification has created
antisemitism as its “deformed child” which is now threatening its “parent,”
national unity. Although he shows himself confident that national unity
will survive this (self-incurred) backlash, he writes that it does grave dam-
age to the nation.

The German Jewish Question, the Belated Nation, and the

Immigration of Unassimilable Polish Jews
A peculiar characteristic of Treitschke’s argument (as far as I can see, shared
by no other anti-Jewish writer of the time) is the claim that there is not just
a “Jewish question” but a specifically German “Jewish question.” Treitschke
argues that on the one hand the weakness and belatedness of German na-
tion building, on the other hand the numbers and specific characteristics
of the Jews that live in, and are migrating to, Germany constitute the Ger-
man “Jewish question.” The Jews immigrating to Germany are “Jews of the
Polish branch.” They are numerous, rise easily into positions of power, and
are less assimilable than the “Spanish Jews” of Western Europe. Instead of
assimilating, they turned more arrogant and stubbornly idiosyncratic the
more influential they became thanks to legal emancipation. Treitschke’s
argument culminates in the notion that the history of the “Spanish” Jews
is a “history of freedom” like that of the “occidental” nations, while that of
the “Polish” branch of Jewry is not. This lack of a “heroic” history makes
the latter unassimilable to German culture.
Few respondents (Cassel, Rülf) defend the legitimacy of migration. Most
(Bamberger, Lazarus, Graetz, Neumann) deny that there is clear statistical
evidence that would support Treitschke’s claim and assert the loyalty and
German-mindedness of the majority of German Jews, and even that of the
“Germanic” Jews in Poland (Rülf, Bamberger). Lazarus and Graetz ridicule
the notion that a numerically small minority like the Jews could “corrupt”
174 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

the moral fiber of the German nation. Treitschke’s claim of a correlation

between Jewish willingness to assimilate and the differing ethnicity of Jews
of the “Spanish” and “Polish” branches is rejected unanimously and with
detailed historical argument.

The Precariousness of the German Nation and

the Dangers of Mixed Culture
One aspect of Treitschke’s argument that was not challenged was his claim
that German national unity is singularly precarious and needs to be actively
defended. Treitschke suggests that unless the Jews “become Germans,” Ger-
manic civilization is in danger of being replaced by “German-Jewish mixed
culture.” Although he does not demand formal religious conversion, he
demands the Jews should completely assimilate culturally. He names as
evidence for a Jewish lack of commitment to assimilation the failure of Jews
to make first-rank contributions to German culture; they are prominent
only in inferior practices such as journalism.
Treitschke’s argument here is based on two presuppositions. First, becoming
German is a cultural issue. One crucial aspect of culture is economic behavior,
while religious denomination—as opposed to “religiosity”—is secondary; lit-
erature and journalism are exemplary because they are cultural and economic
at the same time. Lazarus, Breßlau, and Oppenheim hold, in contrast, that
the Jews contribute significantly, and they see this contribution as evidence
of a commitment to German culture and nation. Treitschke replies with a
discussion of Heine; he acknowledges Heine’s merits but attributes them
to his Germanness: they have, as it were, been achieved only despite Heine’s
Jewishness. Treitschke’s second presupposition is that the Jewish failure to
assimilate threatens the unity and purity of German culture. No contributor
challenges the validity and necessity of assimilation as such except Nadyr, who
counters that the German Jews are already too “Germanized.”

Purity and Diversity of Culture, Race, and Amalgamation

Bamberger and Lazarus challenge the concept of “pure culture” as such and
argue that the potential of any culture depends on its ability to assimilate.
 Dissent and Consensus in the Antisemitism Dispute 175

Breßlau also asserts that German culture is a “mixed culture” resting on

Germanity, Christianity, and classical antiquity. He supports Treitschke’s
demand for the Jews to “become Germans” but asserts that they are more
clearly in the process of becoming Germans than, for example, Catholic
ultramontanists. Lazarus suggests that the concept of historical progress
that underpins Treitschke’s position needs to be rearticulated and argues
that progress consists in growing diversity. The earlier stage within a devel-
opment ought not to have to disappear but could coexist with subsequent
stages, as in the case of Judaism and Christianity. The “permanent vocation
of the Jews” is the furthering of difference while at the same time being a
particular embodiment of the generically human.
Naudh also defends diversity against universality, but the thrust of his
contribution is to accuse liberalism of ignoring the value of diversity. Liberal
egalitarianism tries to distract from the danger that unassimilable Jews con-
stitute for German particularity. He rejects the notion that German culture
is a “mixed culture,” because Greeks, Romans, and Germans are “of the same
race.” Up to the present moment, Semitic influences have been irrelevant
to Germanic culture. Jews have to be excluded from both state and society,
because their parasitical and unethical character is a racial trait and cannot
be overcome by assimilation. Treitschke also rejects the notion that German
culture is a “mixed culture.” Differing from Naudh, he claims that German
culture has “amalgamated” Germanic, Christian, and classical elements to
the effect that they no longer constitute a “mixture” of distinct elements.
Treitschke admits that German culture is an “amalgam” but does not want
that amalgam to be further mixed with “neo-Jewish” elements.

German Spirit and Jewish Spirit

While most respondents engage in a defense of (some remaining) Jewish
difference against Treitschke’s demand for complete assimilation, Bamberger
and Lazarus also make a point about the affinity of the German and Jewish
“spirits”: the Germans are the people Jews have been most strongly attracted
to out of all peoples, and the high level of emotion in the Dispute itself is
evidence of this. Both Jews and Germans are inclined toward spirituality,
176 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

cosmopolitanism, abstract thinking, and speculation (both in the intellectual

and commercial senses). Lazarus emphasizes that—differences in dogma
notwithstanding—there are strong affinities in morality (Sittenlehre) and
all essential aspects of religiosity. Bamberger stresses that given the funda-
mental affinity, the remaining differences of character and temperament
are beneficial for German culture and politics.

Manchesterism and Unproductive Jews

Treitschke holds (in his first contribution) that the Jews, in their appearance
as speculators and usurers, characterized by dishonesty, deception, and greed,
are about to destroy what he thinks are the traditional, pre-capitalist ethics
of the German people, its “good-natured willingness to work,” that is, to
work not for utility and financial profit only. Treitschke cites the allegedly
disproportionate Jewish involvement in the Gründer-boom as evidence. The
“anti-capitalist” undertones of Treitschke’s remarks spark a strong reaction
from Philippson, Oppenheim, and Bamberger and in the “Declaration of
the Notables,” to the effect that Treitschke does not come back to this line
of reasoning. Treitschke’s adoption of what Oppenheim denounces as a
quasi-socialist argument is the only aspect of his argument that Treitschke
abandons. Oppenheim defends the notion of work as business against any
alternative notion of work as an “ethical” or state service. The Declaration
asserts the link between the demand for religious equality and that for “equal
sun in competition.” Bamberger asserts that successful businesses do not
exploit society but make it richer, and he likens Treitschke’s anti-Jewish
stance to the pan-Slavonic campaign against the (economically success-
ful) German minority in Russia (a campaign that Treitschke himself had
criticized). Joël and Oppenheim stress that Jews were not involved in the
Gründungen beyond the extent of their share among businesspeople. Breßlau
supports Treitschke’s attack on Jewish speculators but points out that the
Jews’ higher share in the financial sectors has specific historical reasons not
of the Jews’ own choosing.
The “straightforward” antisemites Naudh and Endner, however, take up
the economic argument and develop it in more detail. As with Treitschke,
 Dissent and Consensus in the Antisemitism Dispute 177

the racial, ethnic-cultural, and economic arguments are closely intertwined

in their comments. For Naudh, Christianity was a revolution against “Man-
chesterism” and utilitarianism as invented by the Jews two thousand years
ago. Contemporary Germans are the “breadwinners” for unproductive Jews,
who have become so numerous—especially in Berlin—as to overburden
the Germans. Naudh demands a halt to Jewish immigration, while Endner
suggests (in addition) resettling the Jews in remote and uncultivated parts
of the countryside and making them embrace productive occupations.

Healthy Patriotism and Exaggerated Nationalism

The question of how state, nation, race, and religion should relate to each
other is—quantitatively and conceptually—at the center of the Dispute.
No participant in the Dispute questions the validity of nationalism and the
notion that the nation-state is the form of state adequate to and charac-
teristic of modern society. Lazarus and Cohen are most explicit in arguing
that the building of nations and nation-states is a crucial civilizational and
ethical endeavor for humanity; Cohen goes as far as declaring the nation
as significant as religion.
All contributors emphasize that the nation ought to create unity as well as
the consciousness of unity, that is, national consciousness. However, Philipp-
son and Bamberger in particular emphasize that “exaggerated” nationalism can
“degenerate” and become exclusionary. For them, “exaggerated nationalism”
overlaps with socialism and threatens the liberal-capitalist social order. In
the case of pan-Slavism, Treitschke, too, rejects a variation of (quasi-racial)
nationalism because it undermines rather than strengthens “healthy patrio-
tism.” Cohen warns that nationalism must not become a “moral norm” and
must not exclude from the nation those who do not have, or do not want to
have, another nation (such as, it is implied, the German Jews).

National Spirit and Racial Matter;

Intermarriage and the Amalgamation of Tribes
Treitschke, Bamberger, and Mommsen hold that nations are constituted by
the amalgamation of tribes. In the process—a crucial aspect of historical
178 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

progress—the nation’s tribal constituents have to lose to a large extent their

particular characteristics. However, Mommsen also emphasizes that it is
important that their differing particular characteristics go into the national
amalgam. Only Naudh seems to disagree with the basic theory that the na-
tion is constituted through an amalgamation of different elements. While
Treitschke deplores the decrease of conversions and intermarriage as a nega-
tive side effect of emancipation, Naudh argues that intermarriage is not a
means of assimilation at all but helps further Jewish domination. Cohen
holds that a degree of racial unity of the nation is necessary and that the
nation ought to develop “its racial type.” Only Cohen and Naudh (neither
of whom subscribes to a strict mind-body dualism) reject the conception
formulated by Lazarus (and silently shared by all the others) that national
spirit ought to overcome and transcend racial-corporeal matter. Unlike
Naudh, however, Cohen argues for assimilation, implying that “racial type”
is in itself already the result of historical development: national “spirit” and
racial/tribal “body” overcome each other in a dialectical way, resulting in a
new national spirit and body. He also holds that although “racial instinct” is
“natural,” it must not be allowed to degenerate into a principle of exclusion
of those “who do not have, nor want to have, another nation.”

Objective versus Subjective Elements of the Nation

Lazarus also entertains some kind of a dialectical tension between what he
calls the “objective” and “subjective” elements of the nation. While language
(not race) is the most important objective element in the formation of a
nation, the nation is constituted by a subjective, spiritual as well as historical
constellation that intervenes in objectively given conditions. Although not
independent from material conditions, the nation is “a spiritual creation of
the individuals who constitute it.” The national spirit is in turn, however, a
product of common history and destiny (which are at least partly objective
elements). Despite his insistence on the relevance of “objective” factors,
Lazarus rejects the reference to “race” because it means undermining the
human effort to spiritualize existence.
Naudh embraces a static concept of “race” that the “national spirit” cannot
 Dissent and Consensus in the Antisemitism Dispute 179

overcome. Bamberger argues that the category of “race” has been adopted
only to further legitimize an injustice that used to be justified on grounds
of religion. The discussion of “race” is but a pretext for the continued and
anachronistic existence of an ancient antipathy.

Christian Nation, Secular State, Religious Form

Another bone of contention is the relationship between religion and na-
tion. Treitschke writes that the Germans are a “Christian nation,” while
the German state—as a modern state—is secular. However, the Germans
ought to “preserve the Christian character of their institutions.” Treitschke
and Cohen agree that different religions can only temporarily coexist in
one nationality and with one religion ruling over the other(s). Philippson
and Lazarus argue that politics is beyond religion and that the Jews ought
to maintain their religious particularity. Cohen rejects this as a “flawed
liberal slogan” and argues that all members of a nation ought to participate
in that nation’s religious foundation. However, he also rejects Treitschke’s
notion that Judaism is the religion of “an alien tribe”: for Cohen common
religiosity is what matters, while the difference between Jewish and Christian
religious form is unproblematic: also, the German Jews “breathe out of the
culture of Christianity.” Naudh argues that religion is the supreme expres-
sion of morality (Sittlichkeit) and as such pivotal to the national character
of a people. Like Cohen and Treitschke, he rejects the idea that politics is
unaffected by religion. Unlike Cohen, however, he does not distinguish
between religiosity and religious form, and this brings him to a different
conclusion: under the condition of modernity—where the state is based on
nationality, to which religion is crucial—the separation of state and church
has become meaningless.

Assimilation and the Unity of the State

Jewish assimilation is advocated by all contributors except Naudh, who does
not believe that assimilation is possible. Treitschke’s position is ambivalent:
he advocates assimilation, but his portrayal of the Jews and their culture
seems to suggest implicitly the conclusion (drawn by Naudh explicitly on
180 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

the grounds of “race”) that the Jews cannot assimilate to the German nation.
Treitschke supports his claim that complete Jewish amalgamation is impos-
sible with the further claim that the “abyss” between Jews and Gentiles is
“thousands” of years old and especially made permanent by the fact that the
Jews are a “nation without a state.” This brings them inevitably into conflict
with any existing state’s endeavors to protect its cultural-political unity.
The conclusion has to be for the Jews to act with discretion and modesty in
order not to provoke any escalation of this unbridgeable contradiction. In
this context Treitschke refers affirmatively to the Roman state’s persecution
of the Christians as these were then seen as just another Jewish sect. Cassel
points out that this contradicts Treitschke’s repeated invocations of Chris-
tianity. It clearly shows that for Treitschke religion is subordinate to raison
d’état. Graetz responds on the level of historical facts, trying to disprove the
existence of official Roman anti-Judaism. The crux of Treitschke’s argument
that Jewish (or rather, any) cultural particularism has by necessity to be
overruled by “the hard necessity of the unity of the state” is in this context
not challenged by any respondent.

Religion, Religiosity, Denomination, and Glaubensart

Treitschke as well as Lazarus and Cohen discuss the question of the relation-
ship between Christian and Jewish religion under the perspective of what
it means for national unification, although Cohen includes more strictly
theological arguments in his discourse than do Treitschke and Lazarus.
Cohen and Treitschke insist—against Lazarus—that religion is central to
nation building, but Cohen disagrees from Treitschke on the definition
of religion, employing a (Kantian) distinction between specific “religions”
and “religiosity.” While Treitschke emphasizes that Protestant and Catholic
denominations can come together in the nation because they share the
same religion—excluding the Jews from this possibility—Cohen asserts
that adherents of all forms of religion (Glaubensarten) can come together
as long as they share Religion in the sense of (ethical) religiosity.
While Treitschke and Naudh see Christianity as a departure and a pro-
gressive development away from Judaism, Lazarus and Cohen maintain that
 Dissent and Consensus in the Antisemitism Dispute 181

Christianity has added a new element to the evolution of religion without

making Judaism redundant or anachronistic. Lazarus argues for maintaining
religious difference despite national amalgamation, and Cohen argues for
only temporary religious difference until a higher synthesis of Judaism and
Protestantism is achieved. All authors rely on a concept of progress: while
Treitschke argues that Judaism has already been sublated and overcome—that
is, rendered anachronistic—by Protestantism, Cohen expects this to happen
in the future. Lazarus sees growing diversity itself as a sign of progress. For
Naudh, even those elements of Judaism that were absorbed into Christianity
are evil and need to be eliminated: Christianity came into its own only in
its successful history within the “Aryan peoples,” not in its futile attempts
to win over the Jews.

Possibility and Impossibility of Assimilation

There is general agreement in the Dispute that the Jews were and are obliged
to “become Germans” as part of the “barter,” as it were, of emancipation for
assimilation. Treitschke claims they have not yet done so sufficiently (with
which some of the interlocutors also agree) and casts doubt on whether they
are actually capable of complete assimilation. Here lies a fundamental fault
line that runs not only between Treitschke and his liberal critics but also
through Treitschke’s argument itself when he demands, on the one hand,
assimilation, but on the other hand denounces it as impossible. With the
second face of his discourse Treitschke comes close to Naudh’s unambigu-
ous position. Treitschke explicitly chooses a polemic against Graetz as his
vehicle for demonstrating that the antisemitism dispute is essentially about
the question of nationality. Instrumental to this choice is the argument
about the differing evaluation of the heritage of German-Jewish culture.
Graetz’s writing vacillates between a (“proto-Zionist”) Jewish nationalist
sentiment and a critical perspective on German culture that emphasizes
the failure of German Enlightenment writers to support unequivocally the
cause of Jewish emancipation. Treitschke rejects paradigmatic figures of
German-Jewish culture (with the exception of Gabriel Riesser) as well as Ger-
man non-Jews who were supportive of the Jewish cause (Lessing). Through
182 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

selective quotation he constructs an exaggerated portrayal of Graetz as a

Jewish nationalist and implies that Graetz’s attitude is representative of that
of the German Jews of the time. Joël points out the contradictory character
of Treitschke’s accusing the Jews of fancying themselves as non-Germans
when they ought to embrace their Germanness, and at the same time of
being aliens who only masquerade as Germans for tactical reasons. Joël is
also the only author who defends Graetz against Treitschke’s, Cohen’s, and
Philippson’s verdicts. Lazarus, Cohen, and Meyer unequivocally assert that
the German Jews are Germans. Lazarus, Bamberger, and most strongly Cohen
regret having to respond “as Jews” at all. Philippson reproaches Cohen for
directing the demand to become (more) German at the Jews when it should
be directed at all Germans. While rejecting the notion of a Jewish nationality,
all respondents nevertheless assert and defend some sense of Jewishness that
would be compatible with assimilation. Apart from Joël, only Oppenheim
rejects the notion that the Jews lack Germanness. For him, the Jews’ defend-
ing their emancipation does not contradict but is rather evidence of their
determination to assimilate to German nationality and culture.

Emancipation for Assimilation; Universal versus Positive Law

Treitschke’s remarks on legal emancipation are highly ambivalent. On the
one hand, he endorses “civil equality” as a general mark of “civilization,”
which has to be paid for, however, with complete assimilation. On the other
hand, he implies that the Jews’ “tribal characteristics” do not allow complete
assimilation to happen, which in turn means that their emancipation can
never be “complete.” Joël and Philippson endorse a natural law concep-
tion of civil rights, while “Börne” claims that civil and human rights are
inseparable because they emerge together within the context of (bourgeois)
society. Philippson interprets Treitschke’s position in the light of a formu-
lation by another anti-Jewish pamphletist who argued that civil rights for
the Jews are rooted in the “positive will of the state” and the “overall culture
of its subjects,” not in the individualistic concept of universal natural law.
Philippson qualifies the natural law position by stating that the state cannot
deny civil rights to anyone “born within the country to parents who were
 Dissent and Consensus in the Antisemitism Dispute 183

also born there.” “Börne” asserts that rights are formulated irrespective of
individual merit. He strongly endorses the necessity of assimilation but
argues that only general social and political progress can deliver it. Cohen
rejects the unmediated concept of natural law and argues that the action of
the state is, or ought to be, rooted in how the particular nation conceives of
the universal “moral law.” By insisting on how the universal is articulated in
a specific national culture, Cohen attempts to mediate the two concepts of
“right”—the universal one and the positive, historically relative one.

German Disunity and the Power of Jewry

Treitschke’s “demand” is simply that the Jews give up their remaining res-
ervations about “becoming Germans.” The antisemitic movement (which
is the German people’s response to the lack of respect on the side of the
Jews) should help the Germans reaching “a stricter concept of the state
and its obligations” and “a more vigorous national consciousness.” Only
civil society—not the state—can solve the “Jewish question” caused by the
arrogance of the Jews. Inasmuch as the Germans have been indulging in
tolerance, Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, and relativism (endangering
their own “firm religious conviction”), they are complicit in the “power of
Jewry.” Only a strong reassertion of Christian conviction and the overcom-
ing of clerical disunity can create a situation in which the Germans will be
able to “afford” being tolerant. The German nation demands from the Jews
nothing it would not demand from all its citizens. If the Jews, however, con-
tinue acting as if building a “state within the state” and frustrating German
expectations of their assimilation, they may provoke not only the reversal
of legal emancipation but also anti-Jewish pogroms.
Direct responses to these aspects of Treitschke’s discourse are few. Naudh
argues straightforwardly that the Jews are “a distinct people, not a religious
sect” and form “a nation within the nation.” They need to be treated as a
foreign, conquering nation; not individual Jews but the Jews as a people are
evil, and specific legislation is needed to deal with them. In the first place it
ought to restrict economic freedoms and freedom of movement. Similarly,
Endner demands resettlement and “productivization” of the Jews.
184 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

Breßlau reproaches Treitschke for having failed to make any specific sug-
gestions for how to solve the “Jewish question”: Treitschke merely repeats
old accusations that help to make the existing barriers higher and stronger.
Breßlau agrees about what is “evil and mean” within Jewry and what needs
to be fought. However, this fight can only be fought together if Treitschke
lends his support to defend Jewish honor. Breßlau’s practical suggestion
is that representations of Jews in literature or onstage be modeled on the
middle-class normality of German Jewry. Mommsen reproaches Treitschke
for having violated a specific duty that the “better part of the nation” has
toward nation building: the duty to hold down “sentiments of difference”
felt by other members of the nation. Mommsen holds that it is crucial to the
process of the nation’s maturing toward self-government that its representa-
tives are able to discuss the “idiosyncracies” of particular groups within the
nation with “moderation and forbearance.” The nation owes to itself the
protection of the Jews’ religion and peculiarity, irrespective of their conduct.
However, Mommsen warns that the state cannot do more than warrant legal
equality: “we”—that is, the national-liberal elite—cannot defend the Jews
from popular hostility based on a sense of difference. Since Christianity still
defines international civilization, the Jews’ refusal to convert remains a dan-
gerous and difficult personal choice. Mommsen’s only practical suggestion
is that in order not to provoke a civil war that would endanger the Jews as
well as national unity, Jews need to understand their obligation to practice
their religion in private, not in public. They ought to give up all not strictly
religious communal Jewish institutions that could be interpreted by others
as expressions of an anachronistic national particularism.
Bamberger’s position is in this respect not very different from Mommsen’s.
Bamberger argues that Treitschke acted with the best patriotic intentions but
that these were frustrated by Treitschke’s assertions about the detrimental
influence of the German Jews and his failure to reject the antisemitic agita-
tion. Treitschke’s, and more generally the antisemites’, indictments can be
expected to reinforce separatist sentiments on the side of the German Jews
wherever such sentiments still exist. They damage the process of nation
building. Bamberger’s argument rests on a distinction between Treitschke’s
 Dissent and Consensus in the Antisemitism Dispute 185

good (liberal) intentions and an anachronistic, anti-Jewish “intellectual ten-

dency.” Bamberger appreciates Treitschke’s concern with restoring Christian
religion as a bulwark against the threat of Social Democracy, but he has
reservations as to whether it is feasible to defend bourgeois order with the
help of religion. However, Bamberger insists it should be done without
attacking the Jews, since they are allies of order and respectability, not of
disorder and socialism.

Some Extent of Consensus

The discussion and analysis of the multiple and complex differences among
the positions held in the Dispute has also shown that all involved agree on
what needs or deserves to be discussed and what goes unquestioned. The
foremost and most general consensus is that the nation-state is the form
of state most adequate to modern society, and that this form of state and
society needs to warrant its cohesion through some form of national culture,
including a sense of morality. Furthermore, there is a general agreement
that morality is in some way intertwined with religion. However, opinions
vary as to whether national culture implies a shared (positive) religion or
merely general religiosity: the shared, national-liberal discourse is based on
state, nation, culture, and morality as a chain of closely related concepts,
while the link from culture and morality to religion or religiosity is less
clear and thus fiercely contended. It is in this last element that the divide
between the liberalism of the defenders of emancipation and the illiberalism
of Treitschke and the antisemites seems to be located. This observation must
throw the concept of liberalism into relief, however: Treitschke presents his
own orientation as a turning away from liberalism, and while some see it the
same way, others continue to address him as a fellow liberal whose illiberal
aberrations may be merely local and temporary, whereas the straightforward
antisemites remain skeptical of him for exactly the same reason. Arguably, it
was because he remained basically a liberal that Treitschke found little fault
with the “Declaration of the Notables” and initially missed the point of it.
Conceptions of “culture” in the Dispute are as if on a sliding scale, with
one extreme being a monolithic, racial concept of culture, a majority opinion
186 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute

that culture is based on an “amalgam,” and the opposite pole holding that
culture is, and ought to be, “mixed” and open-ended. Those who think
culture is an “amalgam” think, or at least seem not to reject, that there is a
point when enough “mixing” has taken place, that is, when the amalgam is
a quasi-“pure” culture. There is little opposition to the notion that immi-
gration by “Eastern Jews” challenges the sense of who the members of the
nation are: the dissent is about whether or not the immigrants are numerous
enough to cause a problem.
All National Liberals except Treitschke view the movement that refers
to itself with the neologism “antisemitic” as a threat to national unity: the
nationalism of the antisemites is dangerous because it is “exaggerated,” a
notion that resonates with Treitschke’s own rejection of pan-Germanism
and pan-Slavism. The closest thing to a definition of what exactly constitutes
“exaggerated nationalism” is that it turns on the nationalist endeavor itself.
It is in this sense that antisemites appear as “enemies of the Reich” and of
National Liberalism.
There is a consensus that some groups are “too different” to be included
in the nation. It is unclear, however, where the threshold of difference lies
that one ought not to cross in order to be recognized as a member of the
nation. The defenders of the Jews argue either that the Jews are less differ-
ent than the antisemites claim or that in spite of being different they are
not numerous enough to do much damage. It is also pointed out that they
constitute not the only, and not even the most pressing, problem: other
groups (Catholics, socialists) are more different as well as more numerous,
that is, much more dangerous.
There is a clearly articulated clash of opinions between, on the one hand,
Treitschke’s concern about the “Jewish” (i.e., modern capitalist) threat to
the Germans’ “good-natured willingness to work” and, on the other hand,
the support for market capitalism and utilitarian ethics. It is significant that
Treitschke, not normally one to easily change his mind following criticism,
abandoned this issue straight after it was signaled to him that his endorsing
the “anti-capitalist” aspect of the antisemitic program contradicted his well-
known polemics against Katheder socialism. In the context of the Dispute,
 Dissent and Consensus in the Antisemitism Dispute 187

not even Treitschke’s rhetorical abilities sufficed to formulate the attack on

“Manchesterism” (in political terms, on left liberalism) without sounding
like a “socialist.”
Furthermore, on the more philosophical level there is a general consen-
sus (excluding only Naudh and Endner) that “spirit” ought to prevail over
“matter.” The adoption or condemnation of the demand for “racial unity”
is dependent on whether reference to “race” is deemed compatible with a
general framework of idealism (Cohen, Treitschke) or whether it means
succumbing to “materialism” (Lazarus). There is a consensus that there is
progress in the evolution of religion—a fundamental liberal concept—but
there is dissent about whether each step invalidates all previous ones, or
whether the remnants of earlier stages in the development remain valid
and legitimate, or will remain valid only until a perfect synthesis will have
been reached.
There is a consensus that “the particular” needs to feed into, and be
overcome by, the quasi-universal (the nation), and that the universal and
the historically relative need to be mediated. Civic rights as well as politi-
cal forms and institutions need to be mediated with historically specific
national-cultural traditions. The dissent is over which side in this process
ought to prevail.
All in all it seems that the contradiction between Treitschke’s “undoubt-
edly good intentions” and their adverse effects are connected in ways that
the liberal critics of antisemitism were not able to pin down. Not one of the
liberal politicians and academics but—out of all people—the priest, Paulus
Cassel, gave a hint that no one considered worthy of discussion: that the
public discussion on whether Jewish emancipation should be revoked was
an indication that (liberal) society is lacking in liberty in a generic sense.
This section is devoted to exploring the theoretical implications of the
Berlin Antisemitism Dispute. Taking its cues from the textual analysis,
the discussion focuses on the interrelations among liberalism, nationalism,
and antisemitism, aiming at theoretical-conceptual as well as historical-
political contextualization of the Dispute. In the exploration of National
Liberalism in chapter 9, special attention will be given to Treitschke’s
role; chapter 10 will discuss the concept of nationalism, especially in the
German imperial context; chapter 8 will point to some of the continuities
and the ruptures in the development of nineteenth-century antisemitism
in Germany.
 Eight. Antisemitism

The Viennese rabbi Adolf Jellinek predicted in 1866 that the antithesis
“Christians against Jews” was going to be replaced by that of “Aryans against
Semites,” the “new Jewish question.”1 The emergence of a movement that
chose to refer to itself with the neologism “antisemitic” around 1880 proved
him right. The social and intellectual process that found expression in the
new concept, however, reached back much farther. The rather ambiguous
phenomenon that can best be described as “modern antisemitism” is the
product of the specific late-nineteenth-century synthesis of pro- and anti-
modern forms of antisemitism. The product of this synthesis is “modern” not
because of any of its formal aspects (being formulated in racial as opposed
to theological language, e.g.) but because of its specific social content: it is
a form of anti-modernism, anti-capitalism, and anti-liberalism that is not
one. Throughout the twentieth century and still today, this has remained
the specific nature of modern antisemitism.
The word “Semitic” had been established as a collective term for the Hebrew,
Phoenician, Arabic, Aramaic, and Ethiopian languages by eighteenth-century
scholars.2 The concept of a “Semitic race” was introduced by historians,
philologists, and political commentators in the 1840s.3 The exact origin of
the term “antisemitic” is not known. The earliest known reference seems to
be an article in the Allgemeine Zeitung des deutschen Judentums (September
2, 1879) reporting the announcement of an “antisemitic journal” by Wilhelm
Marr.4 At the end of the same month there were advertisements for the
192 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

foundation of an “Antisemitic League” which did, however, little more than

propagate the word. The breakthrough of the term as a new political keyword
occurred in the course of the year 1880. The new term was “conveniently
inaccurate,” as it implied more than “just” hatred of the Jews but still left no
doubts about the target.5 It also “tended to load on the Jews . . . the whole
weight of ‘Asiatic barbarism.’”6 The proponents of “antisemitism” claimed
that “Semites” (in particular, Jews as the most prominent and exemplary
group) had “always” been hated, although the new term was chosen to sig-
nal, and in the consciousness of, its modernity. This double character—in
itself a modern feature of antisemitism—resembles the like ambivalence of
the concept of the modern nation. Those who coined the new word (and
many contemporaries) seem to have felt that they “invented” something
radically new; however, the explicit reference to the notion of a “Semitic
race” was not more than a shift in emphasis within a discourse significant
parts of which had presupposed that notion for a long time (see below).
The words “antisemitism” and “Jew-hatred”—as far as the modern period
is concerned—are, and should be used as, synonyms: an overemphasis on
a rupture around 1880 (when the former term was coined) is misleading
because it gives undue credit to the antisemitic claim that the movement that
referred to itself with that name was something new and different from, for
example, the Jew-hatred of 1819 or 1848. Furthermore, the overlap between
Jew-hatred that is articulated within the rhetoric of race and those forms of
Jew-hatred that do not use that same rhetoric is so strong that such a con-
ceptual distinction obscures more than it clarifies.7 This is why also Volkov,
for example, writes that the role of racism “in shaping ‘modern’ antisemitism
was less than crucial.”8 Use of the word “race” meant, as it were, “Look at
me, I am radical!” It was a specific, deliberately offensive form of saying
something that could also be said, and had been said, in other ways.
The most perplexing aspect of nineteenth-century antisemitism is that
hatred of Jews could express opposition to modern liberal society, national-
ism, and “bourgeois revolution” as well as (nationalist, bourgeois, liberal)
opposition to reaction and counterrevolution. As will become clear, modern
antisemitism mirrors in this respect also the fundamental structure of the
 Antisemitism 193

discourse of modern liberalism. Modern, late-nineteenth-century antisemi-

tism originated historically from two antagonistic sources at the same time,
and each side left its traces in all subsequent forms and manifestations of
antisemitism. How to take account of this peculiar phenomenon, appreciating
the branching out of an increasing number of differential and contradictory,
even antagonistic, manifestations rather than fragmenting the historiography
of nineteenth-century antisemitism to so many descriptions of successive
distinct phenomena, must be the touchstone of any interpretation of modern
antisemitism. The short period of anti-feudal reform in Prussia between 1807
and 1815 gave birth to a form of antisemitism that expressed conservative
aristocratic opposition to modernization. The Prussian conservative landlord
Ludwig von der Marwitz argued in 1811 that the legal introduction of the
free alienability of real estate made Prussia “a new-fangled Jew-state [ein
neumodischer Judenstaat].”9 The antisemitic German-nationalist radicals
from the period of the anti-Napoleonic wars (Arndt, Fries) were anti-reform
and anti-French.10 The anti-Jewish and anti-French agitation of the “Wart-
burgfest” (1817) included celebrating Luther as well as burning copies of the
Code Napoléon. Anti-modernist antisemites adopted in this context the idea
first developed by the French Catholic reaction to the French Revolution
that the Jews were “useful instruments” for Illuminati and Jacobins who
were carrying out a conspiracy against religion, monarchy, civil society, and
property.11 Anti-modernist antisemitism evolved suddenly in Prussia and
destroyed friendly relations between aristocracy and Jews where they had
existed, such as in the Berlin salon scene, but it decreased when the reform
period ended with the Vienna Congress: when reaction ruled securely, im-
agery of the Jews as dangerous modernizers was less attractive.
Conservative antisemitism (often reduced to forms of “mild discrimina-
tion”) continued to exist next to a competing and initially more marginal
form: liberal, anti-aristocratic, pro-modernization antisemitism. A Prussian
anti-feudal pamphlet from 1807 claimed that the Jews formed a symbio-
sis with the nobility.12 This line of anti-feudal, pro-bourgeois (and in this
sense, liberal) antisemitism exploited similarities of some aristocratic and
(as seen at the time) traditional Jewish values (social conservatism, the
194 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

emphasis on the importance of family links, an a-national, inter-European

orientation). Arendt argues that the view held by early liberals in Prussia
and France, namely, that aristocracy and (privileged) Jews constituted an
interested alliance against the rising bourgeoisie, may have been not com-
pletely counterfactual at the time.13
Populist antisemitism before 1848 was rooted in the anti-capitalist and
anti-modernist moral sentiments of the petite bourgeoisie. Although they
were “related in many ways to the conservative world-view,” they were ar-
ticulated as a petit bourgeois form of liberalism: primarily, they were still
pitted against aristocratic, old-regime domination.14 From the perspective
of artisans and other traditional “middle-class” groups, the ascendancy of
the Jews from the very lowest to fairly comfortable positions contrasted
with their own fears of decline. This produced a rhetoric that could see
“the puffing locomotive” as a work of demonic Jews.15 An example of this
“liberal” form of antisemitism is a pamphlet distributed in Bavaria in May
1819 by a lawyer, Thomas August Scheuring, who argued that Jews consid-
ered themselves only temporarily to be living in Diaspora until “their great
Messiah” would lead them to Palestine. Therefore, “the Jews [could] never
fully amalgamate with the indigenous, national people and become a part of
that harmonious whole that we call a bourgeois society.”16 This pamphlet—
perhaps the earliest example of a quasi-liberal position that anticipates the
basic structure of Treitschke’s attitude—was debated in the local press and
village pubs immediately before the Hep-Hep riots in Würzburg in August
1819. Local debates and Hep-Hep riots coincided with the Bavarian Diet’s
discussing the emancipation of the Jews.17 The riots were a political protest
against emancipation and invoked—among other arguments—the notion
that the Jews were unable to be part of bourgeois society.18 The sociohistorical
interpretation of the riots is contested. The socioeconomic background was
that the ending of the Napoleonic “Continental System” resulted in cheap
English commodities (especially textiles) entering the continental European
market. In particular in south Germany this had severely damaging effects
on local production and distribution. The imported products seem to have
been sold mainly by Jewish traders.19 These issues were fiercely discussed also
 Antisemitism 195

at the universities and within student fraternities. Nevertheless, Würzburg

(like other places where anti-Jewish riots occurred) was then not a place
of particularly extreme poverty.20 While it is evident that the (journalistic
and state-official) discourse about the riots consistently claimed that the
urban and rural poor suffered from and took revenge for Jewish usury,
such contemporary claims may themselves have been antisemitic.21 It seems
far from clear that the rioters were actually debtors and the victims their
creditors.22
The period before 1848 also saw other examples of liberal opposition to
Jewish emancipation: when the Baden reform government abolished the
distinction between “citizen of a town” (Ortsbürger) and “protected citizen”
(Schutzbürger) in 1831, the Jews were exempted due to a motion brought in
by the Liberal politician Karl von Rotteck. Subsequently, only Jews could
be Schutzbürger in Baden towns—their relative discrimination had actually
increased: a social divide between full citizens and protected subjects had
turned into a divide between Christian citizens and Jewish non-citizens.23
Antisemitism changed to the extent that people got used to “demons” such
as locomotives, liberalism, and the capitalist mode of production. The period
between 1848 and 1871 saw the majority of the landed aristocracy as well as
the more wealthy petite bourgeoisie join the dynamic, capitalist sections of
society and increasingly adopt the capitalist methods they had previously
condemned as “Jewish.” This condemnation was transformed in the process
if not given up: capitalism and liberalism were in their eyes—so to speak—
”baptized” to the effect that only their destructive, radical, incompatible, or
unpleasant sides continued to be referred to as “Jewish.”24
Modern antisemitism in the more narrow sense—the “antisemitism of
the industrial age”25—was an even less homogeneous phenomenon than
that of the reform and reaction periods following the French Revolution:
next to the (now smaller) number of those who still hated the Jews for
standing in the way of progress and the (still large) number of those (mainly
conservatives) who hated them for ushering in progress at all, there were
those antisemites “who were, in effect, a disappointed second generation
of the National Liberal bourgeoisie,”26 a “bourgeois movement against the
196 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

principles of bourgeois society.”27 Although they also inherited some of the

petit bourgeois, pre-1848 (artisanal) liberalism, their rejection of capitalist
modernity was much more selective. Only rather marginal figures among
the national-liberal educated bourgeois would completely reject industrial
society; but still, many saw themselves disappointed when they realized
that the result of the process they had supported was quite different from
what they had expected it to be: a modern state based on and a promoter of
capitalist economic development. They tended to blame what they would
see as the “exaggerations” of its modern capitalist elements on the influence
of the “Jewish spirit,” rather than on the specific historical dynamic of which
their own involvement had been a part. Many other antisemites came from
“the disappointed democratic camp,” such as Richard Wagner, Wilhelm
Marr, and Bruno Bauer.28 Their antisemitism resulted from disappointment
with either the failure or the unwanted effects of the partial successes of
the left-liberal, democratic movement, combined with their refusal to join
the only credible inheritor of 1848 radicalism, Social Democracy. A further
differentiation has to be made between those who despised liberal capital-
ism when it worked smoothly and those who despised it only in its periods
of crisis such as the one after 1873.29 Respectively, there is a sliding scale of
antisemites who would (with similar rhetoric) want to go back to whatever
they imagined pre-capitalist society had been like—reactionaries—and those
who would intend to make the existing system work better—reformists.
Perhaps the only element that constitutes a real novelty in the second half
of the 1870s was the emergence of antisemitism as a “worldview.” This aspect
of antisemitism was more than an anti-Jewish program but offered “the
travesty of a theory of society,” more specifically of “bourgeois society in
crisis.”30 As a worldview, antisemitism promised that the destruction of the
“evil” principle of Judentum would mean the victory of a “good” principle,
while other forms of antisemitism also knew of other evils that were not
supposed to be automatically resolved together with the “Jewish question.”31
However, this particular form of antisemitism only gained some currency
during and since the 1890s and therefore falls outside the demarcations of
the present discussion.32
 Antisemitism 197

The Jew-hatred of peasants, for example, was probably not often intense-
ly ideological. The peasants might have hated “their” Jewish middlemen,
but they still had an awareness that they belonged to the same rural world
within which they depended on each other.33 Dan White writes: “Periodi-
cally anti-Semitic excesses broke out in Hessen during the Middle Ages and
Reformation, outbursts of the usual sort that took the Jews as surrogates
for feudal lords or urban patricians. But these abated during the absolutist
era between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Jewish life, as a part
of the rural existence in Hessen, remained relatively undisturbed until the
French Revolution and Napoleonic order revolutionized both.”34 In Hessen,
as White points out, antisemitism became hegemonic only in areas in which
“peasant liberation was a mocking euphemism.”35 The rural population
had to repay the state for the compensation it had granted the nobility, and
therefore the “liberated” peasants had to take out loans, often from local
Jewish merchants or traders.
The urban middle classes were differently positioned. “Insecurity and
instability were the dominant notes of their existence,” or at least of their
consciousness. The lower-middle-class youth of Christian and Jewish back-
ground were competing directly for social advancement; peasants and village
Jews were objectively bound up together and on the decline together.36 The
specific form of antisemitism of the “small people” that was based in “mate-
rial interest, social envy and the craving for social status” and the belief in
“the identity and moral inferiority of Jewry, usury and the rule of capital”
became “something much more encompassing”—namely, the worldview
of modern antisemitism—only when “politicians, agitators and ideological
fanatics” mirrored back to them their sentiments in systematic form seizing
the opportunity given by circumstance.37
The main tendency of antisemitism after 1848 reflects the partial conver-
gence of the main ideological positions in the political arena tout court, liberal-
ism and conservatism.38 Within this framework, elements of the (reactionary)
discourse that finds the Jews too modern can be found in combination with
elements of the (modernization and emancipation) discourse that finds
the Jews too unmodern. The majority of antisemitic pamphlet literature
198 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

(which seems mostly to have been written by people from petit bourgeois
background) in the nineteenth century can be located somewhere between
the anti-modern tendency and that of those who were disappointed by the
failure of modernization to take place thoroughly enough. Treitschke’s posi-
tion, although it is bildungsbürgerlich (from the educated bourgeois elite)
rather than petit bourgeois, is characterized by the same ambiguity.

Antisemitism and the Concept of “Race”

Volkov writes that the role of racism in shaping “modern” antisemitism
was “less than crucial.”39 This is only true, however, if by “racism” is meant
the explicit racist discourse of the late nineteenth century. An altogether
different issue is the relevance of the concept of “race” (as distinct from the
word “race”).
The familiar typological distinction between (racial) “antisemitism” and
(not racial) “Jew-hatred,” “anti-Judaism,” or “traditional antisemitism” tends
to obscure and play down the danger of the latter.40 The suspicion that even
a converted Jew “always remains a Jew”—not a pervasive but neither an
unusual element of “traditional anti-Judaism”—has always been implic-
itly racial, whether or not the word “race” is actually used.41 The notion of
an unchangeable Jewish character was already present in some of Luther’s
writings; they were racist avant la lettre. Caricatures of Jews that constructed
“typical” physical characteristics of Jews, that is, a “racial type,” became
common as early as in the second half of the seventeenth century.42 Sartre
showed that at the basis of race-thinking, long before any reference to alleged
“biology” came into play, is the notion that social groups relate to each other
the same way individuals in society do. The notion that every social group
has a “collective will” or agency accommodates the idealistic view that social
processes are caused by “wills”—which manifest themselves in the form
of intrigues, cabals, perfidy, courage, and virtue—with the contradictory
experience of the relative powerlessness of one’s individual will.43 If a social
group is supposed to have a will and agency, it must be thought of as a quasi-
personality, modeled on the bourgeois individual. For the antisemite, the
Jewishness that makes the Jews Jews is a substance “analogous to phlogiston,”
 Antisemitism 199

the “substance” that in the nineteenth century was thought to constitute

the “matter” of electricity.44 The developed, allegedly biological concept of
“race” is only a secondary “slender scientific coating” of this much older
and more fundamental—namely, societal—conviction.45 The word “Jews”
and the phrase “the Jewish people” referred until the end of the eighteenth
century to a group constituted by its religion as well as its status outside
(although not independent from) ständische (corporate) society.46 To the
extent that within the context of that society social position was static and
quasi-inherited anyway, a specific notion of inherited—that is, racial—
characteristics was unnecessary and hardly existed.47 From the eighteenth
century on, a radical and momentous change occurred: “Jews” became an
anthropological category. In the context of “Protestant theology of the En-
lightenment, idealism and liberalism,”48 those elements of Christianity that
enlightened critique aimed to challenge tended to be identified as not just
false theological doctrine but the anachronistic manifestations of a “spirit
of Judaism,” a spiritual force that needed to be restricted to its proper realm,
the ghetto of the Jewish subculture. A template was established: the same
“spirit of Judaism” that was found to have corrupted and falsified Christian
religion subsequently could also be held responsible for the wrongs of Chris-
tian society. In this process, Judaism was transformed from a theological to
a secular, anthropological-historical category.49 While in the pre-modern
context, religion could be thought of as constituting a social-cultural-ethnic
group (a “nation” in the rather vague, pre-modern meaning of the term),
for the historical-anthropological thinking predominant in the nineteenth
century, religion could not be more than the epiphenomenon of an under-
lying national, cultural/historical substance. This substance is what finally
came to be called “race.”50 In the pre-modern context, a statement such as
that the Jews are a nation constituted by their religion was a meaningful
statement; in the modern context it is not.
As in Treitschke’s case, the antisemitic discourse often entertains the no-
tion that there must be a reason why the Jews have been objects of hate in
so many instances and over such a long time. Antisemites have always been
keen to demonstrate the antiquity of Jew-hatred: if not only Goethe and
200 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

Napoleon but even “the Romans” hated the Jews, it cannot be completely
wrong. Antisemitism tends to suggest a specific construction of a history
of animosities against Jews. The wider the temporal framework for such
a construction—that is, the more transhistorical Jew-hatred is claimed to
be—the more transhistorical must be the supposedly self-identical object
of that “eternal” hatred, the Jews. This process inevitably produces a “racial”
concept. Again: whether or not the word “race” is used is of only secondary
importance. Those who argue in such a mode identify, or at least ally, them-
selves with the long line of perpetrators of what they claim are antisemitic
acts. Their racism is “the attempt of the persecutors and discriminators
to explain their own practice of persecution to themselves” in a way that
necessarily obscures the actual history of those practices.51 The concept
of “race” is also implicit in the uneven logic of the emancipation bargain:
if toleration led to the Jews’ becoming assimilated and civilized, this was
evidence of the validity of the idea that emancipation leads to assimilation.
If it did not, this was evidence of the unassimilable nature of the Jews, or at
least their (tendentially eternal) “immaturity.” The concept of an inferior
“race” (whether the word is actually used or not) functions here, too, as a
way of explaining the failure of the emancipation doctrine. Rather than
admitting that the doctrine does not work, it is argued that the stubborn
Jews are beings outside the doctrine’s range of validity: they are not human,
assimilable beings, capable of being fitted into bourgeois society. It is on these
grounds that the centrality of the demand for “amalgamation”—demanded
by the antisemites and advocated, or perhaps rather conceded, by most of
the defenders of Jewish emancipation—can be recognized as the key to un-
derstanding the discursive slippery slope from liberal to straightforwardly
racist antisemitism. (The violence, and even an intimation of its industrial
form, can already be felt in the metaphor of “amalgamation,” which is taken
from heavy industry.) The more bourgeois society has become total in the
course of the twentieth century, be that in its totalitarian or the liberal/
social-democratic variants, the more it has developed its “rage against dif-
ference,”52 the more critics of that society will be attracted by the quality of
unassimilability of the small remaining pockets of apparently pre-bourgeois
 Antisemitism 201

groups: blue-collar proletarians, real women, authentic Jews, noble savages.

Their very existence seems to promise (or menace with) the possibility of a
reality beyond that of bourgeois society and subjectivity, but as chimerical as
their existence is, as ambiguous is the promise projected unto them. It is in
this sense that the fascination with difference and apparent unassimilability
is the flip side of the rage against it.

Digression on the Historical Background of the Concept of “Race”

As the concept of “race” is so central to the debate on antisemitism, it seems
necessary to dwell a bit longer on its evolution. Modern “race-thinking”—
gradually evolving into the “worldview” of “racism” as it can be found in
the late nineteenth century—has most prominently been shaped by three
different historical developments and the discourses that accompanied
them, reinforcing and influencing each other in various ways: the Spanish
reconquista and Catholic reaction, European colonialism, and the struggle
between old and new nobility (feeding into that between nobility and “third
estate”) in eighteenth-century France. The first discourse is part of an intra-
elite struggle about the legitimacy of leadership, and in particular reflects the
elitist (and for this reason unsuccessful) attempt at state and nation building
in early modern Spain.53 The second is about the categorical recognition of
differential levels of productivity and the value of labor-power (or rather, the
value of the laborers themselves if they are slaves), a discourse more directly
connected to the emerging modern economic structure. The third combines
elements of both and is the most relevant one for the present context.
In the context of the Spanish Inquisition, the (formerly Jewish) conversos
were suspected of not sincerely having adopted Christian belief, because
those who forced them to convert knew that the conversion had been by
force.54 The formulation of what probably was the earliest form of explicit
racial theory (pivoted on the notion of the “limpieza de sangre”) began with
the belief that the presence of Jews was “a problem” and that this problem
ought to be solved by forced conversion of half of the Jews and expulsion
of the rest.55 After this happened, it was felt that “the problem” was not suf-
ficiently solved, so persecution and discrimination continued. Furthermore,
202 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

it was generally conceded that the brutality of the Inquisition reinforced the
(alleged) hostility of the Jews: the Inquisition explicitly referred to the hate
that persecution must have created as the reason for continued and preventa-
tive persecution. An explanation had to be found that would legitimize the
continued practice of persecution and suspicion without questioning the
adequacy of persecution as a means to solve “the problem.” This explana-
tion was the concept of the “Jewish race,” which emerged in this context for
the first time.56 As Reemtsma notes, “the mental traces of a centuries-long
practice live longer than the considerations which led to that practice in the
first place.”57 The history of persecution and murder, and their multifarious
reasons and motivations, is obscured and petrified not only by the notion of
“race” but also by that of “racism”: “racism” is not one of the causes of rac-
ist practices, as the casual use of the concept seems to imply, but merely an
aspect of the specific forms they take, and of how the perpetrators themselves
account for their deeds: “The Aryan myth was their (false) rationalization
of their hostility, but since we do not believe that biological differences were
the cause of their hostility, ‘racism’ cannot be our explanation of the myth
of their hostility.”58 The examination of specific histories of persecution is
relevant; not relevant, however, are “lyrical thoughts about ‘the problem
of the other.’”59
In the colonial context, an older tradition of European Christian “ethno-
centrism” and the Renaissance ethnographic discourse on various “exotic”
peoples that European explorers met was transformed into the modern
concept of “race” when the conditions of slavery of “blacks” (which became
more exclusively harsh in the course of the second half of the seventeenth
century) needed to be explained and legitimized.60 In the colonial context,
“race” referred first of all to the lower level of productivity prevalent in the
subjected colonial (or imported slave) population, a socioeconomic char-
acteristic that was hypostatized into a physical one.61 The most momentous
development in this context was the “invention of the white race” in the
late seventeenth century.62 Clear concepts of “a white race” and “a black
race” need to be distinguished from the more diffuse elements of racializa-
tion and race-thinking that can be found in the colonial context from its
 Antisemitism 203

beginnings to the extent that “race” was a regular part of the vocabulary of
the most “advanced” European elites since the sixteenth century.63 The status
of African American laborers was until 1660 “essentially the same as that of
European-American bond-laborers, namely limited-term bond-servitude.”64
In the framework of the triangular trade, however, African slaves turned
out to be much cheaper than European servants,65 and their servitude could
(for practical-material as well as cultural-ideological reasons) more easily be
extended to lifelong, and then hereditary, slavery.66 This outcome set them
so fundamentally apart from everyone else that “race” became a plausible
denotation of this segment of the workforce. The sheer brutality of a quasi-
naked form of intensive production, pure modern economy uninhibited by
traditional or reinvented morality also produced in the colonies a purely
economic semantic of “race.”
In the early eighteenth century, members of the high aristocracy in France
developed a theory of history—most famously formulated by Boulainvilliers
(1727)—that made use of the concept of “race” in an effort to explain and
legitimize the existing class structure of French society: the privileges of the
high aristocracy were said to be the result of the conquest of a Gaulish race
by a Frankish race.67 Not unlike in the Spanish case two centuries earlier, a
ruling elite of old lineage defended itself against successful boundary crossers
from less noble lineage with reference to the concept of “race.” (The Spanish
high aristocracy held a similar myth: they considered themselves descendants
of the Visigoths who conquered Spain in the fifth century.)68 In the period
preceding the French Revolution, this notion was invoked against the claims
of the Third Estate but backfired devastatingly in the Revolution when
spokesmen of the Third Estate took it up, turned it around, and used it as
a nationalist argument against a treacherous, anti-national high nobility.69
Abbé Sieyes, preeminent pamphletist and a popularizer of crucial elements
of classical political economy, wrote: “Why should it [the Third Estate] not
relegate to the forests of Franconia all those families which persist in the
foolhardy pretence of being descended from the race of the conquerors and
of having succeeded to the rights of conquest?”70 The French, supposedly
Frankish, high aristocracy continued using the idea of their superior racial
204 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

makeup with an anti-nationalist, reactionary intention and in the hope to

rally aristocratic solidarity on a European level.
Although the political use of the concept had been a French aristocratic
invention, the “Germanic race” was subsequently more successfully invoked
in Prussia in the context of the anti-French wars of “liberation.” Here the
concept functioned in two overlapping but distinct ways: as a means to
unite a not (yet) national population against French domination, and to
create a national society in which the aristocracy (some of whom had been
suspiciously fond of French language and culture) would cease to be the
exclusive ruling class. In Prussia, thus, race-thinking first developed not
against but within the discourse of nationalism, independent from a nobility
that was closely involved with the non-national state.71 It is in the specific
historical context of early-nineteenth-century Germany only that “racial”
ethnic-cultural nationalism stood in opposition to more traditional, that is,
aristocratic-patrimonial, forms of state-nationalism, the “patriotism” that
translates as loyalty to a Vaterland and a Landesvater, the Fatherland and
the Father of the Country. (The questions of nationalism, patriotism, and
race/ethnicity will be discussed further in chapter 10.)
Another distinction needs to be added here. Most forms of European
“race-thinking” assume the existence of a multiplicity of races that usually,
but not necessarily, are ranked in a strict hierarchy. In such contexts, “the
Jews” are one race among others and often rank somewhere in the middle
ground between “Aryans” (top) and “the Africans” or “the Chinese” (bot-
tom). Ernest Renan is an example of this line of thought. It is important
therefore to distinguish from a more general notion of “racist antisemitism”
a more specific one that Sokel suggested calling “ontological antisemitism”:
the “Jewish essence” is unchangeable and transhistorical, as in the concept
of “race,” but based on a Manichaean dualism of good and evil, light and
darkness, with Judaism/Jewry/the Jews being the evil element.72 This concept
operates with moral, universal, sometimes cosmological claims and in a
metaphysical rather than (or in combination with) a “biological inheritance”
rhetoric and seems to be indebted to the older theological tradition of anti-
semitism.73 Richard Wagner, Gustav Raabe, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Eugen
 Antisemitism 205

Dühring espoused ontological antisemitism. Use of the rhetoric of “race”

does not necessarily imply ontological dualism. The more systematically
violent forms of antisemitism tend to be those that show the element of
ontological dualism: the Manichaean principle seems to imply an imperative
for particularly extreme action (such as extermination), while the concept
of “race” as such does not.74

Antisemitic Anti-capitalism
Clerical reaction and conservatism in the aftermath of the French Revolution
opposed a cluster of historically related phenomena—including liberalism, in-
dividualism, and the capitalist mode of production—that are usually summed
up with the concepts “modernity,” “modernization,” and “modern society.”
They also opposed socialism as long as it appeared to be part of the general
cluster of modernist movements—not, however, when socialist notions of
collectivism or “community” offered themselves as allies against liberalism
and individualism and were themselves articulated in backward-looking terms
and imagery.75 To a significant extent, clerical reaction and conservatism were
antisemitic in the sense that they held “the Jews” responsible for the modern
phenomena that they opposed.76 In particular, Catholic economic thought as
it was cultivated in the nineteenth century in the context of clerical-populist
Catholic reaction77 painted egotism, greed, and materialism as Jewish and
established the distinction between a “good” and a “bad” economy: Jew-
ish economy means exploitation that is not based on productive labor, its
wealth stems from frivolous speculation, while Christian economy is based
on honest labor and the just use of rightfully acquired or inherited property.78
Non-bourgeois Catholics tended to maintain a “theological” work ethic that
saw labor as just punishment for the Fall that no one should be allowed to
escape.79 The gist of the idea is epitomized in a formulation from a text from
1880: “The factories must become monasteries again.”80 In 1891, Pope Leo
XIII tried to square the circle of the Catholic concept of labor with economic
reality by maintaining that capitalism meant “degeneration [Verwilderung
und Entartung]” unless it was “spiritualized” by the “right spirit” and thereby
reformed into a “civilizing [kulturbejahend]” economy.
206 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

Two phenomena are in this context most important and also most per-
plexing: first, Catholic populist reaction was extremely successful during
most of the nineteenth century; second, its antisemitic anti-capitalism was
not only shared but further developed by an array of non-Catholic groups
and individuals, including liberals, democrats, and socialists. The notion
of the Jews as harbingers or embodiment of capitalism seems to have been
the most influential element that mediated between anti-modernist and
pro-modernist forms of antisemitism as described above. How is it pos-
sible that a concept that stems from late-medieval Catholic social-ethical-
economic thinking (based on contrasting feudal property as legitimate to
bourgeois-mercantile property as illegitimate, or at least less legitimate)
could be translated into a conception that became immensely effective in
the very different context of industrial capitalism?81
Non-Catholics were able to appropriate Catholic anti-capitalist and anti-
modernist ideology because it not only antedated capitalism and modernity
but had pre-Christian historical sources in the Attic and Hellenistic Enlight-
enment and the classical (i.e., non-capitalist) bourgeois society that carried
it.82 These allowed it to bridge other, historically younger divisions (e.g.,
those between liberalism, conservatism, and socialism) in situations when
these seemed to become temporarily less significant—first of all, of course,
in situations of intensified nation building, and again in the various forms
of crisis that capitalist society produces. Antisemitic anti-capitalism was
channeled from its place of origin in Catholic economic thought through
German romanticism and French Proudhonism into the liberal and socialist
traditions.83 A classic formulation is the following of 1845 by the Fourierist
antisemite Alphonse Toussenel:

As do the people, I call by the despised name of Jew every dealer in money,
every unproductive parasite living off the work of someone else. Jew, usurer,
money-dealer—all are synonymous for me. Many people have reproached me
for having given the name of a still living people to an infamous profession. I
reply that it is not up to a writer to attack the value of an expression that has
been consecrated by use, and that in my national language I have not been able to
find a better name than Jew to designate those whom I wish to stigmatize.84
 Antisemitism 207

Toussenel added that also Protestant nations—the Puritan English and the
Dutch, Swiss, and American Calvinists—were included. Still, in the Kaiser-
reich it was not uncommon that liberals who defended Jewish emancipation
would maintain the notion that “mammonization” is crucial to “the Jewish
spirit” and that the Jews are the clearest (although not the only) carriers of
this “spirit.”85 In popular liberal publications, “Jews were granted a virtual
monopoly in caricatures concerned with moneymaking and commerce in
its dishonest and vulgar forms.”86 Blaming the nasty sides of moneymaking
on “the Jewish spirit” helped liberals bridge the gap between embracing
industrial capitalism while being “locked into an older, competing system
of values” that stemmed from petit bourgeois, small-scale commodity pro-
duction. The distinction between financial and industrial-agrarian capital
“provided them [the middle classes] with a social critique that did not touch
. . . private property.”87 Probably the publication that was most influential in
this direction was the best-selling 1855 “realist” novel Soll und Haben (Debit
and Credit) by Gustav Freytag, National Liberal and long-term friend of
both Treitschke and Mommsen. Christine Achinger calls Soll und Haben “a
case study of bourgeois consciousness.”88 As she demonstrates, the value-
structure of this novel is pivoted on the notion of “German work,” namely,
work that is supposedly not mediated abstractly as is “Jewish,” capitalist work.
“German work” is the constitutive core of the “autonomous moral subject”
who has the strength to resist pipe dreams and temptations (such as wild,
dominant, non-feminine women) as well as being “lazy, dirty and rebellious
like the Poles,” “wild and haughty like the nobility,” or “cunning like the Jews.”
Somewhat ironically, this novel, apparently the most successful German
novel of the period of National Liberal ascendancy, constructs in this way
a remarkably boring bourgeois hero and, as if waiting in the wings of the
narrative, also already its own vitalistic negation in the character of a cynical
power-man (Machtmensch) who refuses to play along bourgeois rules and
“creates his own norms.”89 Arendt states that more generally in the period,
the “leftist movement of the lower middle class and the entire propaganda
against banking capital turned more or less antisemitic, a development of
little importance in industrial Germany but of great significance in France
208 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

and, to a lesser extent, in Austria.”90 Massing points out that Marx and Engels
devoted a large part of the Communist Manifesto to deriding reactionary,
romantic, and artisanal forms of socialism; the polemic against Proudhonism
in particular runs through Marx’s whole life work. The concept of “predatory
capital” was common property to all populist antisemites from the 1870s
on. It allowed conservatives, reactionaries, and the last representatives of
old-fashioned petit bourgeois liberalism to appropriate some of the more
traditional elements of the socialist movement. The ultraconservative (and
racial) antisemite Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg gave a clear definition
of “useful and harmful capital” in a speech before the Reichstag in 1893:

We anti-Semites are opposed to neither Jewish capital nor to capital in general.

We distinguish, however, between useful and harmful capital. We seek to promote
the useful and to restrain the harmful. Useful capital, in our opinion, is that
which is put to work in agriculture and in industry, where it creates livelihoods
for millions of workers. Useful capital operates in honest trade, the function of
which is to collect the world’s goods and offer them for sale everywhere, thus
enabling the whole of mankind to participate in the progress of civilization.
Useful capital, we think, is present in the form of savings, which represent the
fruit of an industrious life. Useful capital increases on a modest scale only after
real labor has been spent on increasing it. But harmful capital grows beyond all
limits without doing real work, setting the stage for frauds and swindles that
rob trusting people. Such capital may be found at the stock exchanges, and it
is certainly no fault of ours that this capital is mostly in Jewish hands.91

The petit bourgeois–liberal and socialist undertones of this statement by

an ultraconservative aristocrat illustrate impressively the extent to which
antisemitism, especially thanks to its fetishization of “honest” and “useful”
work, can help to bridge all ideological divides within modern bourgeois
society. At the same time, however, antisemitism sharply distanced those
who adopted it from the specific form of modern liberalism that was then
predominant among the upper bourgeoisie (“Manchester” liberalism) and
also from Marxist Social Democracy. Populist antisemitism appropriated
socialism but fought Marxism; antisemites have no time for the paradoxical
 Antisemitism 209

realities of capitalism as understood by Marxist dialectics: they reduce all

historical phenomena to unchanging essences and hope one day to be able
to build the racial community “on timeless, indestructible qualities,” the
highest expression of which is the “Aryan blood,” in order to reconstruct
Germany “in the immortal spirit of honor, beauty, friendship, and the regu-
lation of profit,” prevailing against “the Jewish forces of Mammonism and
Marxism.”92 The racist myth was a static ideology that “culminated in the
dream of a noncompetitive society based on private enterprise.”93 In anal-
ogy to their imagining capitalism without competition, the racists dreamed
of history without history: they attempted to “de-historicize history” by
transposing all social categories into biological ones. “Indeed it was a con-
stant complaint among antisemites that the Marxists refused to regard stock
exchanges or banks as more wicked than other capitalist institutions” since
they “welcomed the dynamism of the capitalist system as irrevocably insur-
ing its historical demise.”94 The Protestant priest Adolf Stöcker emphasized
that he warred only against “mobile capital,” “stock-exchange capital,” while
“Marx and Lassalle . . . looked for the roots of the [social] problem not in
the direction of the stock-exchange, but of industrial production; they made
the industrialists responsible for all social ills and directed the workers’
wrath upon them. Our movement corrects this. We show the people that
the roots of their plight are in the power of money, in the mercenary spirit
of the stock-exchange.”95 Here lies the immediate political background for
the paradox that subsequent generations of antisemites held Jews respon-
sible for both capitalism and the forces that aimed to overcome it (such as
in the antisemitic slogan of an alleged alliance of “the Golden and the Red
International”). “The industrialists” are in this vision exempted from any
responsibility for the evils of “capitalism,” which is not understood as a
“mode of production” (as in Marx) but as the dictatorship of money and
the stock market. This notion seems much less paradoxical if one considers
that at the time, liberalism and socialism could indeed be understood as
reflections and aspects of the same sociohistorical process. The antisemites
seem to have understood (instinctively, as it were) the dialectical dependency
of socialism and communism on capitalism: emancipation of the working
210 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

class—implying that of humanity—relied on the dynamism of the capitalist

mode of production.96 The historian Talmon paraphrased the antisemitic
logic similarly: “Modern Jewish universalism in the form of international
capitalism or international Marxism, was the same thing using two differing
disguises, for both aimed at weakening the organic unity of the race and
national solidarity.”97 Likewise, Pulzer: “To the more old-fashioned kind of
Conservative antisemitism, the fundamental similarities shared by Liber-
als and Socialists in any case loomed large—their humanism, positivism,
internationalism, and the revolutionary origins of their theories all seemed
to come out of the same stable.”98 In nineteenth-century Europe, industrial
capitalism and social democracy could indeed appear as two newly arrived,
competing but related entities, as the modernity of both was still fresh, and
the belief that they are of the same “essence” must have seemed plausible
to many. Whether they might then call this essence “the Jew” or something
else is of course a different question.99
The ascendancy of the Social Democratic Party, marked by the unification
of the two workers’ parties in Gotha in 1875, gaining momentum especially
in the 1890s, forced antisemitic socialism to rearticulate itself: the growing
hegemony of the Marxist rejection of Proudhonism and related ideologies
(then often denounced as “anarchism”) meant that antisemitic socialism
needed to confront (“Manchester”) liberalism and Marxist Social Democracy
at the same time. This is an important element in Stöcker’s rhetoric and was
developed after the 1880s into a more consistent ideology in which Judaism
came to be seen as the “common essence” of capitalism and Marxism. This
conception is not without its irony, because the socialism that the antisemites
tend to endorse is indeed (in the perspective of the Marxist critique) of the
same essence with capitalism: it fails to challenge the basic elements of the
capitalist mode of production (the value form, commodity production,
labor-power as a commodity, wage labor). The antisemitic socialists attack
the Marxist challenge to the capitalist mode of production for being of
the same essence with capitalism, while they themselves endorse just those
elements of the socialist tradition that fail to challenge the capitalist mode
of production. The antisemitic notion that emancipation of “unproductive
 Antisemitism 211

people” (like the Jews) is only welcome if it means that they become pro-
ductive links antisemitism to bourgeois ideology, while Marx’s critique of
political economy offers a critique of the bourgeois concept of productivity
(namely, productivity of value).100 However, the workers’ movement and
its institutions did certainly not in their entirety manage to leave behind
bourgeois conceptions of productivity and labor, which weakened in turn
their members’ immunity to antisemitism.
The notion of the Jews as embodiments of Mammon could hardly have
become a universally accepted cliché had there not been some traces of
historical truth to it. Until the eighth century c.e., most Jews at any given
place in the world were peasants and artisans, not traders or moneylend-
ers.101 However, already long before the dissolution of the Jewish state in
Palestine by the Romans, a number of Jews all over the Mediterranean basin
were engaged in trade. When after the disintegration of the Roman Empire
commodity production shrank to a minimum in Europe, Jewish traders
“continued to be the sole commercial intermediaries between the East and
the West.”102 It was not before the high Middle Ages, however, and only in
central Europe, that the Jews were driven out of agriculture and shifted
toward whatever economic niche was most open to newcomers; often this
niche was trade. In Carolingian times, judaeus and mercator seem to have
been used as synonyms: documents from the tenth century use the phrase
“Jews and other traders.”103 The shift from trade to moneylending was caused
by a somewhat paradoxical twin process that was part of the general crisis at
the beginning of the second millennium: following the Crusades, Christian
traders were able to expand their activities hugely. This general process of
expanding money economy was accompanied, however—perhaps as a moral-
political reaction of a clergy concerned about the societal changes occurring
under their eyes—by the proclamation, and increasing propagation, of the
canonical ban on interest.104 The moral-theological view of interest was
based on the refusal on the side of medieval law, following Roman law and
in contrast to modern political economy, to understand money as a (special)
commodity: pre-modern economic thought “considered gold and silver as
tokens possessing imaginary value, varying at the will of the king.”105 Only
212 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

in the absence of an adequate theory of money could the “price of money”

be seen as subject to ethical-political-theological considerations. The more
society was monetarized, however, the less viable became an “ethical ap-
proach” to determining interest. In modern society, any interference with
the law of value (“ethical” rates of interest, or “ethical” wages above the
value of labor-power) comes at a price that a ruling group can only afford
in exceptional circumstances.106
As also the emergence of the guilds kept the European Jews out of artisanal
occupations, Jews were driven into moneylending, while in the Mediterra-
nean and in the Arab and Muslim realms, where the huge majority of Jews
lived, they continued being peasants and artisans.107 For the larger part of the
Middle Ages, very little had been produced in Europe that potential trading
partners in the Orient would have been interested in buying. The few places
where goods for exchange (such as textiles) were produced (some cities in
Flanders and Italy) were also those where a Christian class of merchants led
the process of pushing the Jewish merchants out of business.108 The mod-
ern anti-Jewish discourse preserves the equation of “Jew” with “merchant,”
although it had been meaningful only in the context of medieval economy
when Jews did to a certain extent represent money economy as a foreign,
external element within an “underdeveloped,” decommodified economic
order. To the extent that commodity production in Europe resumed on a
wider scale, let alone when the capitalist mode of production developed, this
equation became less and less meaningful but still remained in use.
In the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries the Jews were expelled
from the more advanced countries (England, France, Spain) toward the
more “backward” countries. The largest number ended up at the bottom
of the ladder, Poland, while some survived in the “underdeveloped” pockets
of Germany and Italy.109 Everywhere except in Poland began the time of
petty usury, ghettos, persecutions, special taxes, and dealing in secondhand
goods. It is telling that the most economically “backward,” that is, the least
bourgeois place—Poland—was also the only one where religious toleration
was a principle of governance. In England, France, and Spain the begin-
ning processes of consolidation of large territorial states—which would
 Antisemitism 213

subsequently be reinterpreted as nation-states—included the expulsion of

the Jews (in 1290, 1394, and 1492, respectively). Even after readmission, their
numbers were small in these countries. In Germany, however, the Jews were
numerous and visible, and lived under the precarious condition that the lack
of a uniform legal and political system prevented their effective expulsion as
well as their integration or permanent establishment.110 The famous failure
of a “bourgeois revolution” to occur between the fifteenth and the nineteenth
centuries (which is when it “should” have happened, from the standpoint
of “Whiggish” historiography) was, first of all, responsible for the fact that a
considerable number of Jews survived in Germany. At the same time, under
the miserable conditions of Germany after the religious wars, not conducive
to the formation of a nationally minded bourgeoisie and a modern state,
money capital was desperately sought after by a plethora of princes, but
no Christian bourgeoisie existed that would have been able and willing to
provide the necessary monies. It was then that a very small number of rich
Jews became court Jews, prominent and highly visible Jews who became
allies of modernizing absolutist monarchs operating toward what would
later turn out to be bourgeois society and the national state. However, in the
1600s also Jewish moneylending declined in Germany, and “the increasingly
anachronistic image of the Jewish usurer blended with two developing forms
of economic antisemitism: fantasies about the Jewish thief, leeching off the
populace from below, and the Court Jew, the manipulator from above.” The
rise of Jewish banditry from the late 1600s helped to create “a new stereo-
type,” that of “the Jews as a people of thieves and robbers extraordinaire.”111
Popular literature created in the subsequent period from these elements “an
antisemitic collage of the Jew as manipulator and profiteer.” Additionally,
the “growing Sephardic presence in the Ottoman Empire” stimulated “a new
myth of Jewish conspirational power”: Jewish merchants and manufactur-
ers seemed to be “behind the successes of the Turkish foe.”112 These are, in
rough outline, the historical particulars that constitute the particles of truth
around which “antisemitic anti-capitalism” developed. Its identification of
“the Jews” as the people historically responsible for the emergence of modern
state and economy was a gross exaggeration for any period of time at any
214 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

place, but was completely misguided in the nineteenth century, when it

successfully evolved into a fully articulated ideology.

Antisemitism in the German Reich in the

Years Leading up to the Dispute
Antisemitism blossomed during the Bismarck Reich during the periods
in which the Conservatives were hostile toward the government, namely,
in the last phase of Bismarck’s liberal era (1875–78) and during the lib-
eral era under Chancellor Caprivi (1890–94).113 This observation allows
the conclusion that in this period only established Conservatism was able
to mobilize antisemitism efficiently, and it did so as a means to challenge
the government, while all other tendencies of antisemitism—the “radicals”
of all hues—were still fellow travelers of the Conservatives, whether they
liked it or not. An illustration of this is the case of the antisemitic petition
that was circulated in the fall of 1880 and constituted the high-water mark
of antisemitic publicity when it fetched a quarter of a million signatures
all over the Reich.114 Although it was initiated by an assemblage of radical
antisemites, its actual text “merely demanded the legalization of what was
the predominant administrative practice anyway.”115
The literature seems generally to agree that the ascendancy of antisemitism
as a modern political discourse started in 1875 when antisemitism was “taken
up by two politically defined newspapers,”116 the so-called Kreuzzeitung, the
voice of orthodox Prussian Protestantism, and Germania, the organ of the
Catholic Center Party.117 In January 1874 the Conservatives had suffered a
massive electoral defeat by the National Liberals and the Catholic Center.118
The antisemitic articles of the Kreuzzeitung that were answered by those in
the Germania seem to have been a deliberate offer of cooperation to a new
potential ally reflecting the new situation.119 The initial tone was set by the
Kreuzzeitung’s Franz Perrot, who called “our fellow citizens of Semitic race
and Mosaic belief ” the “actual leaders of the National-Liberal majority in the
Reichstag.”120 Articles in the Kreuzzeitung attacked in particular the economic
aspects of Bismarck’s policy, which was tarred as “a banker’s policy made
for and by Jews.” Articles in Germania denied that hatred and persecution
 Antisemitism 215

of Jews had ever been “caused by religious fanaticism” but argued they were
rather “a protest of the Germanic race against the intrusion of an alien tribe.”
They supported this claim with anti-Jewish quotes from (non-Catholic)
authors such as Goethe, Herder, Kant, Fichte, and even a speech by Bismarck
from 1847. Germania pointed out that there were few Jews in the “produc-
tive strata” and interpreted the recent liberal anti-Catholic Kulturkampf as
a Jewish war of revenge. It called for “emancipation of the Christians from
the Jews” and for Christian economic solidarity: “Don’t buy from Jews!”121
In the aftermath of both series of articles, a group of Conservatives and
Catholics, informally dubbed the Antikanzlerliga (Anti-Chancellor League),
continued publishing on the same tracks.122
Another point of reference for the formulation of antisemitism was the
emergence of the Social Democratic Party, founded in 1875. Although in
theory anti-liberal, it could in practice be expected to be an ally for the
democratically inclined wing of liberalism—obviously an alarming scenario
for the conservative and right-wing/liberal elite.123 The fight against Social
Democracy was particularly prominent in Treitschke’s as well as Stöcker’s
positions.
The year 1877 saw the publication of Politische Gründer und die Korrup-
tion in Deutschland (Political Promoters and Corruption in Germany) by
Rudolf Meyer, who played a central role in the Anti-Chancellor League.124
Meyer was “the most extreme anti-Bismarckian, antisemitic State Socialist”
and advocated the idea that the monarchy should be responsible for the
welfare of the working class.125 He argued that Bismarck was “owned by the
Jews and the Gründer.”126
All the strictly right-wing antisemites mentioned so far were effectively
enemies of the politics represented by Treitschke, who supported Bismarck
as strongly as he resented socialism, whether from the lectern, the pulpit, or
the Social Democratic Party. Their antisemitism was part of a larger agenda
of rejuvenating church and state by way of toppling Bismarck and turning the
Conservative Party into a popular party.127 The same is true of another leading
antisemite close to the extremely conservative part of the Lutheran Prussian
establishment, the priest Adolf Stöcker. Stöcker came from a lower-middle-
216 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

class background and via a career through university and army became a court
chaplain in 1874. He had close relations to the Kreuzzeitung and was a lifelong
friend of Adolf Wagner, a Berlin University economist and the leading Katheder
socialist of the 1880s.128 Stöcker’s fundamental attitude—rooted in Christian
economic doctrine—is summed up in his 1874 description of socialism as
“an offspring of materialism, created in the palaces of atheist wealth.”129 In
1878 Stöcker founded the Christlich-Soziale Arbeiterpartei (Christian Social
Workers’ Party), which attempted to promote a clerical version of Prussian
state socialist reformism, timed to take advantage of the anti-Socialist laws of
the same year.130 After Stöcker increased the use of antisemitic rhetoric from
September 1879 on, he pioneered the translation of conservative antisemitism
into an urban populist movement. Still, he “made no secret of the fact that
Social Democracy was his chief enemy.”131
Stöcker’s “first full-dress antisemitic attack,” a speech on “What We De-
mand of Modern Jewry,” given on September 19, 1879, must be regarded one
of the most influential antisemitic documents in this context, and seems
to have made a strong impression on Treitschke.132 Already the emphasis
on “modern Jewry” in the title points to Stöcker’s claim that he “respected”
or even “loved” Jews as long as they remained religious, that is, were not
“modern” Jews.133 Stöcker’s speech made the following argument: “Jewish
papers assail our faith”; “I do indeed consider modern Jewry a great dan-
ger to German national life”; “please, be a little more modest!”; “modern
Jewry is most certainly a power against religion”; “they persist in remaining
Jews”; “please, be a little more tolerant!”; “the worst Berlin papers are in the
hands of Jews and . . . the Jewish element completely dominates the editorial
staffs”; “our sacred institutions are constantly dragged into the dust”; “un-
less these wells of poison are cleaned out, the situation cannot improve”;
“Germany’s splendor will arise with new life after this period of decline”;
“the Jews are and remain a people within a people, a state within a state, a
separate tribe within a foreign race. All immigrants are eventually absorbed
by the people among whom they live—all save the Jews”; “they control the
arteries of money, banking, and trade; they dominate the press and they are
flooding the institutions of higher learning”; “and this is where we make
 Antisemitism 217

our third request. Modern Jewry must take part in productive work: a little
more equality, please!”; “they do not enjoy work and . . . they do not believe
in the German concept of dignity of labor”; “hatred of the Jews is already
flaring up here and there, and this is repugnant to the Gospels. If modern
Jewry continues to use the power of capital and the power of the press to
bring misfortune to the nation, a final catastrophe is unavoidable. Israel
must renounce its ambition to become the master of Germany”; “either we
succeed in this . . . or . . . German spirit will become Judaized.”134
Treitschke’s first article in the Berlin Antisemitism Dispute—written less
than eight weeks later—took its cues from Stöcker’s speech to an extent that
borders on plagiarism, despite the verbal contempt that Treitschke had for
Stöcker. It appears that Treitschke rejected the populism and the “socialist”
moments in Stöcker’s program but joined Stöcker in picking up what had by
now become a powerful discursive weapon for the anti-Bismarck Conserva-
tives and recuperating it for the pro-Bismarck camp. A telling episode that
throws light on the still-liberal context of even populist antisemitism is a
report from a speech Stöcker gave before master artisans in 1880: “Reacting
to continuous heckling from the floor, Stöcker was forced to explain that
he was not, in fact, objecting to liberalism as such, but only to the present
subverted and corrupted liberalism.”135
Another mainstream source of antisemitism in the period, the writings
of the journalist Otto Glagau, was far removed from the reactionary es-
tablishment. Jacob Katz argues that Glagau was “the central figure in the
birth of the movement.”136 From December 1874, Glagau published a series
of articles, “The Stock Exchange and Speculation Fraud in Berlin,” in the
moderate liberal Gartenlaube, which seems to have had a readership of
two million.137 The Gartenlaube stood for a “fusion of political liberalism,
Kitsch and mass following”; it was anti-aristocratic and generally supported
“equal opportunities.”138 Until that time it had a track record of presenting
a quaint and unthreatening, schmaltzy Judaism.139 Glagau’s articles pro-
vided a form of moralistic indictment of dishonest business practices that
included references to anti-Jewish stereotypes as a rhetorical element of
their populist journalistic style.140 Glagau presented himself as a defender of
218 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

petit bourgeois economic interest against big industry and finance capital.141
In 1878 his articles were published as a widely read book of the same title
as the series.142 Glagau claimed that before 1866, National Liberalism had
campaigned abstractly for “freedom” and “unity,” while since 1866 it set out
establishing “Manchester freedoms” that enabled the Gründer to rob com-
mon people of their money. In this context, he claims that 90 percent of the
Gründer were Jewish.143 In another text published in 1878, Glagau blamed
Jewish liberals—Lasker and Bamberger—for the liberalization of trade and
stock exchange and criticized liberal hypocrisy in the face of the uproot-
ing of handicraft by industry, the disappearance of the peasantry, and the
emergence of a “destitute proletariat.” Manchesterism “wants to transform
everything into money,” “rejects all sense of solidarity, humanity and all ethi-
cal principles,” and “preaches crass materialism.” The freedom of trade and
movement that it has brought to the worker is actually just “the freedom to
choose the occupation and the place where he may starve to death”: “Jewry
is applied Manchesterism in the extreme. It knows nothing any more but
trade, and of that merely haggling and usury. It does not work but makes
others work for it, it haggles and speculates with the manual and mental
products of others. Its center is the stock exchange. . . . As an alien tribe it
fastens itself on the German people and sucks their marrow. The social ques-
tion is essentially the Jewish question; everything else is swindle.”144 On an
optimistic tone, Glagau claims that the number of “decent and honest folk”
was slowly rising145 and concludes: “I do not want to murder or slaughter the
Jews, nor drive them out of the country; I do not want to take away any of
their possessions, but I want to change them thoroughly.”146 Although being
“a physically as well as psychically decidedly degenerate race,” they “are rul-
ing the whole world.”147 From the Jews “we can learn” how to function as “a
single chain, closely knit.”148 Both the assurance that one did not want to kill
or drive out the Jews and the references to an ethical economy reappeared,
as we have seen, in Treitschke’s texts on the subject: a closer comparison of
Glagau’s and Treitschke’s writings would certainly show that their positions,
directly evolved from the right-wing strand of liberalism, are indeed very
much alike. Although Glagau was more like Wilhelm Marr in the radicality
 Antisemitism 219

of his tone, he was, like Treitschke, a well-connected establishment figure

and a defender of Bismarck against reactionary opposition.149
Of similar background to the case of the Gartenlaube is that of the peri-
odical Grenzboten. Founded in the 1840s, this liberal publication150 “swung
over to supporting Bismarck . . . without qualification”—due to Bismarck’s
cooperation with National Liberalism—by the end of the 1870s.151 In 1880 it
published articles written by Moritz Busch152—press officer in the Foreign
Office and Bismarck’s “journalistic handyman”—in which the foundation
of a cross-party and cross-denomination umbrella organization solely dedi-
cated to antisemitism was suggested.153
Naudh and Endner, whose responses to Treitschke have been discussed
above, were part of a very different scene, the radical fringe of antisemitism
that also saw a breakthrough in 1879. The best-known document of radical
antisemitism, the first explicitly racial, populist, and anti-Christian antise-
mitic publication that reached mass circulation, was Wilhelm Marr’s Der Sieg
des Judenthums über das Germanenthum, vom nicht confessionellen Stand-
punkt aus betrachtet (The Victory of Judaism over Germandom, Regarded
from the Nondenominational Point of View).154 Marr was also involved
in founding in September 1879 the short-lived Antisemiten-Liga (League
of Antisemites). He suggested that the fact that the Jews are the dominant
power in the West was the result of their racial qualities and that only a
general pogrom could save the Germanic peoples from “Judaization.” Marr
saw “passionate popular indignation” on the rise. He presented himself as a
disillusioned democrat and atheist who turns his back on liberalism, which
he finds has become “Judaized” and materialist.155 The economic behavior
that he considered characteristically Jewish was for him a manifestation of
monotheistic religion.156
Marr was also the first editor of Die Deutsche Wacht: Monatsschrift für na-
tionale Kulturinteressen—Organ der antijüdischen Vereinigung (The German
Guard: Monthly for National Cultural Interests, Published by the Anti-Jewish
Association), whose first issue appeared in November 1879.157 The lead article
in the first issue of the journal is a key document for understanding Marr’s
brand of antisemitism. The article (written in the form of an appeal to the
220 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

two chambers of the Reich) starts with a list of all the liberties that had been
fought for in 1848 and that have subsequently been revised and restricted,
or have never been implemented fully in the first place. The article suggests
that only one of the “achievements” (in quotation marks in the source) has
not been reversed: Jewish emancipation. Marr158 points out that he had
himself been among the “cloud-cuckoo-landers [Wolkenwandler]” of the
“people’s springtime,” a mistake of which he says he is not ashamed. He
goes on to tell the “unvarnished truth” of the “democratic” (in quotation
marks in the source) birth of Jewish emancipation: he claims that Jewish
emancipation has actually never been supported by the majority of any as-
sembly, but it had to be “fabricated and smuggled in” in a package together
with other demands, including general suffrage and freedom of the press:
“Jewish emancipation has been a contraband of the revolution of 1848.”159
The “sufferings” that stem from Jewish emancipation are worse than any
other endured by the German nation: “All of society sighs under the spirit
of Jewification [Verjudung] that has become flesh and blood . . . and grows
like cancer.”160 Emancipation was the only “achievement” of 1848 that had
escaped revision, and it should not remain thus.
Already in 1880, Marr was replaced as editor by H. Naudh,161 the author
of another emblematic text of racial, anti-Christian antisemitism, Die Juden
und der Deutsche Staat (The Jews and the German State), which was then in
its tenth edition.162 Naudh discusses the “Jewish question” strictly as a prob-
lem of the state and its underlying Sittlichkeit (morality), which he claims is
determined by race. Naudh and Marr were the two antisemites who made
most unequivocally a point of not being anti-modern. They rearticulated
the pro-modernization antisemitism from the first decades of the nineteenth
century. The thrust of their argument is to show that Jews cannot be part
of modern liberal society and that their presence endangers its success-
ful realization. They combine anti-Jewish ideas with various references to
modern bourgeois political thought. From their autobiographical remarks
it is clear that the events of 1848 were pivotal to their thinking: antisemitism
seems for them a way of rationalizing the experience that the “democratic”
revolution they had hoped for had not been realized.163
 Nine. Liberalism and National Liberalism

The National Liberal journal Grenzboten, one of whose editors was Gustav
Freytag, published in 1879 the following statement: “Manchester radicalism is
as anti-national as ultramontanist and socialist radicalisms are. Its delusion
is the cosmopolitan free trader society, the atomistic cosmic fog that has
some kind of a core preventing it from total disintegration only in the power
of English capital.”1 This anti-liberal comment of this journal, which is also
known for its antisemitic contributions, has its roots within, not outside, the
liberal tradition; the following discussion of the development of liberalism
in Germany will show that liberal anti-Manchesterism is not a contradic-
tion in terms: the liberal tradition in Germany contained at any point of its
history forms of opposition to what was then seen as “English conditions.”
My contention is that this fact can help to explain liberalism’s ambivalent
attitude toward antisemitism. Even the most extravagant examples of liberals
or democrats who turned into antisemites (Richard Wagner, Bruno Bauer,
Wilhelm Marr) should therefore not be treated as isolated cases explicable
only on an individual level (nor, indeed, as emanations of a particular German
“national character”). Their antisemitism should rather be taken seriously
as part of the continuum of responses to capitalist-industrial modernization
that emerged from within the liberal and democratic traditions in Germany
(in distinction to but also intertwined with the antisemitism of conserva-
tives, which never ceased to exist next to it).
As the central perspective of this book is to look at the dispute over
222 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

Treitschke’s antisemitic remarks as a dispute among liberals about the cen-

tral categories with which to think about state, nation, society, culture, and
religion, it is crucial to be as clear as possible about the meaning of the words
“liberal” and “liberalism.” These are notoriously evasive concepts that are
descriptive as much as normative; as there is no straightforward and gener-
ally agreed-upon definition that could simply be referred to, one can get
at their meaning only through a combination of historical and theoretical
discussion. In this chapter, particular attention will be paid to liberalism’s
relation to nationalism, especially in the German context. What must sound
to the contemporary reader like an oxymoron, “liberal anti-Manchester-
ism,” or the liberal critique of “English conditions” (a phenomenon not
too dissimilar from what in contemporary usage goes under the names of
“anti-capitalism” or “anti-globalization”), is the immediate context in which
“liberal antisemitism”—likewise, two words most people would not easily
use in combination—developed.2 My principal contention, that the Berlin
Antisemitism Dispute can help us understand some of the contradictions
fundamental to liberalism and modern liberal society, needs to be developed
against a prevailing, unhistorical notion of what constitutes liberalism.
The National Liberal Party, of which Treitschke had been a member until
July 1879, was a product of the multilayered antagonisms of 1848–49 and
the developments in the decades following these years. Differentiations and
contradictions that had already been intrinsic to the liberal tradition before
1848 became explicit and more clearly articulated in organizational differen-
tiation. When the optimistic belief that (quasi-automatic) extension of the
middle classes and their social and political values and organizations (i.e.,
the process of modernization itself) would “prevent revolution” eroded, calls
for the state to help grew louder. Within the liberal discourse, an antagonism
developed between the belief that “social harmony” is natural (invisible
hand) and that it needs to be actively created (visible hand, as it were); the
mediation between these two beliefs, often implied rather than explicitly
embraced, was that the creation of the “visible hand” of the national state is
itself a natural process (i.e., in turn part of the higher wisdom of the invis-
ible hand; to put it with Hegel, it is God’s—the invisible hand’s—will that
 Liberalism and National Liberalism 223

there be states). The question of how much and what kind of “visible hand”
is necessary has not left liberalism ever since. The “early liberal” idea of a
harmonious society in which citizens peacefully worked together for the
common good was modified under the impression of the rapid develop-
ment of industrialization and capitalism. The science that aims to explain
these processes is political economy; the variant of it that seems to have
been most influential in Germany was that connected with the name of
Bastiat. Heinrich Bernhard Oppenheim wrote in 1861 that Frédéric Bastiat
in his Harmonies économiques (1850, translated into German in the same
year) had developed “like nobody before or after him” “the organism of
laboring society . . . objectively.” “This is the science of the modern state,”
Oppenheim enthused.3 Bastiat argued that “all legitimate interests are in
harmony.”4 Because nature created the individual for living in society, the
laws of society cannot be in contradiction with the (natural) laws that govern
the individual.5 The notion of separate or even antagonistic class interests
should be rejected, while the notion of “self-help and education” should be
central to social reform.6

National Liberalism
The expectation that the middle classes would successively absorb all other
classes of society and thus be able “automatically” to provide mediation and
synthesis for society as a whole had been central to early, pre-1848 liberalism.
The emergence of the proletariat seemed—at that time—to be a merely
temporary phenomenon that could either be patronized and embraced
or else fought and defeated easily. Pro-emancipation liberals expected the
workers to become de-proletarianized, well-behaved, and educated citizens
in much the same way that they expected the Jews to become “de-Judaized”
German citizens.7 Liberals in the Rhineland (a province of Prussia), where
industry was most developed, departed as early as the 1830s from the notion
of the “classless society of citizens” and argued that “reputable merchants
and manufacturers” should play the leading role in society, that industry
was the “true basis of the state,” and that “where industry is strong as a
force, so too are political power and freedom.”8 This is the background
224 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

against which the (subsequently hegemonic) combination of free-market

policy and Prussianism, the notion that Prussia was the locomotive for the
establishment of “English conditions,” originated. For this new perspective
within the liberal movement, the quick creation of a national economic
sphere was more important and more promising for liberty than the rather
old-fashioned and legalistic “yearning for a constitution.”9 The more the
latter seemed to be going nowhere, the more the new dynamism, based on
industrial and merchant bourgeoisie, and thus on national liberalism, gained
hegemony. This change in the character of liberalism meant the decision to
trust in the dynamics of capitalist development within a unified national
territory rather than in constitutional reform of existing dynastic states. E.
K. Bramsted has characterized National Liberalism drily: “After 1830 in most
Continental countries liberals stressed the need for national identification,
for a national State rooted in the rule of law . . . [whereby] the traditional
freedoms of classic liberalism were to be maintained. There arose sometimes
a problem of priorities.”10
The liberal bourgeoisie was faced with the reality of bourgeois class society,
most clearly brought home by the class antagonisms of 1848. The choice was
now between hoping for a classless society or for a bourgeois society. In the
context of struggling for bourgeois society, the turn toward pro-Prussian,
kleindeutsche, National Liberalism cannot be portrayed as a “betrayal” (such
as in some of the more traditional literature on the subject): within the liberal
framework and in the historical context, realpolitik and the politics of the
Fortschrittspartei (Progress Party)—the immediate context of Treitschke’s
career—made sense and could appear as progressive. The further develop-
ment of liberalism in Germany cannot be understood, however, without a
look at the events of 1848 and 1849.11
From the perspective of the future National Liberals (Friedrich Chris-
toph Dahlmann, Georg Gottfried Gervinus, Johann Gustav Droysen, Rudolf
Haym, Heinrich von Sybel, and others), the year 1848 “was really about
preventing a revolution and bringing into one their hopes for a Prussian-led
and liberal unified Germany.”12 For this the nation should “sacrifice some
of its domestic liberty” for receiving in return “an increase in power and
 Liberalism and National Liberalism 225

prestige abroad,” as Haym wrote then.13 The crucial problem lay in squaring
their ambitions for a liberal, united Germany with the fact that Prussia was
liberal in an economic but not a political sense.14
The Bundestag established in March 1848 a committee of seventeen notables
of liberalism in order to draft a new Imperial constitution on the lines of
moderate liberalism. The attempt to create a federal and right-bound nation-
state was rejected, though, by the existing dynasties; they felt at that point
no need to accept constitutional monarchy. Having failed to bring political
change the institutional way, the liberals worked together with republicans
and democrats in the national movement toward a compromise platform
that warranted legal continuity and that of the individual states and their
dynasties.15 Liberals and moderate democrats pointed to the benefits of con-
stitutional monarchy as enjoyed in England and Belgium. When republicans
subsequently led a revolutionary insurgency in April 1848 (fatally limited to
a few regions), the liberal members of the Federal Assembly supported the
dynastic governments to deploy federal troops against them.16
Federal and Prussian troops were only able to defeat the popular move-
ments in the southern states, though, because the Prussian regime survived
the revolutionary situation in March 1848 when popular assemblies in Berlin
mirrored the Paris February revolution. Realizing that the monarchy seemed
unprepared to handle the situation, the Berlin bourgeoisie immediately
organized militias and saved the Prussian regime from its temporary weak-
ness.17 A revolutionary leaflet from end of May 1848 made the point suc-
cinctly: “Denn aus der freien Bürgerwehr / Wird leicht ein Freiheits-Würger-
Bär,” which means “The liberal militias / Can quickly turn malicious.”18 It
is important to add that a situation (March–July 1848) characterized by
weakness of the bourgeoisie and temporary collapse of the aristocracy was
decided in favor of the status quo through contradictions on the side of the
proletariat. While some workers defended their own “moral economy” (to
use Thompson’s expression),19 others had already begun to internalize the
standards and values of the bourgeois-liberal order—they saw disciplined,
productive labor as something to be proud of and considered the exis-
tence of a class of people who “give work” to workers as a necessity—and
226 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

preached moderation to themselves. The second, new class contradiction

(the capital relation) that grew next to and transformed the older one (the
class contradiction between the two surplus-appropriating classes) did not
take the form of a clear-cut antagonism—bourgeois versus workers: rather,
it produced contradictory behavior on the side of the workers, which gave
the bourgeoisie the time necessary to recover its agency and to restore the
status quo. (Likewise, the revolutionary small-town artisans who subse-
quently carried the revolution in Baden suffered from what hindsight can
recognize as wavering between progress and reaction, but for them it must
have meant the refusal to chose between bounded feudal and unbounded
capitalist exploitation.)20 A counter-revolutionary Berlin publication from
August 1848 declared that the revolution had been caused by “aliens, Jews
and lousy literati.”21 The authors of this publication apparently intended to
build the defeated lower bourgeois and workers a bridge home into the status
quo—amnesty cum amnesia: they were supposedly not to blame for their
attempt at a revolution, after all. Troublemakers—the usual suspects—had
misguided the good German people.
In March 1849, the Prussian king refused to accept a compromise consti-
tution and the Imperial crown from the hands of parliament, whereupon
the liberals practically withdrew from the process; the Frankfurt National
Assembly capitulated before the German princes’ unwillingness to acknowl-
edge its authority. Extra-parliamentary (mostly democratic) factions tried
then to force the princes militarily (the Reichsverfassungskampagne) to
accept the compromise that liberals and democrats had found between
themselves, an effort that was not supported by the majority liberals.22 This
war (following the second proclamation of the republic in Baden in 1849)
was a watershed in German political culture: the republic of Baden was
supported by a majority of the population, who fiercely defended it against
impossible odds.23 When the Prussian military finally won in a series of mas-
sacres, eighty thousand democrats and left-liberals fled Baden and a similar
number fled the neighboring Palatinate and Rhineland. This bloodletting
is the background against which German National Liberalism emerged.
Especially reading Friedrich Engels’s account of the war with its mixture
 Liberalism and National Liberalism 227

of admiration for the heroic popular effort and scorn for a halfhearted
bourgeois leadership that did not dare to fight its corner gives an impressive
sense of what the historical content of the innocent-looking term “post-1848”
is.24 From his own republican-liberal perspective, Hans Kohn suggests that
the German liberals “in their haste to establish national unity” wasted the
revolutionary momentum of March 1848 when they called for a National
Assembly in Frankfurt/Main. Kohn suggests that an alternative strategy
would have been to call for assemblies in all German states that could have
formulated demands for reform reflecting actual power relations in each
specific context.25 Such a strategy might have prevented the united front of
the princes. It appears that the German liberals decided against this option
because it might have led to a democratic and republican solution—a “gi-
ant Switzerland in the heart of Europe,” as Michael Hughes puts it—which
they distrusted.26
No giant Switzerland was formed. The National Liberal historian Johann
Gustav Droysen declared at the end of 1848, in the midst of the popular
uprisings, that he saw in the Prussian army “a great moral force.”27 Friedrich
Christoph Dahlmann declared in January 1849 that “our urge for liberty . . .
does not primarily aspire to liberty; to a greater degree it lusts for power
which has so far been denied to it.”28 A good expression of the liberals’
unhappy consciousness is Gabriel Riesser’s comment that given “the sorry
choice between the despotism of the princes and the so-called democrats,”
“the victory of a despotic, even bloody reaction might be the lesser evil; but
I dread the rule of a people which could be happy to see that victory.”29
Most German liberals concluded from the events of 1848 and 1849 that
national unification had to precede the liberalization of domestic policy.
Since any invocation of popular support could not but result in power
sharing with democrats and republicans, an emerging central power would
have to militarily defeat the cohort of the particularist German princely
dynasties. The only contender for this task was Prussia, which made sup-
port for Prussian expansionism seem the only strategy to modernize and
liberalize state and society in the German realm without giving in to what
the liberals saw as mob rule. After unification, political liberalism could be
228 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

advanced in a unified effort, while the liberal forces in each individual state
would remain powerless against reaction and conservatism (unless, indeed,
popular radicalism would be encouraged). In order to sail with the wind
of progress and zeitgeist, one large sail was needed that would capture this
wind, rather than many small ones that are difficult to coordinate—if they
can be coordinated at all. Left-wing liberals and also many south German
liberals held against this view that the unified state—if founded on illiberal
principles—would merely be an even greater enemy of liberty. One of the
main advocates of Prussian-led unification among south German liberals
was Ludwig Bamberger.
The events of 1848 and 1849 also made many of those who had been more
radical liberals or democrats redefine their general strategy and aspirations.
This rethinking affected all aspects of the liberal program, as is emblemati-
cally expressed in the famous remark by Richard Wagner from his essay “Das
Judentum in der Musik” (Judaism in Music) (1850): “All our liberalism was a
luxurious play of the mind,30 and so we talked about31 the liberty of the people
without knowing that people, actually resenting any actual contact with the
people. And so, our enthusiasm for the emancipation [Gleichberechtigung]
of the Jews also came from a mere idea32 rather than from real sympathy.”33
This statement illustrates a more general phenomenon: the experience of
“actual contact with the people” made many liberals and democrats shed
doubt on the desirability of popular “liberty,” and this affected the whole
liberal ticket. Every item on that ticket was to be reexamined, including the
legal betterment of the Jews. It is important to distinguish two elements in
Wagner’s statement: liberal-bourgeois disappointment about “the people,”
and Wagner’s projecting this disappointment onto “the Jews.” While the
liberals had good reasons to be “disappointed” by “the people,” there has
not been anything in the actual contribution by Jews to 1848 that would
justify the anger of Wagner and other disappointed democrats. In Wagner’s
case, the projection of anti-popular anger onto “the Jews” seems to be a way
of constructing a concept of “the people” as victims, not perpetrators, of
insurgency that the disappointed liberal can refer to affirmatively: blaming
“the Jews” exonerates “the people” and restores “the people” as a positive
 Liberalism and National Liberalism 229

point of reference. The same discursive strategy was used in the counter-
revolutionary Berlin leaflet from 1848 quoted above.
The liberal view of democracy as a threat to “bourgeois society” led liber-
als to accept “temporary” despotism and warfare: Treitschke, whose writing
career begins in this context, demanded—a characteristic formulation of
the National Liberal position—“a powerful, purely German state” (i.e., a
state without multinational Austria) “in which this particularist nonsense
is forced to submit to a centralizing force.”34 This strategic demand was
underpinned by the belief that “when the genuinely national unity of our
people has been achieved, any unnatural constitutional form could only be
short-lived.” Compromise with Bismarck was “not a capitulation of liberal-
ism but the attempt to create a new basis for the representation of bourgeois
interests.”35 After all, even Bismarck was a free trader, such as when he said
in 1849: “Protective tariffs are a protection against the freedom of the people
to buy where it seems most economical and convenient.” Around 1870 “all
Germany was for free trade.”36 (If the idea that Bismarck was a Manchester
man seems strange, one should remember that Karl Marx, too, defended
free trade as a force of progress against Friedrich List and his south Ger-
man liberal followers, who demanded protectionism in the framework of
what in the twentieth century was called “state-driven development”).37 The
achievements of the 1860s and 1870s were so impressive that National Liberals
failed to consider the possibility that Bismarck might one day choose other
partners. National Liberalism was antifeudal, anticlerical, and antisocialist
but not anti-monarchist: Heinrich von Sybel in a text from 1847, Hermann
Baumgarten in his famous “Self-Criticism” from 1866, and Treitschke in a
text from 1869 argued that the preservation of a monarchical veto against
parliamentary suggestions was necessary to defend bourgeois interests against
both clerical reaction and proletarian revolution.38
The most influential analysis of the prospects for liberalism after 1848 was
Ludwig August von Rochau’s “Grundsätze der Realpolitik” (Principles of
Realpolitik), published in 1853 “to widespread liberal acclaim.”39 The gen-
eral message could not get lost on the liberals: “Only through the exercise
of power is what is right appointed to rule.” Right without power was like
230 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

“castles in the air.”40 Rochau suggested that rather than seeking compromises
with democrats and republicans—as in 1848—the liberals should trust that
the “spirit of the age” was on their side.
By that time, those liberals who thought that politically reactionary Prussia
needed actively to be defeated in order to help progress to materialize had
become a minority. Economic progress would more or less automatically
make Prussia a liberalizing force despite itself: although Prussia subjectively
followed its own egoistic interests (the extension of territory and power),
it would inevitably and unintentionally turn into a blind tool of the com-
mon good of bourgeois society by creating the conditions for the objective
unfolding of liberal and capitalist progress. Once the dynamic of progress
was unleashed and irreversible, it would sweep away its reactionary midwife,
the Prussian warrior state for which the Weltgeist, that is, liberal progress,
would—after completed German unification—not have any further use.41
This generally accepted belief of German liberals was eloquently reformu-
lated by Hermann Baumgarten’s famous Der deutsche Liberalismus: Eine
Selbstkritik (German Liberalism: A Self-Criticism) of 1866 (first published
in Preussische Jahrbücher, of which Treitschke was then the editor).42 It was
on this platform that in 1867 the National Liberal Party was founded.43 When
liberals and democrats realized they needed the accommodation with the
ruling powers to defuse the “social threat,” those items on the liberal ticket
that could be dispensed with (such as support for the Polish cause and for
Jewish emancipation) were either given up completely (as in the Polish case)
or put on the back burner (as in the Jewish case).44

The Concept of Liberalism

Liberalism as a political program is a product of the experience of the
American and French revolutions. In this context and immediately after,
the word referred to those who opposed the restoration of the ancien régime
and advocated careful reform “in keeping with the times.”45 Before that,
however, “liberal” had meant the attitude or views that would typically, or
even naturally, be held by any benevolent, generous, reasonable, unpreju-
diced, educated, morally and emotionally balanced person—characteristics
 Liberalism and National Liberalism 231

that would in the bourgeois age be thought of as those of an independent,

sovereign bourgeois individual.46 The modern political concept “liberal”
preserved and exploited its pre-modern and pre-political meaning. Because
liberal individuals were in reality propertied (until, in the twentieth cen-
tury, the extension and redefinition of citizenship changed this semantic
field), the concept has always had a class connotation that bourgeois liberals
before the twentieth century usually did not deny: they asserted, though,
that pursuit of the particular interests of the bourgeoisie is for the benefit
of the general good.47
On first sight it seems that the modern, political meaning of the word
does not have a stable meaning at all: a present-day liberal in England or the
United States seems not to share very much with those moderate forces within
the French Revolution who coined the concept.48 This implies that defining
the concept means first of all writing its history. Furthermore, as George L.
Mosse has suggested, a distinction must be made between “liberal thought”—
in particular, individualism and the concept of Bildung, the formation of
individual personality by education, as an unending process—and “liberal
politics.”49 Konrad H. Jarausch and Larry Eugene Jones write similarly that
liberalism is not only “an organized political movement” but also “a set of
cultural attitudes, social practices, and economic principles.”50 Liberalism as
a political program, or even a political party, came into existence only after
a significant portion of what could be called “liberal society” had already
been realized, such as the splitting of traditional social order into separate
spheres—the economic, the political, and “the social” (the latter being that
which is left from “traditional society” after “economy” and “politics” have
been established as separate spheres). Liberal society must have been brought
about by people who were not liberals, although their worldviews may have
anticipated important elements of liberalism: before the era of the founding
of the German Reich the calls for “economic liberalism”—that is, the free-
ing of “the economy” from “shackles of all kinds”—did not typically come
from people called “liberals.”51 Anthony Arblaster suggests that only such
positions ought to be called liberal in the full sense of the word that pursue
specifically liberal goals and values—such as individual rights and freedoms,
232 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

limited government, religious toleration, free-market economics—against

the backdrop of the specifically liberal worldview, namely, methodological
individualism, secularism, confidence in the use of reason, confidence in
progress.52 This definition has the advantage of acknowledging that goals
typically pursued by liberals can also be pursued by people who have dif-
ferent (e.g., socialist or conservative) worldviews, and also that liberal pre-
suppositions (in terms of worldview) can lead to “illiberal conclusions”
(as in the case of Hobbes). An “ideal-typical” liberal writer, in Arblaster’s
sense, would be Charles de Montesquieu, who suggested a set of pragmatic
measures to ensure liberty (e.g., separation of powers, constitutional checks
and balances) based on a discussion of human society.53 Especially the fact
that Montesquieu looked for ways to adopt the example of English political
institutions by adapting them to the specific and different historical condi-
tions (of France, in his case) rather than plainly emulating them illustrates
well the common roots of liberalism and historicism. Immanuel Wallerstein
makes a similar case with his suggestion to distinguish between lowercase
and uppercase liberalism. He argues that “liberalism” is “the global ideology”
or “the geoculture . . . of the modern world-system,” while “Liberalism” is a
particular movement or party within this framework.54
In Germany, at least from the 1780s, the word “liberal” was used with
reference to a concept of liberty conceived of in a vaguely natural-law sense
as a natural human property. In this context, liberality meant as much as
nonpartisanship (a notion that lives on in what liberal sociologists like Weber
would a century later call “objectivity” or “value-freedom”) and all that one
is assumed to arrive at through truly nonpartisan—that is, liberal—thinking.
This was underpinned by the Enlightenment assumption that proper, undis-
torted thinking cannot but lead to the recognition of (natural-law) truth.
The political program of liberalism was formed in France during the years
following 1795, that is, the governments of the Directoire and Napoléon. It
referred primarily to the politics of the Gironde and the upper bourgeoisie
in their struggle—against royalist reaction on the one side, egalitarian popu-
lar movements on the other side—for ending the “revolutionary passions”
and securing what had been achieved up to this point.55 When the new
 Liberalism and National Liberalism 233

concept was received in Germany at the time, its political dimension was
closely bound to its pre-political, ethical meaning. In 1793, Friedrich Gentz
advocated in an essay attached to his translation of Burke’s Reflections on
the Revolution in France “liberal, non-partisan multifaceted thinking about
the nature and the fundaments of bourgeois society.”56 Friedrich Schiller
described in his “Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen” (Letters
on the Aesthetic Education of Man) of the same year “liberal thinking”
as thinking that is free of limitations and prejudices and able to abstract
from one’s own position.57 Again in the same year, Schiller remarked in a
private letter that current events in France showed that humanity was not
yet mature enough for “the liberal regime of reason.” In another letter he
described a “liberal government” as one in which one (monarchical) will
rules in such a way that “the individual citizen can persuade himself that he
lives according to his own principles and preferences.”58 Schiller does not
question that the monarchical will rules—the point is that it rules in such a
way that the individual does not feel alienated from government. Friedrich
Schlegel, the outstanding voice of early romanticism, asserted the Stoic
conception of liberality in his famous Athenaeumsfragment 441 of 1798,
which emphasizes spontaneous immunity against narrow-mindedness or
hate: “Liberal is whoever is spontaneously free in all aspects and aspirations
and acts in his undivided humanity; whoever appreciates the sacredness
of all things acting, existing and becoming according to his possibilities;
and whoever partakes in the totality of life without allowing partiality to
seduce him toward hatred or disregard thereof.”59 The comments by Schil-
ler in particular are significant beyond the German context, as he strongly
influenced English liberals such as John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold.
Gentz contributed in 1795 the sociology of the concept “liberal”: echoing the
doux commerce topos common in the eighteenth century and formulated
by Hume, for example, in his “Of Luxury” (1752), Gentz wrote that in the
big trading places, “together with that of business, the intellectual horizon
is extended,” and more commercial interaction brings “more liberality into
the appreciation of things and human relations.”60
From the beginning, the concept developed along nationally differential
234 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

paths, without however ever arriving at completely different meanings. In

restoration France the word “liberal” was generally used with negative con-
notations. In 1819, however, the first copy of the journal Le libéral was issued.61
At the same time, the concept gained currency in England, apparently first
as an import from Spain, where it had—under Napoleonic influence—
developed into a political party name that implied the affirmation of the
ending of the ancien régime, defense of individual rights and liberties, and
warning of the dangers of social equality. It was explicitly understood as
being progressive and conservative at the same time.62
This ambiguity in the nature of liberalism makes it difficult to grasp the
place of economic ideas in it. While classical political economy is usually
recognized today as a constitutive element of liberalism, the former’s authors,
such as Adam Smith, did not use the word “liberalism,” nor was their overall
thinking identical to that of nineteenth-century (let alone twentieth-century)
liberals. Nevertheless, the movement that subsequently became known as
liberalism owes a lot to classical political economy, as well as, indeed, to the
Enlightenment. In the nineteenth century, “liberals were in greater agree-
ment on economics than on politics”: they all “believed that the civic rights
of man included the liberation of his productive energies.”63 All liberals
abhorred the vision of “lotus-eating indolence,” the enemy of “industrious-
ness.”64 Only “some reactionary politicians of half juridical, half theological
complexion” could want to defend credit restrictions, one could read in the
Preussische Jahrbücher in 1860.65 The historian Augustin Thierry, “refracting
the historical perspective of . . . David Hume through the experience and
ideology of France after the Revolution,” decisively influenced the liberal
perspective on history and society by presenting middle-class “industry”
(i.e., industriousness) as the “progressive force of civilization” that had been
“hampered” for a long time by “parasitic wealth and indolence; by tradition,
privilege, and ignorance; by special interests and arbitrary injustice.”66 Thi-
erry suggests that in the English Revolution an army whose rallying cry was
“idleness and power” was confronted by the army of “industry and liberty,”
as “the idlers, those who wanted no other occupation in life than pleasure
without pains, of whichever caste, enlisted with the royalist troops, to defend
 Liberalism and National Liberalism 235

interests conforming to their own; whereas those families from the caste of
the former [Norman] conquerors that had been won over to industry joined
the party of the commons.”67 In the French context, the army of “industry
and liberty” was also known as the Third Estate or la nation (Sieyes): here in
the concept of “industry and liberty” lies the most elementary link between
the discourses of liberalism and nationalism.
The concepts “free trade” and “liberalism” seem to have converged explicitly,
though not before the movement around the British “Anti-Corn-Law-League”
was founded in 1838 by Manchester industrialists. By the time the Corn Laws were
abolished, in 1846, it had developed into a mass movement with associations all
over the country. The mass pamphlet literature of this movement made gener-
ous use of the word “liberty.”68 However, those who referred to themselves as
liberals in Germany at the time tended to reject what they saw as “economism”:
even if they embraced free-trade policy, they tended not to see it as a generic
recipe for solviong any conceivable social and political problem.
In Germany, where the constitution of parliamentary parties was slower
than in England or France, the concept of liberalism retained for a longer
period both its Napoleonic and the older, “pre-political” meanings. The
differentiation into liberals and radicals, or liberals and democrats (soon
to be followed by that between democrats and socialists), also hardly oc-
curred in Germany before 1848. The journal Allemannia defined in 1816 a
liberal government as one that provides and protects legally the freedoms
of commerce, person, and opinion; promotes and furthers economic well-
being and guarantees equality in jurisdiction and taxation; gains for the
people independence and dignity through its foreign policy; and creates an
army that is based on honor and patriotism. Such a government would be
“a warranty for the development of the national character of the people.”69
In the same year, the journal Neue Allemannia argued that the neologism
was not vain fashion but a relevant addition to the vocabulary, because no
other word captured exactly the same meaning. Interestingly, the author
suggested that the English language was able to use “gentlemanly” instead
of “liberal” but that no equivalent existed in German. This article aimed
to refute allegations that the new word meant something dangerous and
236 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

rebellious, arguing that it merely expressed all that the good, patriotic, and
noble-minded citizen, “the independent and active member of the big political
family,” would wish. Although the author admitted that “liberal ideas” could
be misused, properly understood they are “innate to every good and honest
mind.”70 In the restoration period, “liberalism” turned into a portmanteau
concept for everything the Metternich system found dangerous. In a text
from 1819 the conservative Adam Müller rejected both extreme legitimism
and “so-called liberalism,” which he identified as a standpoint preoccupied
with immediate economic benefit.71 Another conservative writer attacked
the “moneyed as well as scholarly arrogance” (Geldhochmut and Gelehrten-
hochmut) of liberalism. Franz von Baader, in a text from 1825, saw liberalism
as an atheistic and despotic agent of the disintegration of the European
states. The similarities between the conservative critique of liberalism and
conservative antisemitism are evident already at this early stage.
The partial realization of liberal bourgeois society made the pursuit of
liberal politics a possibility, but it became a necessity only after the early
liberal optimism that “progress,” in the sense of the spontaneous effects of
the unfolding of economic modernization, will sort out things automatically
fell victim to (post-Napoleonic) reaction.72 The “bureaucratic liberalism” of
the reform period constituted a link between enlightened absolutism and
constitutional liberalism, but it also first created the social conditions for the
emergence of a middle class that could subsequently formulate “constitutional
liberalism.”73 In the first place, “the programmatic drafts outlining the future
society of citizens of the state were not produced by the middle classes of the
towns” or by a capitalist bourgeoisie that “did not yet exist in Germany, but
by a non-ständisch intelligentsia”74—the academically trained people whom
Hegel thought of as the “universal class.” The Prussian bureaucratic liberals
might have been staunch free traders, but they did not see much point in
creating public representation for a rather traditional agricultural popula-
tion. Furthermore, equal suffrage was rarely on the liberal wish list anyway,
in any country. (The same goes, of course, for gender equality; authority
of the paterfamilias reasons with reference to nature, as do liberalism and
political economy. Within the family, there is no contract between equals.)
 Liberalism and National Liberalism 237

Liberals always held that representation should be organized in a way that

prevented the “rule of those without assets.”75 Bureaucratic liberals had to be
“illiberal” in the liberal-democratic sense that the word has assumed since
the twentieth century in order to impose on society the liberal politics that
the state entrusted them to pursue.
The groups that embraced modern liberal positions in the period leading
up to and around 1848 included—apart from merchants, shopkeepers, and
industrialists—artisans, peasants, students, and trainees.76 These groups
tended to be torn between a dedication to the existing order and the hope to
benefit from the emerging new order, despite the uncertainties it brought. In
this period, liberals in Germany typically vacillated between the old and the
new. This positioning made them prone to policies that would embrace the
promises of the new but safeguard them against its risks, especially against
what came to be known as “the social question”: they advocated not only
cooperatives, various forms of self-help, and educational associations but
also state intervention and regulation.

Liberal State Socialism in the German Reich

In the aftermath of 1848, the threat of revolution was defeated and reaction
ruled. In the two decades that followed, however, society changed to such an
extent that the situation was reversed: anti-bourgeois reaction was to a large
extent de facto defeated by the everyday workings of bourgeois society, while
the specter of proletarian revolution reappeared. Two decades of socioeco-
nomic development (capitalist modernization in the absence of liberaliza-
tion of government and form of the state) produced ever more evidently a
new class of people who showed tendencies to challenge that same form of
society. They had to be appeased with concessions—degrees of participation
in the distribution of the ever-increasing surplus the new society was able to
produce—while at the same time the necessities inherent in the expanding ac-
cumulation of capital had to be met. For the administrators of the new regime
this was an increasingly difficult balancing act. Economic harmony could no
longer simply be postulated; it had to be created, “never quite knowing how
many concessions were too much, or how few were too little.”77
238 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

Some liberals tended to accept the principle of freedom of association

also for the working class, and argued for better general education (financed
through cutting other, unproductive state expenditure).78 They saw the right
to strike as a contribution, not a threat to the “harmony of classes.” Likewise,
liberal supporters of universal (male) suffrage had a self-conscious view of the
workings of bourgeois society and argued that giving suffrage to the workers
was not very dangerous because, as Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch argued, for
example, the “great social interests . . . will automatically prevail,” and the
man “who stands at the head of an important industrial establishment, the
man who by his intelligence surpasses a great part of his fellow citizens, the
proprietor of a large estate . . . are powers in life which assert themselves of
their own accord.”79 Schulze-Delitzsch understood that the fundamental
structure of bourgeois society, once established, would be impossible to
abolish by electoral means. On the other hand, liberal opponents of universal
male suffrage tended to argue that the masses were “not ripe yet” and that
a democratically empowered mob (stupid either by nature or as a result of
millennia of admittedly unnatural despotism) might derail the slow but
certain train of natural progress that headed to the conflict-free utopia
of bourgeois society. In this vein, the moderate liberal Johannes Miquel
noted that “universal suffrage forces us to wage a difficult struggle against
the stupidity of the masses.”80 Liberals expected that “economic harmony”
would first of all realize itself at the level of civil society, in the bargaining
and contracting of legal subjects, but not exclusively: they understood as
well as did conservatives and socialists that the “invisible hand” needed help
from the visible hand. State intervention and social reform ought not to
empower the wrong people, though. In 1874 Theodor Mommsen stated that
Social Democracy was “the mean enemy of all noble human kind, the gospel
of the necessary abolition of all civilization, the oligarchy of the mob.”81 The
Progress politician Eugen Richter wrote in his “Die Fortschrittspartei und
die Sozialdemokratie” (The Progress Party and Social Democracy) (1878):
“Let us always consider the Progress Party’s struggle with other parties to
the right as a side issue, and remind our friends as well as other parties that
our main task is to defeat our common enemy, Social Democracy.”82 As early
 Liberalism and National Liberalism 239

as 1877 there were liberals who called for stricter legislation against Social
Democratic “demagoguery.”83 Ludwig Bamberger in his 1878 Deutschland
und der Socialismus (Germany and Socialism) argued against an appease-
ment of Social Democracy in any form because in his view, the German
bourgeoisie was too weak to be able to assimilate Social Democratic work-
ers. He saw the Social Democratic Party as a mere product of universal
franchise—which he disapproved of—and as an ally of reaction against
bourgeois society. He applauded the massacre of the Paris Commune and
praised the English working class for not making demands that would chal-
lenge the existing social order. Treitschke demanded after the attempt on the
life of the kaiser in May 1878 that the nation’s parliamentary representatives
ought to go about the “extermination [Ausrottung] of Social Democracy”
irrespective of the legal subtleties involved.84 When parliament subsequently
discussed legislation that was meant to do exactly that, the liberal response
was mixed. Only a small minority warned against panicking about the “red
menace” and suggested prioritizing the defense of democratic and liberal
rights. Anti-democratic and anti-liberal rhetoric used in the antisocialist
demagoguery “bounced back on the liberals like boomerangs.”85 Liberals
themselves had contributed to the panic atmosphere of 1878 that led to
massive electoral defeat of the liberal parties.86 The liberals’ consent to the
Sozialistengesetz (anti-socialist laws) in its toned-down second version was
“not merely opportunistic”:87 tactical considerations were underpinned by
the more fundamental position that “the privilege of liberal freedom” should
not be granted to those whom the liberals saw as the enemies of liberal
freedom. When Sell (1953) famously formulated that the fate of liberalism
in Germany was “tragic” he was right in a more literal sense than he seems
to have had in mind. The liberals’ hubris—the delusion that leads to the
tragedy’s unfolding—consisted in equating democracy and republicanism
to proletarian mob rule and expecting that bourgeois society by necessity
and even in the absence of parliamentary government would, sooner or
later, hand over the commanding posts to representatives of the bourgeoisie.
The liberals failed to comprehend the full logic of the form of society whose
natural-born representatives they thought they were, so that their own actions
240 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

accelerated a process that turned themselves into instruments of their own

undoing: it is in this sense that they were indeed tragic heroes.
Liberals were not unaware, though, of the precariousness of the form of
society as whose natural leadership they saw themselves. If the demoniza-
tion of Social Democracy was almost universal among liberals, their attitude
toward state-led social reform was mixed.88 As the populist antisemitism
of the 1870s made one of its trademarks the call for state intervention on
behalf of those who seemed to suffer under the “Judaization” of society,
the ideas of the liberals on social reform are obviously of high importance
also for understanding their position toward antisemitism. Key here is the
observation that in the second half of the 1870s in Germany, “reformism
was the fashionable creed of the day.”89 Reform organizations mushroomed
with various suggestions for how to solve “the social question,” shorthand
for both the destitute situation of the urban and rural poor and the danger
of their resulting disaffection with church and state. “All this reform activ-
ity essentially aimed at restoring the confidence of the working man in the
government and at making the position of the lower middle classes more
secure.”90 While the industrial workers tended to be unimpressed by being
patronized by priests and professors, the middle classes—despite historically
being opposed to the conservative concept of “the Christian state”—were
looking toward state support with respect to both their own economic distress
and the threat of a revolutionary working class that seemed to be poised to
abolish private property, the state, and the family. Oppenheim sarcastically
coined in 1871 the nickname Kathedersozialisten (socialists of the lectern)
for a group of proponents of state-led social reform who belonged to dif-
ferent political persuasions but were united by a rejection of “Manchester”
liberalism.91 The state-socialist reformist tradition they belonged to was
immensely influential. Victor Aimé Huber, who was among its earliest rep-
resentatives, was involved in the first housing cooperatives in the 1840s.92
Gustav Schmoller presented the history of the Prussian monarchy as that
of a benevolent, socially mediating institution; Adolf Wagner, initially a
Manchester liberal, developed into a far-right-wing conservative and an-
tisemite (he was a main cooperator of Stöcker) under the influence of the
 Liberalism and National Liberalism 241

state-socialist ideas of Karl Rodbertus. Wagner was the editor of a journal

that was actually called Staatssozialist (State Socialist).93 Lujo Brentano was
a Kathedersozialist with a more liberal background: having lived for some
time in England, he understood that workers would stop being hostile to
liberal ideas if they were granted the freedom of coalition, so he saw trade
unionism as the key to social reform. Despite their differences, all of the
above had three tenets in common, which Sell calls the basic program of
Kathedersozialismus: economic freedom cannot be absolute, the economy
must obey ethical as well as practical demands, and the state must intervene
to provide a degree of social justice.94 The fact that none of these tenets
would be anathema to most contemporary Western liberals points on the
one hand to the historical success of this tradition and on the other hand
to its roots in or compatibility with the larger tradition of liberalism. The
Kathedersozialisten fought on two fronts. On the one hand they were op-
posed by Manchester liberals such as Bamberger and Oppenheim, who
dismissed their teachings as “purely class hate propaganda.” “Less expectedly,”
they were also fiercely attacked by Treitschke in a famous article from 1874,
as we will see.95 In the context of an earlier Treitschke dispute, Schmoller
defended himself with a quotation from a text by Bamberger of 1868: “The
state asks the individual to give his blood because the state is in danger, and
it should say another time round, go and starve for I do not know you? . . .
Folly, nonsense, contradiction!”96 A contradiction indeed it is. Bamberger’s
1868 formulation sums up succinctly the underlying logic: if the state wants
to rely on the citizenry to “give their blood” (in war, but also in the daily
life of building a dynamic capitalist economy) it has to give something in
return—namely, some relief from the social distress caused by the extraction
of the surplus product that is the basis of the state’s existence. The fact that
the leading proponent of Kathedersozialismus quotes a formulation from
the formerly “red” Bamberger—a democrat turned Manchester liberal and
as such a staunch enemy of Kathedersozialismus—indicates that the whole
discourse, despite and through its antagonisms, constitutes one continent
of ideas, not several: the continent of what Wallerstein calls “lowercase”
liberalism. Once it is generally acknowledged that the loyalty of the working
242 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

class comes at a price, the different political factions within the state lead-
ership (and candidates for becoming such) mainly argue about what that
price should be.

Treitschke’s Liberalism
There is lying at my elbow a heap of anti-Jewish literature, consisting of pam-
phlets, periodicals, and newspaper cuttings, which I have been curious enough
to collect. . . . Knights of otherwise noble fame had not thought it unworthy of
their steel to descend into the lists, with vizor down, and do strenuous battle
against the alien. Professor Treitschke, Progressist or Ultra-Liberal member of
the Imperial Parliament, has been called the Macaulay of Germany; and there is
undoubted truth in the comparison. The Professor has written stirring poems
and brilliant essays and he is also the most picturesque historian of his country.
But there the likeness abruptly ends. (The Times, November 18, 1880)97

Treitschke was one of the main proponents of National Liberalism, which is

what gave the Berlin Antisemitism Dispute its historical weight, and which
in turn makes the Dispute such an important document for the study of the
history of liberalism. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Treitschke’s brand
of liberal historiography is how closely he intertwined societal-sociological
concepts with political and ethnic-national ones. Whenever he celebrated
bourgeois values—which he did consistently throughout his life—the cel-
ebration of a particular people and its national state (typically, but not ex-
clusively, those of the Germans) followed instantly. A few examples should
illustrate this. In a speech given at a festival of nationalist gymnasts in 1863,
he praised the bourgeois sense of enterprise, the creation of wealth in the
German towns, and the bourgeois notion of the “nobility of labor [Adel der
Arbeit]” that made “our economy more moral and more joyful [sittlicher
und freudiger].”98 In the same speech he also argued that the dynamic of
bourgeois economic success will finally lead to unification, and he admon-
ished the gymnasts not to forget that the Germans were “one flesh and one
blood.”99 In an essay on “The Republic of the United Netherlands” (1869)
Treitschke depicted the Dutch struggle of liberation from Habsburg rule with
 Liberalism and National Liberalism 243

undivided sympathy.100 He saw in the revolutionary Dutch the avant-garde

of the modern bourgeoisie and its primary virtues, labor and thrift: “Among
this industrious little nation trade and industry seem to have been more a
passion that a business. Everybody was trading, and everybody traded with
every commodity.”101 One may wonder why he did not accuse the Dutch
traders of “Jewification.” The semantic trick that lets the Dutch get away
with full-scale trading and money-grabbing is that they do it out of “pas-
sion” not just business like the Jews.
Strikingly, even Treitschke’s notorious essay on the “Teutonic Knights”
(1862), which provides a quasi-mythical prehistory to the modern Prussian
state’s claim to leadership, is written from a bourgeois perspective insofar
as it emphasizes the role of German merchants in the colonization of the
East.102 Treitschke praises the Code Napoléon and the anti-feudal orienta-
tion of Napoléon I,103 while he describes the ideas of the revolution of 1789
as “an obscure chaos of despotic and liberal thoughts that exclude each
other.”104 He attacks egalitarianism and the notion of popular sovereignty
together with the “all-powerfulness of the state” and the—typically French—
desire for “unconditional unity and centralization.”105 He argues that under
Louis Philippe (1830–48), when for the first time in a European country the
middle classes gained “complete possession of ordered government,” they
missed the chance to “reconcile old and new propertied classes” and showed
the same “class egotism [ständische Selbstsucht]” that the aristocracy had
previously shown. They turned France into “a nation of careerists.” Tre-
itschke acknowledges that Louis Napoléon recognized and tried to address
the destitution of the working class. However, “even this coldly calculating
mind fell for the perennial delusion of all absolutists, as if the education to
freedom was possible other than through freedom itself.”106 The last part
of this statement seems a nod toward Humboldt. Treitschke praises the
efforts made by Napoleon III to raise the educational level of the workers
and for their “civil improvement [bürgerliche Verbesserung].” However, he
asserts that “not even the magic tricks of monarchic socialism managed to
reconcile capital and labor.”107 Treitschke recognized (quite correctly) that
state-socialist policy cannot reconcile the conflict of capital and labor. His
244 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

conclusion was that only such carefully chosen measures are to be supported
that promise to weaken the class consciousness of workers.
When in 1871 Oppenheim attacked Kathedersozialismus, Treitschke sup-
ported the social reform option rather than the Manchester position.108
Treitschke also signed the invitation to a meeting in the summer of 1872
that resulted in the foundation of the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Association
for Social Policy). (However, he did not attend the meeting, apparently
because of his deafness.) Treitschke only published a fiercely polemical state-
ment against attempts at social reform, “Der Sozialismus und seine Gönner”
(Socialism and Its Benefactors), in reaction to a speech by Schmoller from
March 1874.109 Treitschke agrees with Schmoller that social reform was nec-
essary to prevent revolution and that the state was “the most magnificent
moral institution for the education of humanity.”110 Treitschke’s disagree-
ment is with Schmoller’s suggestion that “the origin of social classes and,
more generally, of history was force [Gewalt].” For Treitschke the existence
of classes is an anthropological universal: “The millions must plow, forge
and plane for some thousands to be able to study, paint and govern.”111 As
Edward Megay comments in Treitschke’s defense, these famous words are
“often condemned. But moral indignation does not alter the facts of the
history of civilizations.”112 Treitschke’s words were (as so often) particularly
catchy, but the idea was anything but new. Jacques Turgot, for example,
had already recognized that “inequality is necessary to the development
of division of labor and commerce, and therefore to all the social benefits
which modern Europe enjoyed through them.”113 Treitschke repeated a point
that earlier writers had had no hesitations to make; in the late nineteenth
century, though, mass literacy made it advisable for bourgeois theorists to
formulate more tactfully—advice not usually heeded by Treitschke. For
Treitschke, “marriage, property and the organic subdivision of society” were
the foundation of society sans phrase. For him, classes were not formed by
struggle and violence but preexisted them. Struggles between unequal social
groups are the ontological basis of human history, not a specific historical
form of that history.
Cultural leveling (Gleichmacherei) seemed to Treitschke particularly
 Liberalism and National Liberalism 245

dangerous, since universal suffrage opened the perspective of “democracy,”

which spelled the “political de-civilizing of the masses [politische Entsitt-
lichung des Haufens].” Against what he saw as the Kathedersozialisten’s
naïveté, Treitschke emphasizes the danger that too much reform would
dissolve bourgeois society into anarchy (i.e., into not-society, a not-human
state of things). Clearly aware of the difficulty of navigating liberal society
between the Scylla of “too little reform” and the Charybdis of “too much
reform,” he bases his hopes of achieving this tightrope act on the particular
nature of the German bourgeoisie, which he contrasted favorably to its
French counterpart: while the latter is egotistic and greedy by nature, the
German bourgeoisie has only occasionally succumbed to the “temptations
of an epoch of feverish speculation”—and even these rare cases cannot be
blamed on the properly German bourgeoisie: “Many new fortunes have
been made, amassed by dirty hands using immoral means, and in some
parts of the press the greed of these circles shows itself in its ugly triviality
as the Shylock-character of the worse elements of our Jewry.”114 Because the
German bourgeoisie is less capitalist-minded than the French bourgeoisie,
there is hope that it will be able to maintain bourgeois society with only a
modest amount of reform—under the condition, however, that the Jews,
whose negative influence aggravates the social problem, are being kept in
check. If the Jews are left at large, modernization might fail in its totality. It
is in this sense that Treitschke’s understanding of the precarious and con-
tradictory nature of bourgeois class society provides the framework for his
take on “the Jewish question.”115
A second aspect of Treitschke’s work that is crucial for understanding his
position on antisemitism is his concept of the state. Treitschke advocates
“the liberty of man within the liberal state.”116 “Man” can act as a man
only as a citizen, that is, in the framework of the state. Decisive is not the
morality of the individual (Moralität) but the morality as mediated by the
state (Sittlichkeit, the synthesis of subjective and objective morality).117 Full
development of human personality (following Hegel) is only possible in the
state; those who conceived of it as being against the state (Humboldt, Mill)
proposed, according to Treitschke, a “deformed” liberalism.
246 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

The ways Treitschke conceived of the relations among state, nation, society,
and individual are less than coherent. His reasoning can best be described as
a de-dialecticized reading of the Hegelian conception in which each single
element stands next to all the others in its own right and rather unmedi-
ated. Treitschke saw the state simultaneously as the political form of the
Volk (people/nation) and as the unified and structured form of bürgerliche
Gesellschaft (bourgeois/civil society), otherwise the sphere of particular and
conflicting interests. Treitschke vaguely reflects the mutual dependence of
nation, state, and society and holds that the state’s interventions into nation
and society needed to be limited. Relying on Hegel’s account, civil society
can only be formed as state (i.e., “the people united under law,” or else
“civil society homogeneously organized”).118 Civil society abstracted from
the state is for Treitschke just that: an abstraction. Treitschke’s reduction
of civil society to an abstraction makes him fall back behind Hegel as he
employs a vulgar nominalism to civil society, and fetishizes, or reifies, the
state. Treitschke’s conception fails thus to grasp the concepts of state and
civil society dialectically. Treitschke on the one hand (in keeping with the
teachings of the historical school of law and economics) “explained political
and legal institutions as a reflection of the power relations existing among
the more important societal forces,” but on the other hand he introduced
“the state (the actualization of universality and concrete morality) from
the outside as an agent with inherent power to bring order and justice into
the chaos of civil society.” He “was never able to eliminate this dichotomy
between society and state,” which “also mars his view of man as an indi-
vidual person and as a citizen.”119 Megay holds that for Hegel, “the essence
of the modern state” was that “the universal is united with the full freedom
of particularity . . . which must retain its right.” While the strength of the
dialectical conception of state, civil society, and individual would lie in
its keeping open the tension—the “force field”—between its contradict-
ing terms, Treitschke maintained “an uneasy symbiosis of the essentially
antithetical concepts.”120 His notion of the state as an “ethical force that
draws together the nation on a higher level” only superficially resembles
Hegel’s conception, because it lacks the essential idea that the state “in its
 Liberalism and National Liberalism 247

development as well as structure is reasonable.”121 The idea that the state is

an “ethical personality” is for Treitschke just another way of saying that it
is not subject to universal norms and values. Georg Iggers emphasizes that
this concept only appears idealist, while actually it is a form of positivism,
irrationalism, and value-relativism.122
It is not, however, utilitarian. Treitschke rejects the utilitarian concept of
the state as a mere means for achieving the interests of individuals. He holds
that the “totality [Gesammtdasein]” of society is of higher value than the “free
movement” of the individuals.123 However, he also argues for the “mutuality
of rights and duties” between citizens and the state, whereby both the state
and the citizens carry rights and duties. The state “is its own purpose like
everything living”; it “leads an actual life just like each citizen does.”124 On
another occasion Treitschke rejected what he saw as Hegel’s deification of
the state and defended (against Hegel, he believed) the independent force
of conscience of the individual (which he thought Christianity had intro-
duced into world history).125 In the context of the Kulturkampf Treitschke
writes that the state is also “a cultural force [Culturmacht] which we expect
to make constructive contributions to all spheres of national life.”126 He
maintains—against the U.S. model, in which churches are private associa-
tions separate from the state—that churches should be publicly supported
and, by the same token, publicly controlled. He also argues that the state as
the creator of order is necessary for bridging the particular interests of the
groups that make up society.127 Treitschke argues that “the ultimate legal
basis of the state” is the “ethical consciousness of the nation”;128 the state is
therefore (as Treitschke holds against Mill) “not the enemy of the citizen.”129
At the same time, he fears (like Mill) egalitarianism and “dictatorship of
mediocrity” and applauds Mill’s demand that the individual be protected
against “the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling.”130 Here is where
Treitschke sees the main task of the emerging German nation-state: to give
expression to “the love of the German for individual freedom” and the
Germans’ characteristically strong sense of toleration.131 The German state
is expected to fight off uniform mass civilization.
For Treitschke, liberty remains a mere phrase “as long as no nation exists,”
248 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

because the nation “is the only basis of any development of the state,” and
liberty is possible only in the state.132 Whichever path leads fastest to nation
building and state formation is the best, “even despotism,” because “once
national unity is achieved, any unnatural constitutional form will not last.”133
National unity will lead to (constitutional) freedom, while (constitutional)
freedom not based on national unity is mere illusion. Treitschke embraces a
pro-Prussian attitude because Prussia provides (comparatively speaking) the
most liberties among all German states.134 He holds that all other German
principalities “can be called states only in a daringly metaphorical way of
speaking.”135 Prussia—since the reform period—qualifies as an “ethical” state
in the Hegelian sense. In a letter written in 1860, Treitschke outlines his view
of what had to be done: “driving out the dynasties, annexation by Prussia. . . .
Who believes this could be done peacefully? But is not German unification
under Emperor Wilhelm I an idea worth a few hundred thousand lives?”136
If measured by early-twenty-first-century standards of polite discourse, the
political rhetoric of nineteenth-century liberals is breathtakingly casual and
frank in the ways they calculate that a certain quantity of deaths is worth the
equivalent of a certain quantity of political goals accomplished. This is the
language of realism: “The concept of war is inherent in the concept of the
state, because the essence of the state is power . . . without weapons against
those who disturb the inner order and against the foreign enemy no state
can exist,” a formulation that—like the Fichtean and Hegelian ideas on the
necessity and the benefits of war on which it is based—has the advantage
that indeed it reflects the historical facts.137 Treitschke had no sympathies
for the defenders of the dynastic rights of the princely rulers of semi-feudal
realms such as Schleswig-Holstein. If the power that had constituted those
rights in the first place had ceased to exist or stood in the way of progress,
those rights were void. Treitschke rejects scruples in destroying the old prin-
cipalities, because “the ball is rolling, not even a God could stop its course
now.” The “train of history” necessitated the “unification of large national
masses,” which Treitschke expects would also replace provincial narrow-
mindedness with the “moral improvement” that characterizes the citizens
of large nation-states.138 After the Prussian victory over Austria in July 1866,
 Liberalism and National Liberalism 249

Treitschke commented that the smaller states were now “more than ripe for
the deserved destruction.”139 Now was the time to attach “the soft mass of
statelets” to Prussia “in its rough greatness, its strength and brusqueness as
a hard core.”140 Only the nation-state can guarantee true civilization and
world peace, and political liberalism needed to “have the courage” to support
Prussia in ending the widely hated Kleinstaaterei, the political fragmenta-
tion of the German lands.141 From a liberal position, seeing the evolution of
nation-states as an element of liberal progress, there is indeed no good reason
to shed any tears about the destruction of Saxonian or Hanoverian princely
semi-feudalism; Langer calls Treitschke’s attitude in this sense “idealistic
realism.”142 Since unification had to be achieved at the exclusion of what
liberalism had always considered its main enemy, Habsburg Austria, it had
to be carried out by a lesser enemy of liberalism—the Prussian state. The
National Liberal pattern of thought is strikingly contemporary: we don’t like
war, and we don’t even doubt that the motives of the states that are starting
it (against existing interstate law) are egotistic and narrow self-interest, but
we still support it because we—due to our superior insight—understand
that the Weltgeist merely uses the egotism of the warmongers for the higher
purpose of advancing liberal democracy (just as it uses the egotism of the
baker to provide society with the finest bread). Therefore we have to allow
the superpower of the day to destroy petty, evil dictators (dynastic absolutist
semi-feudal princes) in the name of long-term progress. Once sweet commerce
(free market economics) is by any means necessary restored to its naturally
rightful might, the political superstructure (national self-determination,
democracy, human rights) will follow of its own accord.
Treitschke welcomes the fact that the liberal movement after 1848 had
freed itself from what he saw as its “naive” trust on the reformability of ab-
solutism. This is one of the ways in which the more modern and nationalist
Gotha liberalism differed from the cautious and moderate old-fashioned
Beamtenliberalismus, the liberalism of the bureaucrats.143 At the same time,
however, Treitschke still favors the gradualism and reformism of German
monarchical thinking over Rousseau’s concept of popular sovereignty, as the
latter in his view could not but lead to anarchy and despotism.144 The ideas of
250 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

German (post-1848) National Liberals must be understood in the context of

their historicism and methodical “realism” (a concept coined by Dahlmann).
This school of thought (of which the German Sonderweg thinking is only a
specific instance) claimed that the principles of politics could be deduced
from an historical account of the political and social circumstances of any
given country.145 Treitschke admired English “aristocratic” institutions of
“self-government” but thought that English parliamentarianism was vi-
able only thanks to the existence of a strong, talented, and self-governed
aristocracy that enjoyed popular trust.146 It did not provide a “model” that
could be transferred to other countries with different social and historical
conditions. Treitschke emphasizes two aspects of German particularity:
Germany is more democratic and more bureaucratic than England. “Be-
cause our society is more democratic that English society, our government
needs to be truly monarchic.”147 Germany’s ruling class was therefore not
the aristocracy but the Beamtentum. Nevertheless, Treitschke holds that
the English and the Germans share the concept of liberty as “the unlimited
right of the personality” (Mill according to Treitschke), that differed from
the French (democratic) idea of liberty. Treitschke rejected those elements
of the liberal tradition that he understood to be French (representative
democracy and centralized state government), and he considered natural-
law liberalism (as prevalent in the south German states) an effect of the
“French deformation of liberalism” and “the smug old Enlightenment” that
filtered across the border into Germany, particularly in the hand luggage
of “international Jewry.”148 National monarchy was considered necessary to
counterbalance the tendency of parliamentarians to represent the interests
of the propertied classes, as well as preventing a tyranny of the majority and
“socialisme autoritaire.”149
When Treitschke left the National Liberal Party in July 1879, he com-
mented that the terms “liberal” and “conservative” had lost their meaning.
He sensed correctly the winds of change. Supra-party organizations and
pressure groups would in the 1880s and 1890s realize precisely the kind of
conservative-liberal rapprochement (“on the model of the Victorian Com-
promise”) that Treitschke began to advocate in the arena of party politics
 Liberalism and National Liberalism 251

already around 1879.150 It could be built upon “the solid foundation of parallel
economic interests” of agrarians and industrialists. In any case, it was not
antisemitism or cultural illiberalism that wiped the remaining forces of left-
wing or Manchester liberalism out of German Imperial politics: Bismarck’s
social security scheme did. Whoever opposed it, for whatever reasons, in
an era when support for state-centered social reform became a national
consensus, stood no chance in parliamentary politics.151
In many respects there was not a significant break in Treitschke’s intellectual
development, although a radicalization of his nationalism and an increase
in straightforwardly racial rhetoric can be discerned.152 Langer concludes
that in the 1860s Treitschke was probably a “typical German liberal,” while
the Treitschke of the 1870s was neither exactly a middle-of-the-roader nor a
complete outsider.153 Hans Herzfeld—drawing on Friedrich Meinecke—saw
Treitschke as a representative of “classic liberalism” aiming at “a synthesis of
previous German idealism and historical-political experience.”154 Herzfeld
characterized Treitschke after his turn toward admiring Bismarck as a “liberal
Tory”: the anti-democratic features of Treitschke’s individualism are rooted
in his opposition to what he saw (and abhorred) as the “atomism” inherent
in “natural-law liberalism.”
 Ten. Nationalism and the Reich of 1871

Next to antisemitism and liberalism, nationalism is the third major category

that is needed to put the Berlin Antisemitism Dispute into perspective. The
specific history of the formation of the Reich of 1871, whose consolidation
provided the immediate context of the Dispute, needs to be explored.
Although one of the defining characteristics of the modern nation is
that it is an ethnic-cultural and political entity at the same time, one of the
dominant themes of nationalist discourse, and also of scholarly and other
discussions about them, is the effort to establish a dichotomy between two
types of nationalism: ethnic or cultural, sometimes dubbed German or
“Eastern European,” versus civic, political, patriotic, or “Western” national-
isms. Within the liberal context, this distinction is connected to the notion
that the “civic” is normatively superior (tolerant of cultural diversity, e.g.,
and non-racist) to the “ethnic.” This discourse, which identifies France and
Germany as opposite paradigms, seems to be traceable to the border dispute
following the German conquest of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871.1 As the discourse
of the two opposed types of nationalism is also closely connected with the
question of how nationalism and antisemitism, especially in the German
case, relate to each other, and also because there are striking parallels be-
tween the dispute on Alsace-Lorraine and the Treitschke Dispute, it is worth
looking at it more closely.
The annexation of Alsace-Lorraine was advocated as a war aim of 1870–71 by
most German liberals, including Treitschke and Bamberger, and increasingly
 Nationalism and the Reich of 1871 253

also by the general public in Germany.2 Although Bismarck seems to have

been rather reserved about the idea, not even the democratic press was
unanimous in defending the popular sovereignty of the Alsatians. Treitschke
wrote in 1870 that the Alsatians could not possibly know “what is good for
them” because they had to live under despotic French cultural influence;
the German state should “return to them their own self against their own
will.” Their German features would soon be reanimated by “nature itself,
the voice of the blood.”3 (He did not fail to mention, however, the economic
benefits of annexation.) In the aftermath of the war, David Friedrich Strauss
and Theodor Mommsen went public, similarly invoking language, culture,
race, and history for their argument that the Alsatians were German and that
the Prussian military had only corrected the “historical anomaly” of French
tutelage that had resulted from French seventeenth-century conquest.4 The
most notable respondent on the French side was Ernest Renan, a moderate
republican and part of the intellectual establishment of the French Third
Republic.5 Renan had—until then—shared German historicism’s concept
of the nation and its scorn for Enlightenment contractarianism.6 He had
held that it was a “dangerous sophism” to assume that the individual existed
prior to the nation.7 However, the experience that after French military
defeat representatives of the (ethnically German) Alsatians expressed their
wish to remain French seems to have converted him to a more contrac-
tarian concept of the nation: the case of the Alsatians appeared to prove
that ethnicity did not determine political will. Renan avoided the dispute
about what the “real” ethnicity of the Alsatians was and argued instead that
ethnic-cultural-racial “abstractions carry much less weight than the right
of flesh and blood Alsatians to submit only to an authority enjoying their
consent.”8 He claimed with this formulation the virtues of concreteness for
the republican concept of the nation and discredited the ethnic concept as
being based on (typically German) abstractions, a line of argument that
resonated well with an intellectual context that adored the concrete and
abhorred abstraction. (His German opposites would obviously claim that
the ethnic is concrete and that republicanism is based on abstractions.)
The circumstantial necessities of the patriotic cause converted the Renan
254 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

who had been “the real scientific inspiration behind the Aryan myth in
France,” the author of the words that “the Semitic race, compared to the
Indo-European race, represents a truly inferior version of human nature,”9
to the progressive liberal who is now mostly remembered for having de-
fined (in a famous speech of 1882) the nation as a “daily plebiscite.” Renan’s
reaction to German triumphalism became emblematic for the subsequent
canonization of a conception of the nation that implied a notion of man as
able to “lift himself out of his context, escape from his national heritage,”10
apparently the progressive alternative to what the apologists of German
military might, Mommsen and Strauss, seemed to presuppose: man as “a
captive of history.”11 Finkielkraut points out that the basic constellation of
the dispute over Alsace repeated itself in the Dreyfus affair, when the anti-
Dreyfussards argued the “German,” ethnic way to the extent that some of the
patriotic defenders of Dreyfus found that antisemitism was an un-French,
typically German attitude.12 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute followed a
similar pattern, but in this instance—again somewhat ironically—Mommsen
played the role of Renan, while Treitschke excelled in his performance of
what had been Mommsen’s part a decade earlier.13
The widespread belief that German nationalism has a consistent history
of being ethnic-cultural while French nationalism is essentially political has
been shaped in the German-French conflicts from Alsace to Dreyfus.14 This
orthodoxy was challenged and substantially modified more than a decade
ago by Rogers Brubaker, who pointed out that in France, “cultural nation-
hood has been conceived as an ingredient, not a competitor, of political
nationhood.”15 In Germany, by contrast, this integration did not happen at
an early stage, because nationalism appeared in two separate and for a long
period hostile forms: as that of the (Prussian) “reformers,” who thought of
nation building in strictly political terms, and that of the “romantics,” who
tended to think in cultural, moral, and aesthetic terms.16 The difference be-
tween French and German nationalism is not a distinction between political
nationalism on the one side and cultural/ethnic nationalism on the other,
but between a comparatively integrated political-cultural/ethnic national-
ism as it emerged in France and that of a tension-ridden dualism between
 Nationalism and the Reich of 1871 255

political and cultural/ethnic nationalisms (in the plural) characteristic of

nineteenth-century Germany. However, in both countries the “inner” nation
building through state-led unified educational and communication institu-
tions succeeded only from the 1870s onward. “In practice, in the midst of
war against other states as well as against internal rebellions,” that is, in the
course of the revolution itself, “the successive governments of France fused
the idea of nation as the body of the citizens with the idea of the nation as
the French.”17 That articulations of nationalist thought in the context of
the French Revolution mostly emphasized universal and political values as
defining the nation does not mean that other (“objective,” cultural, “ethnic”)
features were not presupposed as existing. The latter had to move more into
the focus of revolutionary, nationalist discourse when La Nation found herself
at war with other states, and especially later when the competing states were
themselves nation-states, too. Only as long as the conflict was between La
Nation on the one side and an assemblage of dynastic, non-national states
on the other was the “universal,” “political,” “subjective,” “civic,” or “consti-
tutional” side of nationalism specific enough to sustain its articulations. The
more, however, a situation emerged in which different states of the same
kind—namely, nation-states—confronted each other, the less the political
form of the state could be a sufficient ground for mobilization.
In the cases of France and England it is generally acknowledged that “the
state” preceded and created “the nation.” The same is true for Germany. In
the German case this is less often acknowledged, however, because many
intellectuals at the time chose to believe, and made others believe, that “the
nation” created “the state,” and the latter’s functionaries often found it op-
portune to confirm this notion. The kernel of truth in the nationalist claim
that there “is” a nation that is somehow prevented from “having” its own
state is that in a specific territory and among a specific population, favorable
conditions for building a nation-state would be found by someone who
was about to create one. Not “the nation” but the ingredients necessary for
making one, the “ethnic-cultural,” that is, not-yet-national raw material, is
what is present there and could be made into a nation in the process of state
formation. As the latter is usually rather violent and includes intensified
256 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

class and other antagonisms, it can effectively and yet discreetly transform
ethnicity into nationality. The set of questions that needs to be asked about
any alleged “common heritage” is: How and why are which cultural, social,
or political traditions, institutions, or artifacts considered by whom to be
constitutive of what kind of commonality?18
The only connection between the dichotomy of “ethnic” versus “civic”
nationalism and the German and the French nations is that this dichotomy
was first formulated in the context of the conflicts between these two nations
and entered the wider discourse from there. Its ubiquity is not matched
by any conceptual clarity: if ethnicity is narrowly defined as a reference to
descent, hardly any modern nationalism will fit into that category, because
hardly any modern nationalism actually makes descent the main issue. If
ethnicity is defined as a reference to culture,19 then all nationalisms are
ethnic.20 This point is salient: in reality all nations are characterized by a
claim to a national culture, and most theories of the nation, as well as most
nationalisms, acknowledge this fact, whether they might otherwise be filed
under “political” or under “ethnic.”21 Renan’s famous lecture which contains
the formulation that the nation is a “daily plebiscite” (introduced by Renan
with “pardon the metaphor”) also stresses (in many more words) “possession
in common of a rich legacy of memories” and “a long past of endeavours,
sacrifice and devotion.”22 The point of Renan’s lecture was that “the nation is
‘given’ as well as ‘chosen’” in the sense that one is supposed “to choose” from
among what is “given.”23 The ethnic and the civic aspects of the nationalist
discourse are just that, aspects, and cannot be understood even as the op-
posite endings of a scale of types of nationalisms defined by the proportion
in which these two supposedly distinct ingredients are mixed.24

Nation, State, Society

The concept of the nation refers to a specifically modern form of mediation
between society and the state. (Against the notion that there is also a “cultural
nationalism” that supposedly is not concerned with the state, I agree with
Anthony Marx’s point that “if nationalism is not defined with reference
to the state, then it would remain too vague a subject of analysis.”)25 Their
 Nationalism and the Reich of 1871 257

interdependence is so powerful that in the modern context the meanings

of the three concepts “nation,” “state,” and “society” have tended to con-
verge: these days not even sociologists speak often about society without
thinking of “a society,” that is, a national society, a society within the bor-
ders of a particular national state.26 Anthony Marx defines nationalism as
“the modern ideal of popular loyalty and obedience coinciding with the
boundaries of political power, either institutionalized as states or asserted
against those states.” It “implies the ideal of a ‘nation-state’ in which mass
allegiance and institutional power coincide.”27 The decisive characteristic is
that nationalism is about “mass political sentiment or solidarity” involving
“mass engagement with states.”28
Building on the turbulent historical experience of the early modern Eu-
ropean states that were formed before nationalism emerged as a doctrine,
Rousseau was among the first to systematically formulate the insight that
early modern, rationalist social-contract theory could not adequately de-
scribe what was needed to unify society enough to sustain a modern state:
in addition to being based on a (metaphorical) contract between egotistic
individuals, the nation had to be “a moral, collective body.”29 It is in this
sense that the concept “nation” refers to a specific form of society that is
characterized by a specifically modern kind of loyalty of “the people” to “its”
state. The emergence or the “making” of this loyalty, from its first beginnings
in the fifteenth century to the present day, was and is a complicated, multi-
directional, and indetermined process that was never exclusively controlled
by any one instance, group, or class of people. In its more developed form
in the nineteenth century, national loyalty could be used by the bourgeoisie
to impress “its system of values on all of the people.”30 The cultural-ethnic
features of the nation flesh out the “contract” between egotistic individu-
als to form a society based on bourgeois values in a fashion that gives the
particular constellation of state and society its uniqueness. They make it
worthy of loyalty (especially, worth dying for) in spite of the universality
of most of its features, or else because it embodies certain universal values
better than others. The nationality of the population and “its” state are a
mere claim or pretense as much as a continually reproduced reality. The
258 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

ethnicity and culture of the nation invoke the particularity as well as the
unity, and possibly the homogeneity, of the national society.

The Role of Religion in the Context of the Nation-State

The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute was a debate on religion, too. All sides in-
volved expressed views on the necessity, the role, and the form of religion in
the modern state and society. Religion has not usually been at the forefront
of discussions on nationalism and liberalism during the last century, perhaps
due to rather premature assumptions about the progress of secularization
in the modern period, but religious conflict in the nineteenth century was
neither anachronistic nor parochial (and sadly this still seems to be the case
in the twenty-first century, perhaps even increasingly so). The meanings of
“religion” and “confession,” however, changed considerably compared to earlier
periods. At least three distinct but related tendencies characterize religion
in the modern period: first, the church hierarchy took over, centralized, and
standardized the forms of religious life that had previously been much more
local and village centered (clericalization); second, parallel to clericalization
(Verkirchlichung) and contrary to it, there has been a growing tendency to Ent-
kirchlichung, that is, the emergence of a sphere of “religiosity” different from
but not indifferent to formal, institutional, and positive religion (individual-
ization); and third, with the emergence of the modern state and of “politics”
as a separate sphere of activity in the modern period, religion became one of
the modern state’s most effective tools: it became politicized. Religion as a tool
of politics is fundamentally different from the moral-religious view of social
and economic processes that is characteristic of traditional society where “the
economy” as a separate sphere in its own right, following its own amoral rules
and laws, does not exist. The complex of processes usually summed up as
“modernization,” including the constitution of the sphere of “the economy”
next to that of “the political,” subsumes religion to these spheres and takes
the revival of “moral-religious” worldviews, which it tends to provoke, into
its own services. The interaction of these three tendencies—clericalization,
individualization, and politicization—produced the immense multiplicity
of religious phenomena characteristic of the modern period.
 Nationalism and the Reich of 1871 259

From the late fifteenth century on, “the evangelization of the populace
coincided with the development of what can loosely be called nation states.”31
Post-Reformation Christianity (in its dual form of Protestantism and Counter-
Reformation Catholicism) was “the world’s first political ideology.” Early
modern formulas such as “Un foi, un roi, une loi” (One creed, one king,
one law) or “Cuius regio eius religio” (Whose realm it is, that ruler’s religion
one has to adopt) reflect that “the political” and “the private” have never
been located in separate or even independent “spheres” to the extent that
liberal theory later suggested. Religious confessionalization was bound up
with the emergence of territorial states.32 Religion provided rulers of early
modern states with a powerful legitimation to challenge traditional and
corporate social and legal relations within their territory—that is, to lay
the foundations for a political program that later would be canonized as
liberalism—and also to consolidate its borders.33 Religion played a role in
many ways not unlike that played by nationalism later. “Religio vinculum
societatis” (Religion is the ligament/tie/bond of society) was the axiom of not
medieval but “early modern socialization [Vergesellschaftung].”34 Religion
in the confessional age was also instrumental in imposing social discipline
as well as the first modern standards of moral and sexual behavior: it was
only in the modern context that the church (in either denominational form)
took over the regulation of crucial social functions such as engagement and
marriage ceremonies from local family and village structures.35 In the same
breath it fought also the heathen elements of popular piety.
The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) had aimed to create territories in the Ger-
man area that were confessionally homogeneous to an extent comparable to
that of most other early modern European states. However, this effort was
undermined by both the resettlement of persecuted religious minorities in
countries of different confession and by enlargement of states by annexing
areas populated by people of different confession (especially Prussia and
Bavaria).36 Dutch, Belgian, French, Bohemian, and Swiss Protestant refu-
gees were welcomed by German governments because they came “from
culturally advanced regions.”37 Jews who were in a position of becoming
instrumental to advancing modernization were also welcomed, although
260 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

their relevance was actually much less central than has often been assumed.
Lucian Hölscher suggests that generally in (early) modern Europe, religious
minorities that faced difficulties “to maintain their religious integrity in
an alien environment” tended “to strive for economic and cultural suc-
cess.”38 The “map-makers at Vienna boldly joined what those at Augsburg
and Westphalia had so carefully kept asunder.”39 The enormous increase in
spatial mobility and urbanization throughout the nineteenth century inten-
sified this mixing process. “The demographic shifts that brought Catholics
and Protestants into common space prefigured, far more than Bismarck’s
policy, the recrudescence of confessional conflicts in the Kaiserreich.”40 The
confessional mixing process through intrastate migration or changing state
borders had different effects in the cities and in the countryside: among the
more mobile and urban parts of the population (first of all, from the mid-
eighteenth century, the educated bourgeoisie), confessional distinctions
appeared more bridgeable the more personal belief gained in importance.
Less mobile and more traditional groups reacted by reaffirming local church
traditions. In Prussia after 1815, for example, Catholics reacted against the
Prussian reform policy as much as did Lutherans and Calvinists against the
state-led unification process of Prussian Protestantism.41 Not surprisingly,
German nationalism in the period after Napoleon and before 1848 searched
for a singular, national religion that could bridge the confessional breach.
Ernst Moritz Arndt, for example, claimed that “Germany is the land of
Protestantism,”42 while others searched for a synthetic form of Christianity
beyond the Christian confessions (such as Fichte in his later years and Jacob
Fries, one of the protagonists of the Wartburg festival in 1817), or looked at
pre-Christian religiosity rooted in the ethnic Germanic past (such as Jacob
Grimm).43 In this context, the Jews formed “a negative point of reference
for an ideology of national-religious integration.”44 Nineteenth-century
piety created in Germany a plethora of sects and religious groupings that
constituted a “vast religious spectrum” characterized by “social and regional
breaches” rendering “a weltanschauliche integration of society” difficult.45
Society was not simply divided into an anti-clerical and a pro-clerical camp,
but pious and dissenting groups often opposed both “the established Church
 Nationalism and the Reich of 1871 261

and its political allies in governments and bureaucracies.”46 At the same

time, antisemitism could borrow from an understanding of Judaism as a
“national” or “ethnic” religion.

Religion and Religiosity

Modern society transformed traditional religions into “systems of belief ”
and “confessions” that one does or does not “have.” “From around 1770,”
writes Hölscher, “the theology of the Protestant Enlightenment distinguishes
between a ‘public’ and a ‘private,’ an ‘outer’ and an ‘inner’ religion.”47 Con-
fession and belief, or religiosity and piety, were conceived of as separate
(although not independent) from each other.48 The mutation of religion to
religiosity meant, for example, that Protestants did not always see decline
in church attendance as something negative.49 Religion’s “evaporation into
religiosity [Verflüchtigung der Religion ins Religiöse]”50 was instrumental
to the sacralization of the nation, since it blurred the distinction between a
“sacred” and a “profane” sphere. This was anticipated theologically by the
notion of history as the arena in which God’s will reveals itself.51 Seen in this
perspective, the suggestion that nationalism emerged as an Ersatzreligion is
misleading: rather, the nation could be an ersatz for church and milieu as
these had been discharged from “religiosity”: the nation seems to have given
people back what they lost when religion became religiosity. Nationalism in
itself was neither antagonistic to religion nor ersatz for it. In either Christian
confession, the dialectic of clericalization/confessionalization and person-
alization/individualization worked together against both local, non-clerical
traditions of piety, which were indifferent or even disloyal toward the church
as an institution, and the trend toward secularization.52 Catholic clerical
reaction in the form of ultramontanism was accompanied by a campaign
of spiritual—quasi-evangelist—popular missions. On the Protestant side
there was the spiritual movement of Pietism, while clericalization (in Prussia,
the main Protestant power) took the form of the Prussian Unionist Church,
which was in a Lutheran way allied to the Prussian state. In either case, the
clerical and the spiritual movements overlapped but were not identical. By
the early nineteenth century, “Catholic popular piety and the Catholic Church
262 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

had been in ruins,” but both “neo-traditional forms of mass-religiosity” and

the institution of the church itself (as the “ultramontane” church) went
through “a stupendous renewal” in the course of the nineteenth century.53
The “new forms of integration, demarcation, and identity” that emerged in
the nineteenth century in all confessions might have been misunderstood
by some contemporaries and commentators as anachronistic leftovers of a
religious past, but they were “aspects of the modernization process” itself.
“Severe and lasting intra-religious divisions occurred in the 1840s, especially
in the cities” among Jews, Catholics, and Protestants to similar degrees and
as part of the same historical process.54 “Religious division, which Kant once
believed would disappear with the passage of time, deepened in nineteenth-
century Germany because of, not despite, social and demographic, cultural
and political forces pushing for integration.”55
The renewed, ultramontane Catholic Church introduced and reinforced an
effective hierarchical institutional structure, regimentation, and homogeni-
zation of piety and superstition, including that of antisemitism: the church
partly opposed Jew-hatred and partly redefined and standardized it—it
defined, for example, what a “proper” ritual murder was supposed to look
like.56 Anti-Jewish riots should not break out “spontaneously” but “in ways
defined by the clerics”: as an effect, undisciplined riots in which stones were
thrown at Jews as well as at the parish priest were disapproved of.57
The twin phenomena of a popular pious movement coinciding with at-
tempts by Rome to reinforce papal authority within the church were in-
tensified in the fall of 1848 when the Catholic bishops of Germany agreed
to commit the church to a “full-fledged campaign of popular missions to
restore faith, obedience and order among Catholics all across Germany.”58
These missions were organized by religious orders, foremost the Jesuits.59
Before the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf began in 1871 in Prussia and on the
level of the Reich, it had already been fought—avant la lettre—in Bavaria and
Baden in the wake of liberal economic reforms from 1863 on.60 The “liberal
Protestant educated middle classes” felt they had to defend modern culture
against medieval barbarism. Treitschke, for example, wrote that Rome’s
policy made him appreciate the value of Protestantism and reminded him
 Nationalism and the Reich of 1871 263

that “the Pope is the Anti-Christ.”61 Many Lutheran conservatives, however,

understood (correctly) that the Kulturkampf was not merely a denomina-
tional religious conflict but a struggle of secular authority against clerical
authority—a fact that is still clearly reflected by Treitschke’s comments on
the Protestant Synod in “Our Prospects” of 1879—and thus felt themselves
under attack.62 It is not without its irony that in the same way that for many
liberals Catholicism seemed a dangerous anachronism, for some the same
was true for Judaism, while others saw antisemitism as part of a “relapse”
from modernity into “the Middle Ages.” Whether any modern (in the widest
sense, liberal) individual saw Catholicism, Judaism, or antisemitism (or all
of these) as distasteful and reactionary medieval anachronisms depended
on what exactly that particular individual understood modernity to be, a
category that is of course flexible enough to accommodate an array of different
positions. However, no less than a conflict about the right kind of religion,
“for liberals the Kulturkampf meant . . . a struggle to unlock the potential
for social progress, freeing the dynamism of German society from the dead
hand of archaic institutions.” Central to this was defeating “clerical control
of charities, poorhouses and schools.”63 The newly introduced freedoms of
enterprise and movement as well as government attempts to put the riches
of foundations (that had previously, e.g., provided poor relief) to productive
use underpinned the popular anti-liberal movement especially among the
rural population. “The fact that this anti-liberal popular movement was also a
Catholic movement, increased the liberal readiness to pursue the Kulturkampf
as a domestic preventative war against ‘ultramontane anti-modernity.’”64 As
if echoing Hobbes’s warning that religion other than in the service of the
state was dangerous, the Kulturkampf was (also) the delegitimization of an
ideological resource for popular resistance to (capitalist) progress.65
Protestantism, too, especially in Berlin, went after 1815 through a (neo-
Pietist) movement of religious revival.66 This was paralleled by the state-led
effort to unite Lutherans and Calvinists in the Church of the Prussian Union,
which included the standardization of rites, vestments, and buildings “down
to the most minute details.”67 Those who resisted the unification process (such
as the “Old Lutherans”) were depicted as troublemakers and subversives. The
264 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

Prussian Union “was a church-state organism of a new type,” an exercise in

both “disciplining the Church and sacralizing the state.”68 While Frederick
William III maintained generally an enlightened point of view, seeing religion
as functional and subordinate to raison d’état and being only tangentially
influenced by Pietist revivalism, Frederick William IV (from 1840) embraced
the concept of the “Christian state” and made conversion of the Jews an issue
of state policy.69 Friedrich Julius Stahl, a convert from Judaism and director
of a Berlin-based society for the conversion of Jews, developed the concept
in his The Christian State (1847). Stahl argued that the state was “a revelation
of the ethical spirit of a nation,” and since ethics in turn were grounded in
religion, the state had to express, propagate, and realize in practice the values
of the nation’s religion (i.e., Christianity). Stahl rejected in particular the
traditional Lutheran view that the earthly realm ought to be kept separate
from the Kingdom of God, and argued that the state was an instrument for
remodeling the former on the image of the latter.70 Church and state were
to be separate but not “apart.”71 In contrast to the rhetoric of the “Christian
state” of the 1880s and 1890s, Stahl’s concept was still grounded in a notion
of Christianity as a spiritual aim of humanity that needed to be served by
the state (any state), not in the idea that Christianity was a particular char-
acteristic of a particular nation (the Germans) and needed for this reason
to be reflected in the character of the German state.
While the war of 1866 had met substantial Catholic opposition, Protestants
and Catholics hardly differed in their attitudes toward the Franco-Prussian
War.72 Correspondingly, the Versailles proclamation of the Reich was strictly
military and avoided a confessionally straightforward religious ceremony.73
Even the concept of the Reich could be understood as an “offer of inte-
gration” to Catholics. The majority of educated Catholics welcomed the
Reich of 1871, although they might have understood it as a first installment
to later grossdeutsche unification.74 Of course, members of differing faiths
“constructed their national identity differently, appealing to different tradi-
tions, separate memories, another history.”75 While Protestant nationalists
saw Luther as a founder of the German nation, Catholics tended to see him
as a traitor who had invited foreign powers to intervene in Germany and
 Nationalism and the Reich of 1871 265

caused its disintegration.76 As Helmut Walser Smith writes, the problem of

“national unity in a polity with a divided memory” is a “peculiarly modern”
one.77 “National unity” is, of course, a “peculiarly modern” phenomenon
anyway; the salient question is, why does “divided memory” constitute a
problem? Why did Protestants imagine the Catholics or the Jews as disloyal
even though they actually were not? The integration of a Catholic into the
nation cannot happen in exactly the same way as that of a Protestant: for the
one, Bonifatius must be a national hero; for the other, Luther; for a Jewish
German nationalist, perhaps Mendelssohn or Börne.78 Looking back from a
twenty-first-century perspective, one may wonder why promoters of nation
building have not always and everywhere appreciated that different groups
of the population accommodate themselves in slightly differing ways to the
nation, and failed to recognize that allowing this to happen is in the best
nationalist interest. Once the actual day-to-day mechanics of modern society
ensure that everyone, irrespective of religion (or lack thereof), works the same
shifts, pays the same taxes, and dies in the same trenches, the advantages of
multicultural capitalist development could not fail to become obvious. But
the builders and unifiers of the same modern nations that centuries later
came to embrace multiculturalism more often than not have been blind to
the blessings of “celebrating diversity.” Part of the explanation is that these
“group identities” often coincided with specific class positions, but there is
also an intrinsic reason: religion cannot be reduced to merely an integrating
ideology instrumental to nation building. Essence must appear, religiosity
must be religion. The more religion requires the believer to take serious its
specific national-religious narrative, the more it reproduces difference and
antagonism to the extent that it can become an obstacle to, as much as an
instrument of, nation building. It is in this sense that nationalism’s reli-
ance on and subsumption of religion is a double-edged sword. The case of
religion is far from unique in this respect: other double-edged swords that
nationalism is forced to make use of are socialism and feminism. On the one
hand, nationalists could hardly put a more powerful force than socialism
into the service of creating the imagined unity of “the people” that obscures
the divisions and antagonisms characteristic of modern society. On the
266 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

other hand, bestowing patriotic approval onto socialism will inevitably also
encourage challenges to the obfuscation of these antagonisms. Wherever
(functionalist-sociological) theory sees “function,” historical practice shows
struggle. In the same vein, nationalists could not do better than inviting
women to be nationalist in a “female,” or even in a feminist, way. Whenever
nation building was offered to women, workers, Jews, or other subalterns as
their highway to emancipation, though, the actual leaders of “the nation”
(who tended not to be women, workers, or Jews themselves) had to make
good on some of the promises involved, which in turn could not but create
frictions and contradictions.
Religion is a unifying as well as a divisive element. This dialectic, however,
can take many forms. In the last decades of the Kaiserreich, Catholics and
Protestants learned to create a common national culture based on “shared
antagonisms.”79 It was agreed between them to maintain confessionally ex-
clusive schools, high grain tariffs, the protection of “public morality” against
what they held to be “the evils of modernity,” and antipathy toward Jews,
ethnic minorities, and Social Democracy. As it were, they marched separately
but learned how to fight together.

The Reich of 1871

The German Reich of 1871 was a nation-state, but it was neither founded by
nationalists nor inspired by a broad nationalist movement. It was a bour-
geois state, but it was not governed by representatives of the bourgeoisie. It
realized a consistent program of liberal-capitalist economic reforms, most
of them formulated by liberal experts and politicians, but the backbone of
the authoritarian state apparatus that implemented them was an army and
a bureaucracy predominantly staffed by the sons of the landed nobility.
When looked at under a wider historical perspective, though, in the light
of the general intrinsic contradictions of the histories of liberalism and of
the epoch of bourgeois revolution, these contradictions are less perplexing
than they perhaps first appear.80
The founding of the Reich under Bismarck was not primarily inspired
by nationalism, although many nationalists claimed this.81 The National
 Nationalism and the Reich of 1871 267

Liberal Rochau stated as late as 1869 that a strong national consciousness

did not exist in Germany and that therefore a national state could only be
created through strong external force, not through an internal development
leading toward political agreements.82 This is exactly what—surprising for
all involved—happened in 1870–71. A form of nationalism tailored to fit the
Reich still had to emerge and grip the masses.83 The kleindeutsche unification
of 1871 “was a radical departure from earlier trends in German history” and
“was carried out to solve Prussia’s internal political difficulties not the German
problem.” However, Prussia’s domestic problems were not solved but rather
“transferred into the Reich.” Michael Hughes suggests that a continuation
of the development of the Confederation would have resulted in “a giant
Switzerland at the heart of Europe,” which would have benefited and secured
Germany’s international position more than the Reich did. Unification was
a “damage-limitation exercise” aimed at containing modernizing trends and
safeguarding the existence of traditional structures.84 The “supposed national
unification” led—“ironically”—first of all to a “serious polarization of the
[alleged] nation.”85 Through the war of 1866, Prussia created a solid power
base “down to the river Main” for the project of a greater Prussian state.86
The actual foundation of the Imperial German state took place in a situation
where “anti-Prussianism was growing stronger.”87 Carr suggests that “National
Liberal reactions to deadlock over final unification combined with serious
political unrest in South Germany . . . may well have played a part in the
decision to go to war in 1870.”88 The governments of Württemberg, Baden,
and Bavaria were under serious pressure around 1869. Popular Catholic
movements opposed increased military spending, military service, and the
curtailment of church activities and defended a grossdeutsche perspective
against the prospect of Prussian hegemony.89
The Prussian bourgeoisie, though, had strong economic reasons for
making national unification a priority: as long as the antagonism between
Prussia and Austria remained unresolved, Prussia had to carry the main
financial burden for protection of the smaller German states from pos-
sible Austrian expansion. The Prussian bourgeoisie saw itself as structurally
discriminated against by this situation.90 Likewise, multiple state structures
268 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

meant unnecessary deductions from the revenue: a “most irrational system

of taxation” (the tolls raised on the river Elbe) allowed, for example, a minor
prince to build “in Schwerin a palace which surpasses Windsor and Ver-
sailles,” as the author of an article in the Preussische Jahrbücher complained
in 1859.91 In the liberal German Quarterly from 1862 it was pointed out that
investments in modern factories fail to be made, because “in view of our
national weakness a war threatens us at any moment.” Furthermore, “no fleet
collects for German industrialists the unpaid claims they may happen to
have in Mexico.”92 German nation building needed not only regime change
but territorial changes that a majority of liberals came to think could not
be achieved other than by military means.93 This placed at the center of
the political scene an institution that is by definition unlikely to promote a
liberal mind-set. Liberals were allowed to run the economy and be “arbiters
of what constituted good taste,” but political-military power remained in
the hands of the experts.94
The founding of the German Reich—that is, the fixing of its borders and
institutions—was followed by what in German is called “innere Staatsbil-
dung”: creating the conditions for a deeper penetration of the state into
society, of center into periphery, of state and society into the relations be-
tween individuals and into the individuals themselves, destroying the relative
autonomy of intermediary institutions.95 For this process a new and more
effective legitimization was needed that would also trigger an atmosphere
of dynamism, mobilization, and enthusiasm for a cause shared by all who
found themselves inside the borders of the new state—the nation.96 This
became more difficult when, during the industrial depression since 1873 and
the agricultural crisis since 1876, the “nationalist fever” caused by the wars
of 1866 and 1870–71 gave way to the more sober mood of having to deal with
pressing everyday problems.97 After all, Reichsnationalismus—nationalist
enthusiasm for the Reich—was primarily based on (apart from military
success) increased economic unification and dynamism after 1871, supported
by fast-growing communication systems (railway and media).98 The fact
that nation building in Germany coincided with industrialization allowed
for the claim that its benefits (e.g., a higher general standard of living and
 Nationalism and the Reich of 1871 269

economic dynamism) were achievements “of the nation” and of national-

ism. At the same time it could be claimed that the nation-state was needed
to resolve the specific problems that industrialization created; after 1878, the
slogan “protection of national labor” became common currency.99
The German Imperial state “had to deal with strong particularisms in
Eastern Prussia, Bavaria and elsewhere, a potential liberal-democratic op-
position, religious divisions and a rising labour movement, without the
benefit of a centralized state apparatus (given the entrenched federalism of
the constitution) or national cultural institutions.”100 The defeat in 1848–49 of
democrats who could have implemented some kind of social reform meant
that class conflict became so unmitigated a reality that independent labor
organizations emerged that stood in opposition to liberalism and bourgeois
democracy; in the second half of the 1860s Germany saw an unprecedented
series of strikes.101 Under such precarious conditions, the Reich was un-
able to initiate easily a form of “integral” or “state-sponsored” nationalism.
“Official nationalism . . . may have helped temporarily to consolidate the
alliance of the ‘ins’ but it had the effect of alienating other groups.”102 The
relevance of “official nationalism” is difficult to assess but should not be
overrated. Nationalism is rarely a “strategy” arbitrarily adopted (or not) by
“the state”; rather, the social and historical dynamic of society in its totality
gives birth to the state and also, as an aspect and effect of specific changes
in society, drives this state toward transforming itself into a “national state.”
Furthermore, nation building in the Reich was hampered by the problem
that “the foundation of the national state did not lead to a creative unfolding
of national culture,” because this culture’s fixation on the new state meant it
lost its reference to the German linguistic realm.103 Furthermore, a large sec-
tion of the cultural elite turned against the Imperial “nation-state”—in their
eyes, a state of philistines—in the name of the values of classical, humanist
German culture; Nietzsche would be an example.104 The classical, philosophi-
cally saturated, normative concept of culture is not easily reconciled with
the positive nationalist conception of culture as the supposed “expression”
of the specific national character of the Reichsnation.105
The boom period of the Gründerzeit began in 1867 and intensified after the
270 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

Franco-Prussian War.106 From 1867, Prussia and the North German Federation,
and after 1871 the Reich, also saw an encompassing series of economic reforms,
chiefly the work of Rudolf Delbrück and Otto von Camphausen (“confirmed
‘Manchester men,’” Pulzer notes).107 Freedom of trade was introduced in
the trading regulations (Gewerbeordnung) of 1869. The Aktiennovelle of
1870 abolished restrictions on the development of joint stock companies.
The imperial law on currency (Reichsmünzgesetz) of 1871 and 1873 intro-
duced the gold standard, which helped “encourage German business to go
after a larger share of the world market.”108 Duties on pig iron, scrap, and
shipbuilding materials were abolished in 1873, and those on half-finished
iron products and machinery were halved and subsequently abolished in
1877. Because of rapid industrialization, prices for grain and for cultivated
land rose sharply, encouraging agrarian capitalists in the early 1870s to bor-
row money to invest in land and in industrial methods to increase yield.109
By 1880, two-thirds of Eastern Prussian Junker estates were in bourgeois
hands.110 When grain prices collapsed due to the industrial depression from
1873 to 1878, worsened by the influx of cheap wheat from the United States
and Russia, an agrarian crisis broke out that made Conservatives (from the
mid-1870s) call for protective tariffs on wheat. Because from the 1860s the
public image of liberalism had increasingly been identified with free-trade
policy,111 many blamed political liberalism for the crisis of 1873–75 (the
Gründerkrach).112 The crisis forced industrial and agrarian capital to come
to concerted action, negotiating their contradictory interests in low food
prices (that meant low value of industrial labor power) on the one side and
cheap industrial products and machines on the other.113 Bismarck managed
to translate the changed constellation into the political sphere. Using the oc-
casion of the two attempts on the life of the kaiser (May 11 and June 2, 1878),
he intensified the fight against Social Democracy with the Sozialistengesetz
and used the process of introducing this law to paralyze the liberals. On the
same day that the Reichstag passed the Sozialistengesetz (October 19, 1878),
an assembly of deputies from Conservatives, National Liberals, and Center
Party issued a declaration cautiously calling for protective tariffs.114 This was
“of the highest significance for social history” because it was the first case
 Nationalism and the Reich of 1871 271

of political cooperation between large-scale agrarians and heavy industry,

and it made possible “Bismarck’s emancipation from liberalism.”115 (On
a methodological note, it is of no concern here whether or not protective
tariffs actually were economically necessary or at all beneficial to the Ger-
man economy of the time.116 The point is that a significant enough portion
of both industrialists and agrarians thought they were necessary. On top of
their specific understanding of political economy, or lack thereof, nation-
alism might have been among the factors that made them think so: just as
much as one may become a nationalist because economic reasons demand
it, one may become an advocate of economic protectionism because one is
a nationalist.) When the National Liberal faction was unable to decide on
a clear policy on tariffs, fifteen right-wing members left the party in July
1879, among them Treitschke.
In his widely read “The Secession” (1880), the manifesto of a left-wing
faction that left the National Liberal Party in the following year, Ludwig
Bamberger suggests that “among all the civilized nations [Kulturländern],
Germany has experienced least the political power of its bourgeoisie. This
means that feudal ideas have remained stronger here and that socialist ideas
have . . . gained more and more power.”117 It is easy to recognize in this
formulation a version, or perhaps the original form, of the German Sonder-
weg (special path) argument.118 Bamberger uses this observation to explain
the double phenomenon of Bismarck’s successful outmaneuvering of the
National Liberal Party and the growth of Social Democracy. The Prussian
state (and likewise the Reich that was dominated by it) was old-fashioned
in some respects but modern in others.119 The landed aristocracy in Prussia
managed to emerge from the dissolution of feudal structures as an economi-
cally successful class in its own right that did not need the cooperation of
the bourgeoisie, so that aristocracy and bourgeoisie tended to maintain
their separate cultural characteristics more than they did in England and
France.120 The characteristic feature of the modernization process in Germany
is the extent of “separation and conflict between the institutions specialis-
ing in administration and warfare on the one hand, and those specialising
in economic and cultural activity on the other hand.” The bourgeoisie was
272 The State, the Nation, and the Jews

more self-consciously bourgeois, and the nobility equally self-consciously

aristocratic, while both contributed to “modernization.”121 However, in France
and Britain, as in Germany, the building of “popular national identity,” indus-
trialization, capitalization, and the creation of modern state structures—the
main elements of “modernization”—took place in the nineteenth century. To
quote an expert witness, Richard Cobden found “the Prussian bureaucracy
with its specialized administrative functions . . . clearly more modern than
the English system,”122 while Bismarck as “a radical-conservative modernizer
. . . had clear contemporary parallels in other European countries, such as
Disraeli in Britain or Cavour in Italy.”123 According to Geoff Eley:

Neither the exclusivist, executive, nor aristocratic features of the German polity
before 1914—that is, the checks on popular participation, the relative weakness
of parliamentary controls, and the privileges of the titular nobility—were at
all unusual by the European standards of the time. Indeed, the Kaiserreich was
more frequently regarded as an exemplary “modern” state—in the technocratic
efficiency of its bureaucratic and military machines, in its more intervention-
ist relationship to the economy and society, in the vaunted excellence of its
municipal governments, in its system of social administration, and (from a
different point of view) in the existence of universal suffrage and the extent of
popular political mobilization.124

Eley asserts that “the German experience” of the last decades of the nine-
teenth century was “a successful but conflict-ridden (conflict-ridden because
so successful) capitalist modernization.”125 The formation of the German
nation-state “did indeed represent an intensified version of structures and
processes at work in Western and Central Europe as a whole.”126 The most
extraordinary features of the German case according to Richard J. Evans
are the size and economic power of Germany and the particular timing:
German nation building happened when industrialization and capitalist
class formation were already in full swing.127 The emerging image is that
nineteenth-century German history in its social, political, and intellectual
aspects roughly followed patterns that can also be discerned in the histories
of neighboring countries, although not in identical form.128 Its protagonists
 Nationalism and the Reich of 1871 273

saw their own as a “special path” to only a limited extent, and indeed looked
as much to the experiences and discourses of their neighbors for help in
understanding their own as the latter looked at those of the Germans. For
the conclusions that need to be drawn from the analysis of the Berlin Anti-
semitism Dispute this means that present-day discourses of liberalism and
nationalism in any national context, to the extent that they are rooted in
nineteenth-century traditions, cannot be treated as if they were located a
safe and hygienic distance from the specific German context that produced
Treitschke’s support for antisemitism and the ultimate failure of liberal
society to prevent it from turning catastrophic.
 Conclusion. Antisemitism and the Limits of Liberal Society

A Final Recapitulation of the Dispute

A German “liberal Tory” finds that antisemitism deserves to be taken seri-
ously and declares it, quite happily, an authentic expression of the general
mood of the nation.1 It has its reason in the fact that the “Jewish question” is
in Germany more acute and of a different character than in other countries.
Some other liberals object: antisemitism is only a product of manipulation
and demagoguery, a tool in the struggle of Catholics and Conservatives
against Bismarck and National Liberalism. A radical antisemite also ob-
jects, pointing out instead that all the people have always hated the Jews
everywhere, anyway, but members of the educated elite cannot be trusted
when they want to join the antisemitic campaign: they and their Bildung
are part of the problem itself. Two more left-wing liberals argue the oppo-
site: antisemitism originates with the educated class, not with the common
people. The problem is, the progress of civilization is not irreversible, and
especially the brutalization experienced in modern warfare tends to throw
civilization into reverse gear. An authoritative statement by a large group
of liberal notables points out that antisemitism threatens national unity
and the liberal socioeconomic order. One of its initiators calls antisemitism
the “deformed child” of national unity itself. The liberal Tory finds, to the
contrary, that antisemitism will strengthen, rather than undermine, national
unity, and points out that Germany, being a belated and still weak nation, is
not currently able to assimilate a large number of rather stubborn eastern
276 Conclusion

immigrants with alien attitudes and manners. Bleeding-heart liberalism may

be fine for France or England, but not, at the present stage, for Germany.
Several others assert the loyalty and German-mindedness of the German
Jews, even including most of those from the East, and make fun of the idea
that a tiny minority like the Jews could corrupt the moral fiber of the great
German nation. Assimilation is well under way, and there are no signs of
its failure. But, says the liberal Tory, the Jews do not make any first-rank
contributions to German culture: they are only really good at journalism
and pop culture, and that is because these are cultural as well as economic
practices. And here is from where they corrupt German culture. “What
about Heinrich Heine?” Everyone seems to like Heine’s poetry, but the liberal
Tory finds that Heine was only great when his Germanness overruled his
Jewishness, while others find he was great because he managed to integrate
his Jewishness with his Germanness, making him a truly German Jew, while
one person thought Heine’s Jewishness, not his Germanness, was the main
source of his poetic sensibility.
A liberal economist and a liberal anthropologist challenge the nationalist
concept of culture in itself: there is no pure culture; culture’s greatness and
progress depend on its ability to assimilate. Progress actually consists in
growing diversity. In the course of societal and cultural evolution, manifes-
tations of an earlier stage of development continue to coexist with those of
later stages, as with Judaism and Christianity. And why not? It is actually the
“permanent vocation of the Jews” to further difference as well as humanist
universalism. A liberal historian adds that German culture is a mixed culture
already, consisting of Germanity, Christianity, and classical antiquity. The
radical antisemite also advocates cultural diversity, but he accuses liberalism
and the Jews of destroying the cultural particularity of the German culture:
they want to make everything and everyone the same. On the other hand,
Germanity, Christianity, and classical antiquity are not really different cultures
anyway, as they are all of the same race. Semites had no part in it, and so it
should remain. The liberal Tory makes a slightly different point: German
culture has successfully amalgamated its three constituent elements, but
that is as far as the mixing of cultures should go. German culture is now a
 Antisemitism and the Limits of Liberal Society 277

really winning formula, and no further “neo-Jewish” elements should enter

it. From the left-liberal side comes the objection that the German spirit and
the Jewish spirit are actually quite similar: both groups are quarrelsome as
well as cosmopolitan; they like speculation and are good at abstract think-
ing. Their morality and religiosity are also similar, and whatever differences
there are between them will benefit German culture.
The liberal Tory sees a much more fundamental problem at work, though:
because the Jews turn everything into a mere business, they destroy the Ger-
man people’s “good-natured willingness to work,” which is central to the very
fabric of society, its hierarchy and division of labor. His more left-leaning
colleagues reply that work should indeed best be seen as a business and not
anything else, such as an ethical or a state service, and they reproach the
liberal Tory, himself famous for rabid socialist-baiting, of socialist tendencies.
The radical antisemites happily take up this point. They have a raw sketch
of something very much like National Socialism at the ready: Germans are
overburdened with having to feed unproductive, exploitative, and speculat-
ing Jews; but the revolution against the Jewish inventions of Manchesterism
and utilitarianism is well under way, as it began two thousand years ago
with a man called Jesus.
The liberal Tory and other liberals agree that nations are constituted by the
amalgamation of tribes, whereby national spirit overcomes and transcends
racial-corporeal matter. The antisemite, however, finds that intermarriage
strengthens Jewish domination, because the Jewish genes are so very power-
ful. One liberal, though, a neo-Kantian philosopher, agrees that the nation
ought to develop its “racial type” but understands this to mean a dialecti-
cal, mutual conditioning of national spirit and racial body in the historical
process. The liberal economist and the liberal anthropologist bluntly reject
the category of race as a pretext and nonsense.
The liberal Tory tries to square the circle with his central contention
that the German nation is Christian but the German state is secular. When
some liberals claim politics is beyond religion, the neo-Kantian philoso-
pher responds that, except temporarily, all members of the nation ought to
participate in that nation’s religious foundation—in their religiosity, not
278 Conclusion

necessarily in the religious forms and institutions, though, which are mere
vehicles of that religiosity. The radical antisemite, having no time for such
subtle distinctions, asserts that in the modern context where the state is
based on nationality, in turn including religion, the separation of church
and state had become meaningless. The liberal Tory doubts whether the
Jews would be able fully to become Germans, as some of them can be found
indulging in being a nation apart. In the same breath he accuses them of
cheekily masquerading as Germans when they were, as has just been shown,
essentially strangers. Some others find this position rather contradictory.
While the liberal Tory seems to treat civil and human rights, at least those
of the Jews, as if they are positive rights granted, or not, by the state at will,
others assert they are natural rights. Again, the neo-Kantian philosopher
finds a dialectical way of asserting that the state’s action was, and ought to
be, rooted in its particular interpretation of universal, moral law.

The Great Harmony of Society

One of the more mysterious and unsettling statements to be found in Adorno
and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment reads: “The liberal Jews had
to experience at last the harmony of society which they confessed to as the
harmony of the national community.”2 The liberal Jews confessed to, or
chose to believe in, the (liberal) idea of “the harmony of society,” namely,
the kind of harmony Bastiat refers to in his Harmonies économiques. They
had to experience this harmony, which does not exist, as that of “the national
community” (Volksgemeinschaft), which exists: the only harmony that an-
tagonistic society can warrant is that of the Volksgemeinschaft. Horkheimer
and Adorno’s formulation implies that the worst consequences of “national
community” could have been fought more effectively had fewer people
believed in the convenient illusion of social harmony.
But this possibility seems rather theoretical: Do not the protagonists
and defenders of liberal society have to believe in its harmony, its commu-
nity, its identity? Tocqueville seems to say that much: “Despotism can do
without faith but freedom cannot. . . . How could society fail to perish if,
while the political bond is relaxed, the moral bond were not tightened?”3 If
 Antisemitism and the Limits of Liberal Society 279

Tocqueville is right, and all the evidence suggests he is, liberal society espe-
cially relies on tight “moral bonds,” which in the historical reality known
to us inevitably point to “the culture” of those who live closely together,
and to “religion”: the closeness in Greek of the twin concepts ethos and
ethnos, ethics and ethnicity, points in this direction, while the etymology
of religion gives already the notion of something that “binds” the members
of a community together. The problem seems to lie with a society that
cannot afford the “moral bond”—ethnic ethics, binding religion—to be
relaxed together with “the political bond.” To put it the other way around,
a sociality needs to be looked for that knows neither the chaos created by
antagonistic egotisms nor the need for bonds that stems from it. This form
of sociality is what Adorno hints at in another famous comment: “Politics
that are still seriously concerned with [an emancipated] society ought not,
therefore, to propound the abstract equality of men even as an idea. Instead,
they should . . . conceive the better state of things [Zustand] as one in which
people could be different without fear.”4 Another question that needs to be
asked is, if liberal society relies on some kind of bonds, why should they be
religious ones? After all, at least parts of the Enlightenment tradition had
seemed to look forward to religion’s disappearance, and religion did take
some blows during the French Revolution. In Germany, too, it was possible
in 1795 for some angry young men to write that both religion and politics
teach “contempt for humanity and the incapacity of man to realize the good
and to achieve something through his own efforts.”5 While this text seems
to condemn positive religion as such, Hegel (who might have had a hand in
writing it but at least found it worth copying) exempted Christianity from
such condemnation as early as in his “The Spirit of Christianity and Its
Fate” (1798–99), where he presented Judaism as the paradigmatic religion
of despotism.6 He gave a hint to what made him do so in a text of 1802 when
he wrote that religion “expresses the innermost being of all people, so that
all external and diffuse matters aside, they can find a common focus and,
despite inequality and transformations in other spheres and conditions, are
still able to trust and rely on each other.”7 Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to
say that many of the brightest thinkers of the modern era were prevented
280 Conclusion

from challenging religion by their horror of what might happen to liberal

society without the bonds of religion. In the modern period “religion was
subsumed [eingegliedert], and not overcome [aufgehoben]” as Adorno and
Horkheimer write: when religion became a “cultural artefact [Kulturgut]”
only its “reified forms” survived, while the “element of truth” that they had
carried and preserved (the messianic promise of a better life) tended to be
suppressed and made forgotten.8 The German society of the Second Reich
might have been “becoming increasingly secularized,” but it was “by no
means secular.”9 Private and public, inner and outer, state and civil society
needed a link of some sort, providing firm values, and this link was gener-
ally seen in “culture.” “Values” and “culture” were, however, impossible to
think of without reference to religion. Enlightenment (proto-)liberalism
had developed two approaches to religion, which Smith calls a “soft,” or
pluralist, and a “hard,” or rationalist tendency. The former saw theological
differences as irreconcilable and suggested that creating “a competitive mar-
ket in religious sects” could best neutralize their frictions—the more there
were, the more peaceful it would be (the historical root of today’s notion of
the “multicultural society”).10 The other line of thinking was the idea that
old-time theology ought to be transformed into a new, rational form of
religion that was very often understood to be a continuation and extension
of the Reformation. The rational religion would be universal, cosmopolitan,
pure morality stripped of all institutional, historical, and popular encrusta-
tion. The “soft” and “hard” tendencies were not, however, separate items: an
emblematic thinker like Locke contributed to both at the same time. When
Locke argues that politics should not concern itself with religion, this does
not mean it is independent from it. The tension between a secular state and
a religious civil society is not abolished by decree. The resurgence of forms
of religious enthusiasm that would challenge this precarious separation has
never been absent from modern societies.
Toleration was extended first of all, in England, to the dissenting Protes-
tant sects, not necessarily to Catholics or Jews and especially not to atheists.
“The point [of toleration] was to validate not every way of life and set of
moral beliefs but only enough of them to avoid the dangers of civil war.”11
 Antisemitism and the Limits of Liberal Society 281

Within this logic, minorities that were too insignificant to engage in a civil
war did not need to be tolerated. Moses Mendelssohn argued, in the Ger-
man context, for the extension of toleration to Judaism and Islam on the
grounds that church, mosque, and synagogue (no mention, however, of
the atheist reading club) could “assist the government in inculcating moral
reasons for obeying the law.”12 Also in Mendelssohn’s argument, toleration
of diversity will best ensure that moderate, not-too-unreasonable religion
will complement and support the purposes of the modern liberal state.
The state should therefore grant the space for this to happen while it criti-
cally observes that toleration is actually being put to good use.13 Hegel’s
position is not totally dissimilar: he argues for religious toleration because
the recognition of religious freedom asserts a crucial Protestant principle,
the centrality of individual subjectivity that thereby interpenetrates the
secular sphere. “Hegel argues that to exclude Jews from civil rights would
only confirm the separatism for which they have been reproached.”14 The
modern state and society, united in the spirit of Protestantism, assert their
world-historical triumph by tolerating the remnants of outdated religions.
The case for toleration is here an expression of optimistic belief in the ac-
tuality of liberal progress.
The social content of this belief is spelled out in Christian Wilhelm von
Dohm’s Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (On the Civic Improve-
ment of the Jews, 1781), which links the question of Jewish emancipation
to the larger framework of redefining the tasks of (modern) government
with respect to society:

It is the great and noble business of government so to attenuate the exclusive

principles [ausschliessenden Grundsätze] of all those various societies that they
do not damage the large common bond that embraces all of them; that each
of these divisions shall stimulate only competitiveness and activity rather than
dislike and distance; and that all of them are resolved in the great harmony of
the state. The government ought to allow each of those particular groupings to
indulge in their pride, even in their not damaging prejudices; but it also ought
to strive to instill yet more love in every single one of their members, and it will
282 Conclusion

have achieved its great task when the nobleman, the peasant, the scholar, the
artisan, the Christian and the Jew are, beyond and above all that, citizens.15

Dohm describes the transformation of the Gesellschaften and Verbindun-

gen—corporations and estates—of traditional bourgeois society into the
layers, classes, and groupings of modern bourgeois society. He points to a
characteristic dialectic of continuity and change: social groupings continue
to exist, and they still “indulge” in prejudices and “exclusive principles,” but
rather than existing statically next to each other, they engage in dynamic
competition and form a harmonious whole, the modern “state” (in today’s
usage, “society”). The task of government is to help harmony to emerge by
attenuating social separations: the “great harmony of the state” is based not
on the abolition of separation and prejudices but rather on their transforma-
tion. Dohm’s notion of harmony is a dynamic rather than a static harmony:
the state’s members “love” and recognize each other individually as citizens
but are in competition with each other as members of social strata, groups,
and classes. Dohm suggests that Jewish emancipation would help to increase
competition, dynamism, and productivity.16

From the Enlightenment to the Nation

It is crucial to the discussion that the fate of Enlightenment, liberalism, and
emancipation is bound up with that of the modern state, the nation, and
the necessities they represent. Altogether, these are moments of the larger
sociohistorical framework of modern bourgeois society. (“The modern
era” is understood here as the period in which “modernization” of society
took place, i.e., when a specific set of structural changes occurred that re-
sulted in the creation of “bourgeois society.” The difficulty and complexity
of the concept lies in the fact that beyond its historical-structural mean-
ing, “modernity” also carries normative connotations, a set of promises—
emancipation, humanity, human reconciliation in universal liberation—that
“modernization” has only begun to fulfil. The unfulfilled promises of “the
modern”—the difference between “modernity” and “modernization”—need
to be salvaged against the reality of modern society as it currently exists. For
 Antisemitism and the Limits of Liberal Society 283

this reason, “modern bourgeois society” is not the pleonasm that it seems
to be: although the notion of another modernity is currently driven under-
ground, it is as relevant now as it has been at any previous point in time.)17
Spinoza, Locke, Kant, and others called for a civil and reasonable religion
that would provide the necessary bridging of the gaps between private and
public, between civil society and the state, and left the door open for various
religions to join into a general neo-reformation movement. Hegel and then
Treitschke, together with cohorts of others, claimed straightforwardly what
had previously been implied between the lines: this modern and reasonable
religion already exists—more or less—in the form of Protestant Christian-
ity. In this situation, the Jews and others have to double their effort to join
the Protestant train of reasonable religion, or they might find themselves
being left behind.
Liberals in the age of nation building tended to postulate “a certain unifor-
mity of thought and action for the new society” in a way that had not been
customary in the Enlightenment period.18 Most Jews, hoping to assimilate
into the emerging bourgeois society, or rather into the class that saw itself as
the core of that society, were ready to take part in the bourgeoisie’s struggle
for emancipation from aristocratic domination. However, the non-Jewish
bourgeoisie did not unconditionally welcome the support by an even less
privileged group, let alone fight for their specific interests.19 An example is
the statement by Friedrich Dahlmann of 1831: the “fault lines of our civil
society [die Gebrechen unserer bürgerlichen Gesellschaft]” would not al-
low an act as “politically daring” as the emancipation of the Jews: he feared
emancipation would trigger riots that could get out of hand.20
Jewish liberals tended to endorse the emancipation-for-assimilation deal.
But while in the context of the Enlightenment, “de-Judaization” had meant
religious reform, participation in the general trend of making society “indus-
trious,” and commitment to “universal reason,” under the new conditions of
advanced nation-state formation these concerns were complemented, and
partly replaced, with a much more encompassing concern for “culture.” The
urge toward cultural-national assimilation was an element of nationalism
rather than of Enlightenment universalism.21 The concept of assimilation
284 Conclusion

was rearticulated in terms of state-culture during the first half of the nine-
teenth century. The liberal Karl von Rotteck wrote in 1828 that “the Jew had
to be de-Jewified.”22 He rejected Jewish emancipation with the argument
their religion was völkerfeindlich, by which he seemed to mean antisocial as
well as anti-national.23 The Jews lacked “the freedom and true Sittlichkeit”
to “subject themselves voluntarily to the majority principle.”24 He argued
in 1833 that the “temporary restriction of the rights of the Israelites” was
necessary “because the state as an intimate association [inniger Verein] ne-
cessitates a certain homogeneity or amalgamation [Gleichförmigkeit oder
Verschmelzung] of attitudes and preferences, and the Jews can not have this
actually social attitude towards us [unless they] stop being Jews in the strong
sense of the word.” Rotteck held that “hostility against or at least separation
from all other peoples” was intrinsic to Judaism.25
While Enlightenment liberalism was concerned primarily with civic-
political assimilation (and also with reform toward universal “reasonable
religion”), nationalist liberalism shifted the emphasis on assimilation toward
national culture. The “insistence that the emancipated Jew should cease to
be a Jew in any but a purely private capacity remained the liberal ortho-
doxy” throughout the nineteenth century.26 Concerning the time scale of
how to get there, however, two positions continued to compete with each
other. Rotteck—like most pre-1848 liberals—argued for a postponement
of emancipation until sufficient reform of Judaism and of the Jews was
completed, but also the more radical Humboldtian position—then the mi-
nority position—was present, as formulated, for example, by another Baden
deputy (also in 1833): the Israelites should “be thrown into the masses of the
Christian population so that they would be carried away by the torrent and,
like a pebble wandering along a riverbed, be rounded and made to fit into
the existing order [dem Bestehenden sich einfügen].”27 The second posi-
tion, which twenty-first-century readers will tend to find “more liberal,” is
also rather brutal and inhumane in its imagery; it can hardly surprise that
more traditional or conservative Jews at the time would have found it rather
more objectionable.
Only from around 1846, majority liberal thought generally shifted toward
 Antisemitism and the Limits of Liberal Society 285

support for emancipation without conditions.28 From the 1860s, finally, there
was a liberal consensus that state legislation should not be concerned with the
actual process of the social integration of the Jews but should merely abolish any
obstacles that restricted the individual, allowing society to take care of the rest.
Such shifts were the results of struggles, though: Dagmar Herzog warned from
the traditional notion of a “logical unfolding of liberal principles, expanding
to include ever more social groups in the circle of those who deserved equal-
ity” and argued that the liberals’ turn toward supporting emancipation was a
reaction to “a complex conjunction of intra-Christian conflicts,” namely, the
increased effectiveness of Catholic reaction and “neoorthodoxy.”29 She shows
in the case of Baden that liberals were particularly antagonized by “Rome’s
new authoritarianism in marital matters,” which prompted Baden liberals
to speak out against “religious tyranny” and for religious freedom (i.e., the
right of the “German Catholic [deutschkatholischen]” dissenters to organize
themselves as recognized Christian communities) so emphatically that they
had to give up in the end their reservations against Jewish emancipation.30 A
parliamentary speech by Friedrich Hecker in the August 1846 session in which
the Lower Chamber of Baden for the first time voted for Jewish emancipation
illustrates the process beautifully:

I must admit that this religious persecution, this repression for the sake of faith,
makes quite clear to me what sort of oppression has weighed on the Jews, and
from that moment on that I saw the oppression of our Deutschkatholiken, I
vowed to vote for the emancipation of the Jews. (Many voices cry bravo.) . . .
I was caught in the prejudice of youth, of custom, and now I have returned to
freedom. . . . I would not be able to justify it before God and the people to put
someone in a worse or lower position, because he cannot worship God as I do,
but rather wants to serve Him in his own way.31

Hecker added, though: “I know well, that it makes a peculiar impression

upon one with Christian Germanic sensibilities, when he sees the sharply
etched Oriental face suddenly invading.”32 As Herzog points out, into the
very argument that relativizes the religious difference the same difference
has already returned as the racial difference.
286 Conclusion

Inclusion and Exclusion

The analysis of the Dispute has pointed to the dialectic of inclusion and
exclusion as inherent in the “nation” form of the modern state. Whenever
a state and society are constituted in the form of “the nation,” some degree
of cultural homogeneity will have to be enforced, and there will inevitably
be some form of (more subtle or more overt) pressure toward sociocultural
assimilation. If a relevant minority appears not to be assimilating as much
as it is expected to, representatives of the established national culture tend to
draw one of three conclusions. First, they may think that the members of the
minority are prevented from assimilating by circumstance; this is the classic
position taken by Enlightenment figures such as Dohm and Humboldt and
echoed by Mommsen, Breßlau, and other liberal critics of Treitschke to the
extent that they admit that the Jews are still lacking Germanness. Second,
they are seen as being unwilling to assimilate, which is the dominant theme
of Treitschke’s contributions. Or third, they are seen as unable to assimilate,
which is the “racist” position held by Naudh and Endner, and sometimes
by Treitschke. These three interpretations have different and potentially
opposite practical implications but work toward the same political end, the
consolidation of nation building. Because Treitschke expects antisemitism
to accelerate the assimilation of the German Jews (his first objective) and
strengthen national consciousness of all Germans (his second objective), he
endorses it. The tension in his argument between whether or not he believes
Jewish assimilation to be possible implies that the second objective can
still be achieved independently from the first: if inclusion does not work,
exclusion will. Mommsen, Cohen, and others do not want the second objec-
tive (strengthening of the Germans’ national consciousness) to be realized
without the first (inclusion and assimilation of the Jews). Treitschke’s liberal
critics oppose antisemitism primarily because they think it weakens national
unity. Statements that reject antisemitism for reasons other than its adverse
implications for nation building are few and far between.
A discussion of liberalism needs to differentiate between the presupposi-
tions of the liberal “worldview” and the more practical propositions of liberal
 Antisemitism and the Limits of Liberal Society 287

politics; they do not necessarily—and perhaps not even typically—come in

a package. Invocations of progress, civilization, “industry and liberty,” and
social harmony can mean very different things in practice. A look at the
beginnings of the political concept of liberalism in the context of the French
Revolution shows that it is best characterized—in the modern context—as
the predominant centrist position in simultaneously opposing reaction and
(revolutionary, democratic, or socialist) radicalism. The advent of modern
class society as shaped by industrial capitalism led to a redefinition of the
liberal notion of social harmony and how it was to be secured.
German National Liberalism—to which Treitschke, Bamberger, Mommsen,
and Oppenheim adhered—was shaped by the experience in 1848 and 1849
when unexpectedly strong popular democratic forces emerged that only the
Prussian “warrior state” was able to defeat. Because democratic populism
was at the ready to take advantage of any power vacuum caused by a defeat
of the aristocracy, National Liberals had to learn the hard way that their
vision of transforming the old regime into modern society without any
extreme and sudden political change was impossible to realize unless in a
coalition with the traditional ruling classes. This coalition was no “betrayal”
but followed from the concept of liberalism. The National Liberal outlook’s
vacillations reflected the Janus character of the Prussian state and society. It
was able to accommodate a range of positions, from Treitschke’s emphasis
on the importance of the state as an ethical (sittliche) force to the “Man-
chester” liberalism of Bamberger and Oppenheim. Although Prussia was
not bourgeois in political form and appearance, it would be able to destroy
traditional power structures in the smaller German states without allowing a
power vacuum to emerge—so they thought—because Prussian society and
bureaucracy were more modern than those of most German states.
National Liberals assumed that the modernizing dynamic of national uni-
fication would quasi-automatically transform and modernize non-bourgeois
political forms. Therefore, a realpolitische alliance with the representatives
of such forms (Bismarck in particular) could seem to be legitimate and of
long-term benefit to the liberal cause. In the context of liberal realpolitik
the principle of the Rechtsstaat was repeatedly violated, as in the cases of
288 Conclusion

the Kulturkampf, the regulations concerning national minorities (such as

in Alsace-Lorraine), and the Sozialistengesetze. At the same time, enmity
toward state-led social policy was equivocal among National Liberals, some
of whom advocated moderate state-socialist reform (as also pre-1848 petit
bourgeois liberalism had entertained the notion of state-supported social
harmonization). The continued existence of opposition within liberalism to
so-called English conditions or Manchester capitalism on the grounds that
they undermined the harmony of national unity constituted an important
ideological bridge between liberal and antisemitic nationalism.
Mark Levene sums it up nicely: “The tolerant nation-state is a contradic-
tion in terms.”33 The claim that a particular state is “a nation-state” or that
the society whose political form this state is, is “a nation” is a claim about
the congruence of a political and an “ethnic” entity whereby “ethnicity”
means “culture” in the static (as opposed to dynamic and relational) sense
of the word. The claim of nationality must be made sufficiently plausible
through the existence or the creation of some ethnic-national “culture,” that
is, the (attempted or successful) reification and fetishization of society’s
actual culture—the ensemble of lived relationships between people—which
is always fluid and contradictory, never fully and consistently “national.”
“National culture” helps stabilize in turn the citizens’ loyalty to the state
and the unity and coherence of society. Even the denial that ethnicity is at
all relevant for the nation-state’s cohesion can at times be a defining fea-
ture of the particular national culture. This tends to occur in cases when
a competing nationalism (from within or without the national context) is
articulated in strongly ethnic-cultural or racial terms, such as in the cases
of Renan’s statement on nationalism in the dispute over Alsace-Lorraine, or
Lazarus’s statement in the Berlin Antisemitism Dispute, or indeed, a century
later, the social-liberal version of “political” nationalism represented in West
Germany by Habermas, among others.
The German state of 1871 was founded before a strong national conscious-
ness became common currency among most of the population. The found-
ing of the state was therefore followed by a strong effort of “internal nation
building.” Its bearer was less the Reich—given its federal structure—than
 Antisemitism and the Limits of Liberal Society 289

the dynamic of economic unification and modernization of society. When

industrial and agrarian crisis set in (in the 1870s), the relevance of the state
inevitably increased as a force that could—in the national framework—
lessen some of the phenomena of crisis. To the same extent, however, that
the crisis increased the importance of the state it also undermined some
of its credibility and strength (which relied in the first place on prosperity
and economic security); the more precarious the latter became, the more
national coherence had to be increased through emphasis not on material
but on national-cultural values.
Despite the extent of secularization that is characteristic of the process of
modernization, cultural and moral values were in the nineteenth century
(and arguably still are for most people) impossible to conceive of without
reference to religion. In the context of Enlightenment liberalism, the tolera-
tion of religious difference was connected to the expectation that a reformed,
rational, and universal form of religiosity would emerge that would underpin
modern civilization, morality, and legality. The toleration of traditional,
positive (especially revealed) religion was understood to serve, or at least
not to obstruct, the pursuit of modern, rational religiosity.
This tension was exacerbated by the fact that in the age of confessionaliza-
tion of (Christian) religion in Europe, positive religion functioned more than
ever before as a form of political ideology and was implicated in the process
of early modern—that is, pre-(or proto-)nationalist—state formation. The
emergence of the modern concept of religiosity (which tends to reduce positive
religion to mere “vehicles of religiosity”) is paralleled by the clericalization
of religion and the increased importance of the socially ordering function
of clerical control and hierarchy. However, religious belonging—like that
from descent or ethnicity—has never been coextensive with state territory,
and the more religion served as a unifying force in the service of national
state and society, the more it also became a divisive force.
The modernizing Prussian state that was not (yet) a national state was not
(yet) committed to enforcing assimilation and cultural homogeneity either:
most Prussian governments before 1848 found the continued existence of
a separate Jewish community more beneficial than its abolition. Only the
290 Conclusion

modern sovereign nation-state (as it constituted itself unequivocally first

in the American and French revolutions) made the abolition of “(e)states
within the state” a matter of explicit policy. Emancipation of the Jews as
individuals was in this context the flip side of overcoming the existence of
“the Jews” as a separate corporate group or “nation” (in the pre-modern
sense). Humboldt (1809) already used the concept of “amalgamation” that
still was a keyword for Treitschke, Mommsen, and their contemporaries.34
Liberals in the period between the anti-Napoleonic wars and 1848 tended not
to profess much sympathy for the Jews, whom they considered anachronistic,
unenlightened, and alien to the emerging “culture” of the German nation
that they were working toward. It was only in the mid-1840s that Jewish
emancipation became an unconditional part of the liberal program.
Taking their cue from the Catholic reaction to the French Revolution,
opponents of the new order depicted the Jews as the latter’s instruments or
even its (hidden) conductors. At the same time, in terms of the Enlighten-
ment discourse on emancipation, Jews were attacked as anachronistic and
backward elements that hindered modernization and the formation of the
liberal national state and society. Insofar as the new order meant the capital-
ist transformation of economic relations, Jews were construed either as its
embodiments or as stumbling blocks to it. Insofar as the new order meant
the nationalist transformation of political relations, Jews were construed
as either modernizing destroyers of traditional loyalty or as invariably alien
to the modernity and community of the nation. The synthesis of these
antithetical accusations in the last decades of the nineteenth century must
be seen in the context of the general liberal-conservative rapprochement:
the survival of the new order relied on the alliance of its protagonists with
the more enlightened representatives of the old regime and involved en-
listing traditional values and loyalties to the cause of capitalist modernity;
unsurprisingly, some of the enemies of the old regime also became enemies
of the new.
For the “antisemitism of the industrial age” the nation and the capitalist
mode of production had become familiar and quasi-natural aspects of cur-
rent social relations. The Jews could be accused for any unwelcome aspect
 Antisemitism and the Limits of Liberal Society 291

of their normal workings as well as their malfunctioning. They were said

to be obstructing their harmonious functioning as well as to have ushered
them in in the first place. Anyone’s notion of what constituted a healthy
and desirable extent of capitalist modernity implied a complementary no-
tion of what was excessive capitalist modernity—greed, materialism, usury,
speculation, mammonization, predatory capital. The strategy of blaming
that excess on “the Jews” fit into socialist or liberal frameworks just as well
as into a conservative or reactionary framework.

Multiculturalism and Societal Cohesion

How does the liberal state act when some or even most members of civil
society find—for good or bad reasons, or both—particular cultural practices
of some of its members obnoxious, hypocritical, anachronistic, superstitious,
anti-liberal, aesthetically displeasing, clannish and cliquish, or, horror of
horrors, a threat to “community cohesion”? Common sense might assume
that reasonable and well-meaning people can strike a balance between war-
ranting the “multicultural” right to difference and asserting liberal values,
but closer scrutiny points to a fundamental contradiction: the modern liberal
state appears to be an institution dedicated to easing societal antagonisms
by conducting gentle social and cultural reform, led by the reasonableness
of justice and equality; but in order to be able to do so, that state claims to
be expressive of a particular national culture. The social harmony, cohesion,
and inclusion it promises are in reality those of the national community,
and thus inevitably exclusionary at the same time.
David Goodhart, a former journalist for the Financial Times and editor
of the British right-wing liberal journal Prospect, managed early in 2004 to
capture a crucial bit of zeitgeist and considerable attention with a persua-
sively written opinion piece entitled “Too Diverse.”35 He wrote about the
“progressive dilemma,” quoting a conservative politician, David Willetts:
progressives “want diversity, but they thereby undermine part of the moral
consensus on which a large welfare state rests.”36 Goodhart’s primary concern
here was with the dangers of “tax resistance”: a lack of moral consensus—in
particular the sense that morally “undeserving” people receive handouts from
292 Conclusion

the state—can endanger the fiscal basis of the welfare state. This argument
is, however, only a particular instance of the more general problem (as old
as the modern age) that the state itself, not only the apparent beneficiaries of
the welfare it may provide, must appear to “deserve” society’s entrusting to
it a large portion of its surplus product. Refusing to squander even minute
amounts of money on welfare scroungers, work-refuseniks, and those who
choose lifestyles, beliefs, and attitudes upon which the majority frowns is
only one of the ways in which the state can score points in legitimacy.
Painfully aware of the fundamental precariousness of the liberal state,
Goodhart argued that “the left . . . is ready to stress the erosion of commu-
nity from ‘bad’ forms of diversity, such as market individualism, but not
from ‘good’ forms of diversity, such as sexual freedom and immigration.”
Contrary to what “the left” proposes, Goodhart’s argument implies that we
should not rock the boat with too many sexual, immigration, and other funny
freedoms, because “community” (namely, in its current form of appearance
as “society,” to use Tönnies’s concepts) is already suffering badly from the
effects of “market individualism.”37 We are warned that exaggerated liberal-
ism (i.e., more individualism than what a market economy inevitably brings
with itself) endangers the continued existence of the liberal state.38
In an earlier episode of the same ongoing discourse, the then British home
secretary, David Blunkett, pointed in September 2002 to “a continuing ten-
sion between modernity and the cultural practices of some of those entering
highly advanced countries” who “because of education or geography, find
themselves catapulted into effectively different centuries.”39 The “clash of
modernity with long held cultural traditions” must be recognized by the lib-
eral state as a “challenge,” something about which Pim Fortuyn (the populist
Dutch politician who had been murdered shortly before that date) “had a
point to make,” as Blunkett recognized. As if responding to Blunkett (and
Treitschke and Fortuyn, etc.), Terry Eagleton commented more recently on
the relationship between culture and state power, arguing that culture “beds
power down, makes it appear natural and inevitable, turns it into spontane-
ous reflex and response.” If power is to secure people’s allegiance, it “must
become the invisible colour of everyday life itself. And this is what we know
 Antisemitism and the Limits of Liberal Society 293

as culture. . . . If culture is about plurality, power is about unity. How can it

sell itself simultaneously to a whole range of life forms without being fatally
diluted?” As long as the things that constitute culture “are fairly uniform,
political power can afford to leave them alone. It is when they become too
diverse” that culture “becomes part of the problem rather than the solu-
tion” from the point of view of the state.40 Eagleton plays here on a crucial
ambivalence of the concept of culture: on the one hand, “culture is about
plurality” (literally Lazarus’s argument); on the other hand, state power (and,
by implication, the societal structures, forces, and dynamics that the state is
based on) is forced to take possession and control of culture (the point quite
rightly made by aforementioned “liberal Tories,” or rather Tory-ish liberals).
The more culture comes into its own, as it were, by becoming truly plural,
the less the state can afford to let it do. Eagleton emphasizes the universality
of certain moral values, which are beyond and independent of culture (“As
far as morality goes, it is hard to slide a cigarette paper between Allah and
Jehovah,” he writes, again recalling what many in the Berlin Antisemitism
Dispute said about the Christian and the Jewish concepts of God), but he
also asserts that “those in power are right to see multiculturalism as a threat.”
Against the defiant and almost optimistic tone of Eagleton’s endorsement
of multiculturalism (which is perhaps typical of the British Cultural Stud-
ies tradition), it needs to be equally emphasized that the state and “those
in power” are a very big threat to culture, as they are compelled to reduce
the plurality and dynamism of culture (always already “multi-”) to the self-
identical, reified entity known as “national culture.”
In this book I have suggested it would be worthwhile to step back from
these contemporary musings of different types of liberals who want “to assert
their antiliberal opinions” and explore historical sources from a century and
a quarter earlier.41 In making this move I was led by the hope that a shift of
scenery and historical context may open a different, and perchance enlight-
ening, perspective on what I argue was then as fundamental a problem for
liberal society as it is today. In the question of the nation-state’s relation to
cultural difference I argue it is possible to discuss one of the conditions of
modernity that have provided antisemitism with a platform from which it
294 Conclusion

was able (and in some way or other still is) to unfold its destructive poten-
tial.42 As the idea of the nation, and more generally liberalism’s dependence
on invoking social harmony and “moral cohesion,” has a plethora of other,
perhaps more obvious, implications, the perspective suggested here also
allows reconnecting the discussion of antisemitism to that of inclusion
and exclusion in antagonistic society, from Volksgemeinschaft and “national
community” to “social cohesion.” I would like to see my suggestion to link
the discussion of nineteenth-century German antisemitism to that of con-
temporary multicultural society as part of a larger, ongoing trend to restore
the analysis of antisemitism to its place as paradigmatic for more general
discussions of race, emancipation, assimilation, cultural difference, liberal
society, and national state in Europe. This implies shifting the focus on
those pre-Hitlerite manifestations of antisemitism that are still more clearly
rooted within bourgeois society, rather than in gestures of rebellion to it
(although Hitler’s was of course a rebellion of the “authoritarian character,”
i.e., a rebellion that was not one). The issue here is, why did the “Jewish
question” seem so important that a nationalist like Treitschke rather took
the risk of threatening social peace than accepting what was to him the fact
of the increasing “Jewishness” of society? Treitschke stopped subordinating
a general and rather diffuse feeling of antipathy toward Jews to the larger
objective, national unity, therewith adopting “political” antisemitism, and
this is what fellow liberals like Mommsen attacked him for.
How little the basic problem has changed in the last century and a quarter
can be read off the recent argument by John Gray—an influential voice of
centrist liberalism—that “a stable liberal civil society cannot be radically
multicultural but depends for its successful renewal across the generations
on an undergirding culture that is held in common. This common culture
need not encompass a shared religion and it certainly need not presuppose
ethnic homogeneity, but it does demand widespread acceptance of certain
norms and conventions of behaviour and, in our times, it typically expresses
a shared sense of nationality.”43 Now as then, the liberal critique of the exclu-
sionary tendencies of nationalism finds its limits at what Treitschke called
“the hard necessity of the unity of the state,” which is a necessity produced
 Antisemitism and the Limits of Liberal Society 295

by liberal society itself. The liberal discourse collapses and gives way to an
anti-liberal one at the point where a whole series of conceptual dichoto-
mies that are foundational to it prove unstable: “mixed culture” is difficult
to distinguish from “amalgamation,” “culture” from “race,” “politics” from
“religion,” the “national state” from “national society,” “Sittlichkeit” from
“religion,” “religion” from “religiosity.” All these distinctions and differentia-
tions, in spite of their intellectual appeal and importance, melt away when
brought into the discursive force field of “the hard necessity of the unity of
the state,” especially in a historical context characterized by economic and
political crisis and the “red danger” lurking in the background.
In the concept of the nation, society is articulated simultaneously as a cul-
tural community and as a political one inasmuch as it forms a state. It is in this
context that state and culture in their interplay came to be understood, in the
words of David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, as furnishing “sites of reconciliation
for a civil and political society that is seen to be riven by conflict and contradic-
tion.” From Friedrich Schiller via Humboldt to Matthew Arnold, “cultural (or
aesthetic) formation comes gradually to play the role of forming citizens for the
modern state.”44 The decisive shift in the modern context is that an arbitrary
relation between state and population is now seen as illegitimate: the state is
now seen as the historically developed “unifying representation” of a “popular
will.”45 The state “expresses at a higher level the still developing essence” of “its”
people. Culture, though, is supposed to sublate competing partial interests
by developing everyone to his or her “full human capacity”—actually, the
capacity to be bourgeois—which promises the ending of all conflict. Culture
“educes” the “citizen” from the mere “human being.”46 Lloyd and Thomas’s
words describe well the processes of “emancipation” of various groups of the
population (women, Jews, workers, “ethnic groups”) into the “maturity” or
adulthood of being bourgeois subjects and citizens. It is “the function of culture
to interpellate individuals into the disposition to disinterested reflection” that
alone allows the state to mediate conflicts between social groups:47 “As culture
comes to represent the fundamental common identity of human beings, so
the state is conceived, ideally, as the disinterested ethical representative of
this same common humanity. The idea of culture produces the consensual
296 Conclusion

grounds for representative democracy and the liberal settlement by annulling

individual differences and drawing or eliciting the formal or ‘representative’
disposition in every person out of the real, particular conditions of that per-
son’s life.”48 It is significant that Matthew Arnold, on whose interpretation
Lloyd and Thomas base these thoughts on culture and the state, relied on
Schiller and Humboldt, as did John Stuart Mill: these cross-references seem
to illustrate the unity of European liberalism at least in the first two-thirds of
the nineteenth century. The German Sonderweg was not yet discovered back
then. Likewise, Stanley Aronowitz writes that Talcott Parsons “never tired of
reminding us” that “preserving the cultural system is the very presupposition
of social stability, without which reason cannot flourish,” and that current
debates on multiculturalism “are, in part, a replay, in different cadences, of
this much older dispute.”49 If culture is understood as national culture—
the basis of a collective national identity underpinning a state that is almost
by definition something static (therefore it is called “state”)—then also the
concept of culture must be static: it must to some extent reify and negate the
dynamism that constitutes actual culture. A consistently dynamic concept of
culture, as Lazarus attempted to formulate, is therefore not possible within
the national-liberal framework.

Volksgemeinschaft
In the liberal context, and in its following also in the socialist one, nation
formation has often been construed as the overcoming of ethnic-racial di-
visions, as it was in the Berlin Antisemitism Dispute; nationalism tends to
appear in these contexts indeed as the opposite of racism. This notion lives
on in the contemporary discourse that opposes republican “patriotism” to
nationalism, or good, moderate nationalism to bad, ethnic nationalism.
When, however, “the liberal Jews had to experience at last the harmony of
society, which they confessed to, as the harmony of the Volksgemeinschaft,”
it became clear that the antagonistic society defended by liberalism has no
better community to offer than the national community, and the harmony
of liberal, national society turned against even their most committed ad-
herents for no other reason than their Jewishness.50
 Antisemitism and the Limits of Liberal Society 297

Talk about the “will of the nation” (initially a discourse that challenged
the legitimist, traditional, historical rights of princes and nobility) needed
to be based on a determination of who the nation is. This implies a defini-
tion not only in socioeconomic terms (the nation is the Third Estate, as
in Sieyes’s famous formula)51 but also in cultural-geographical ones. To
the extent that the lower nobility and the (traditional, not yet industrial)
bourgeoisie needed to challenge and destroy the legitimacy of the higher
aristocracy (the transnational, aristocratic “race” in the older sense of the
word), they could not be happy with state borders whose legitimacy was
based merely (i.e., honestly) on the fact that they had been established by
way of feudal, marital, and military means. One of the implications of the
fact that the new society emerged as a national one was that it reinterpreted
state borders by subjecting them to culture, ethnicity, and race (and also
redrew them wherever this was possible and advantageous). The citizens of
the new regime learned to expect borders to be meaningful and expressive
of deep history rather than to be contingent and arbitrary. Since the nine-
teenth century the full-blooded, warm-as-life discourse of ethnic statehood
increasingly flushed out traditional political legitimacy, and it continues to
do so. Contemporary liberals and socialists who believe it is enough simply to
“cool down” and de-ethnicize the discourses of the state (i.e., redress liberal
nationalism as “constitutional patriotism” or “postnational nationalism”)
borrow eighteenth-century ideas to deal with twenty-first-century realities:
the nation may be a phantasm, the nation-state is not.52
As John Gray writes, the notion “that a common allegiance can be sus-
tained by subscription to abstract principles, without the support of a com-
mon culture,” is a “rationalist illusion.”53 Likewise, though from a different
ideological background, Stuart Hall writes that the modern liberal state is
of necessity “enmeshed” and “embedded” in the social practices and imagi-
naries of national culture.54 Bhikhu Parekh confirms that “a morally neutral
state, making no moral demands on its citizens and equally hospitable to
all cultures, is logically impossible.”55 The basic point, however, was made
in its classic form already in 1835 by Alexis de Tocqueville: “Despotism can
do without faith but freedom cannot. . . . How could society fail to perish if,
298 Conclusion

while the political bond is relaxed, the moral bond were not tightened?”56
Indeed, nineteenth-century liberals were acutely aware of the fact that one
of the tasks of the liberal nation-state was to create social coherence. Sadly,
the nation-state in the twentieth century was astonishingly successful with
creating homogeneity, using more brutal (fascist) as well as more subtle
(democratic) means. As a result, today’s society is simultaneously as differ-
entiated and as homogeneous as no other preceding form of society. In this
context, “ethnic diversity,” especially the thin trickle of cultural alterity that
results from immigration, has grabbed public attention out of all propor-
tion. An increasingly homogeneous society holds on to the debate about
ethnic difference as if to a fetish that helps it suppress its well-founded fear
of a cultural death by self-imposed monotony. It also compensates for the
silence on differences other than cultural and helps forget also that many
vibrant cultural differences fell victim to destruction by the “culture industry”
(such as the working-class culture that once formed the milieu of the labor
movement). The actual differences that have survived elimination tend now
to be reduced to differences between “ethnicities” or “cultures”—indeed, a
telling aspect of society’s increasing homogenization. Failure to recognize
and criticize this reality is one of the conceptual weaknesses of the discourse
of “multiculturalism” that is based on a rather thin concept of culture. As
Russell Jacoby writes: “No divergent political or economic vision animates
cultural diversity. From the most militant Afrocentrists to the most ardent
feminists, all quarters subscribe to very similar beliefs about work, equal-
ity and success. The secret of cultural diversity is its political and economic
uniformity.”57 Jacoby writes that Horace Meyer Kallen, who seems to have
coined the term “cultural pluralism” during and in the aftermath of World
War I, did so in the context of his rejection of the worldview of his father,
an orthodox rabbi. Kallen’s clearly stated intention was to replace the cul-
ture represented by his father with a lifestyle based on the acceptance of
U.S. mainstream society’s secularism, humanism, science, and industrial
economy.58 The concept of “cultural pluralism” was coined not as a rejection
of but as a gentler articulation of “assimilation.”59
The related paradox that liberal society is simultaneously increasingly
 Antisemitism and the Limits of Liberal Society 299

homogeneous and antagonistic is indirectly reflected in another remark

by John Gray: “Pressure for the integration of ethnic minorities into the
mainstream culture may indeed be unhealthy when, as perhaps in Britain
today, the cultural traditions of some ethnic groups embody virtues of com-
munity better than the larger society does.”60 Gray admits here between the
lines that the culture shared by “larger society” does not “embody virtues
of community” very well. Its sociability is “unsociable.”61 This adds further
irony to the problematic of multiculturalism: the members of liberal society
are aware and perhaps envious of the fact that there is more community
in those stubbornly particularistic minority cultures than in the national
community that aims to integrate all and sundry but that never really “is.”
The need to defend the cohesion of national culture alone cannot explain
the venom with which in the current period the battles against head scarves
are fought and with which some of today’s liberals’ forebears fought trouser-
selling youths from the East: in real terms, either matter is negligible. Perhaps
it is not too far-fetched to say that some of the conservative practices of
minority cultures mirror back to the liberals the implications of their own
melancholy longing for community: minority communitarianism spills
the truth about what liberals themselves needed to impose (or alternatively,
needed to allow others to impose) in order to glue together the liberal society
of owners and sellers of commodities, of whose dark sides the self-hating
liberals are only too aware. The look-how-cliquish-and-clannish-they-are
side of liberal anti-liberalism mirrors and complements the equally self-
hating look-how-modern/capitalist/liberal/socialist-they-are side of liberal
anti-liberalism. The nods that the Home Secretary Blunkett Labour made
toward Pim Fortuyn testify to this, as did Tocqueville’s enthusiasm about
the religiosity of civil society in the United States. My suggestion is that
Treitschke’s support for antisemitism has the same roots. Cultural conser-
vatism as well as liberalism’s open flank to reaction appear thus as hidden
necessities of liberal society. Awareness of the fact that even demands for
“merely cultural” national homogenization have far more than merely cul-
tural implications can help defending multicultural liberalism against the
champions of unitary national culture as well as keeping in mind its intrinsic
300 Conclusion

limitations. Liberalism has to mimic what it fights against. Having touched

this painful scar on the liberal consciousness is perhaps the gravest offense
those Muslim girls are committing, and perhaps this echoes some of the ways
in which the trouser-selling youths from the East offended the sensibilities
of German liberals (Gentile or Jewish) a century and a quarter ago. This is
an aspect that antisemitism shares with the liberal anti-Catholicism of the
same period. The “envy” (and projection) of strong community cohesion
(from “cliquishness” to “conspiracy”) is a powerful although only partial
aspect of either. Value judgments, or “taking sides,” are difficult in this area if
one’s principal allegiance is to the vision of a state of things in which one can
be different without fear—in other words, in which the free development of
each individual is the condition of that of all. This—the notion of an actually
humane culture—is something neither the liberal state and society nor the
“communities” or “cultures” are on their own able to provide.62

Ordinary Liberals
The “clearly stated polemical purpose” of the discourse which holds that
Germany failed to take what Dahrendorf called the “long hard road to mo-
dernity” was “to explain fascism not by its capitalist present but by the baleful
influence of the feudal past.”63 Remnants of the feudal past are no sufficient
explanation, though, as they existed in the nineteenth century not only, and
perhaps not even especially, in Germany.64 Likewise, when Habermas wrote
(in 1986) that “the only patriotism that will not alienate us from the West
is constitutional patriotism,” his thinking might have been led by the no-
tion that only intensified, capitalist-liberal modernization (formerly known
as “Manchesterism”) would be able to smother any remaining nostalgia
for deutsch-national state-socialism of the varieties favored by antisemites
from the Katheder socialists up to and including Hitler. (If this was indeed
his drift, it would be in line with the thinking of nineteenth-century left-
liberals such as Bamberger and Oppenheim but oblivious of the fact that
the modernity of Nazism combined the racial “social state” with intensive
“Fordist” development.)65 Habermas’s reasoning, however, seems not to
have paid attention to its own lineage: when he added that “unfortunately,
 Antisemitism and the Limits of Liberal Society 301

a commitment to universal constitutional principles based in conviction,”

which is “the only reliable basis of our tie to the West,” has “only been possible
in German national culture since—and because of—Auschwitz,” Habermas
is factually wrong: “constitutional patriotism” was possible in German his-
tory before Auschwitz and had indeed been advocated by German liberals
in the nineteenth century.66 For that very reason, though, it cannot be cat-
egorically separated from the overall history that made Auschwitz possible.
(Besides, there is something unpleasant about any argument that tries to
derive some kind of secondary utility from the “final solution”: it carries
the subtext, “at least there is one good thing about it, it healed the Germans
of German peculiarities.”)67
To common sense it must appear obvious that strengthening liberalism
helps prevent fascism. Historical reality is more complex. In the words of
Geoff Eley, “It was not the weakness of liberalism in Germany, or the failure
of Enlightenment properly to take hold, that explains the possibility of anti-
semitism, that is, but a flaw at the center of liberalism’s own positive creed, its
own best version, which was so strongly centered around a set of dominant
cultural norms.”68 As Dagmar Herzog wrote, “liberalism itself was part of
the problem”: “anti-Jewish sentiment in Germany was not so much due to
the failure of a ‘western-style’ Enlightenment to take proper hold there, but
rather to a contradiction at the heart of the western ideal itself. It was not,
then, the impotence of liberalism in Germany that caused difficulties for
those who were disenfranchised, but rather liberalism’s own fundamental
duality: its simultaneous tolerance and intolerance—the elastic, always po-
tentially inclusive aspects, and the continually contested and renegotiated
exclusions which characterized it as well.”69 Twenty years earlier, Dan White
had already observed that “all of us who write on modern German history
trace out our investigations under the shadow of the colossal failure of
civilized, let alone liberal values in that country during this [the twentieth]
century,” which is “inducing us to attribute more weight to strictly national
causes than they should perhaps bear. . . . Liberalism in Europe nowhere
survived the transition to mass politics with the same strength it possessed
in the age of limited electorates.”70 “When the comparison is extended to
302 Conclusion

1914, a good part of the German experience seems to prefigure the com-
mon dilemmas of European liberalism.”71 The allegedly “belated nation”
was in this view ahead of its time in many ways, including the extent of its
democracy and the corresponding decline of (party-political) liberalism.
Under conditions of a democratic franchise, liberals “could not make good
on their claims of general representation”: German “National Liberals were
unlucky in that political developments in Germany forced the problem of
representativeness upon them long before their counterparts elsewhere in
Europe had to deal with it.”72 Almost another two decades before White
wrote these comments on German National Liberalism, the failure of the
notion of “German peculiarities” to help explain the Holocaust was already
stated by Horkheimer and Adorno in their foreword to the German edition
of Massing’s Rehearsal for Destruction (1959):

Totalitarian antisemitism is not at all a specifically German phenomenon. Ef-

forts to derive it from such a dubious entity as the national character, the
impoverished reflection of what once used to be called Volksgeist, trivialize the
incomprehensible that is to be comprehended. . . . The riddle demands to be
resolved on the level of society. . . . Totalitarian antisemitism indeed owes its
German triumphs to a social and economic constellation, not to the charac-
teristics or the attitude of a nation that spontaneously perhaps harbored less
racial hatred than those civilized countries that had expelled or slaughtered
their Jews already centuries earlier.73

Horkheimer and Adorno point in this short text both to political manipula-
tion and the “receptivity of the masses” for it and conclude, bringing together
the societal, the individual, and the political levels of analysis: “Antisemitism
has its basis in objective social relations as much as in consciousness and
unconsciousness of the masses. But it is actualized as a means of politics: as
a means of integrating divergent group interests; as the shortest and least
dangerous way of diverting attention from a misery for whose resolution
other means would be available.”74
As Volkov recently restated, “the ongoing debate on break and continuity”
is “only about the correct proportions.”75 In order to adequately grasp the
 Antisemitism and the Limits of Liberal Society 303

transition to what subsequently became the Hitlerite form of antisemitism

and its specific character, though, especially with a view to Auschwitz, “it is
important to stress the relative marginality of antisemitic ideas in German
public life, taking the Kaiserreich as a whole. For instance, antisemitism as
such was not part of the radical-nationalist ideological repertoire for most
of the Imperial period.”76 The decisive development was the merging of
intellectual and populist forms of antisemitism, but this happened on a
large scale not before the run-up to World War I, for example, in the “Cartel
of the Productive Estates.”77 As for the role of antisemitism in the context
of the nineteenth century in general, “massive scholarship on antisemitism
in France and Britain has made it abundantly clear that Imperial Germany
was entirely typical in this respect.”78

State, Society, Culture, Individual

The problem of difference and separation as well as the interdependence
of state, society, its culture, and the individuals who constitute them needs
to be discussed in order to get to the problem of why Treitschke, a National
Liberal, welcomed and endorsed antisemitism, and why the liberals who
criticized him nevertheless had to concede a significant extent of consensus
between themselves and him.
For Treitschke, the Jews are a “misfortune” because they threaten the
precarious unity of national state and national society as mediated by na-
tional culture. It is important to recognize that even those who explicitly
invoke the concept of “race” present racial difference as dangerous not in
itself but because it refers as shorthand to differences of cultural, religious,
moral, and economic behavior. Whether such differences are considered to
be “immutable” (i.e., “racial”) or merely to be changing very slowly (over
periods of many years, i.e., “cultural”) is in practice of little relevance. Even
the most radical racists sometimes credit sociocultural practices (even in
the absence of carnal miscegenation) with the power to corrupt the (not-
so-immutable) racial essence of the master race: not even they are totally
convinced that “race” is eternal. Likewise, the fists that beat up “third-world-
looking” persons in the street have probably been set into motion not so much
304 Conclusion

by the (abstract) idea of race but by the (concrete) reality of the nation (i.e.,
nation-state and national society). The shouts of “out with, too many of ”
are claims to mastery over a specific territory combined with the belief that
entitlement to this claim is grounded in a set of determinate sociocultural
characteristics historically and politically linked to the territory in question.79
The person behind the fists may or may not imagine these characteristics
to be inscribed into the dna.
Treitschke’s opponents fail to reject his position conclusively, because their
thinking and their politics are rooted in the same dialectic of nation-state
and civil society. A state or society that demands loyalty and “identifica-
tion” from its members (i.e., not merely the payment of tributes or taxes)
tends to demand that ethnic or religious minorities assimilate or convert.
Although this is not an exclusive characteristic of national state and society,
the relevance of such processes immensely increased in the course of the
nineteenth century and after. The increased relevance of cultural identifica-
tion in the modern context gave the issue of Jew-hatred an equally increased
and qualitatively new significance.
Most theories of the relationship of modern state and society assert in
one form or other the separation of state, nation, and culture as a given fact,
or at least as a fair possibility that is worth working toward: the notion of
“constitutional patriotism” (such as in Habermas) proposes, for example,
that nationalism (patriotism) be contained within the constitutional-political
realm so that its “cultural” and societal base remain non-national.80 The notion
of “cultural nationalism” (such as in Otto Bauer) rests on the complementary
suggestion that nationalism be allowed to spread in the realm of culture but
ought to, and indeed could, be prevented from influencing the non-national
(or rather “multinational”) state.81 Both conceptions assume—from opposite
angles—that the state superstructure could reside in majestic independence
above society and its culture. Each fatally overestimates the possibilities of
the practical separation of state and society, respectively, state citizenship
and membership in society and “the cultural community.”
The merit of the Dispute, and indeed of Treitschke’s and the antisemites’
pamphlets, is that they throw into sharp relief antinomies inherent in the
 Antisemitism and the Limits of Liberal Society 305

modern constellation of state, culture, and society. Any form of liberalism

has to be concerned about the state’s ability to function as a guarantor of the
rule of law and—if necessary—of liberal reform. It has therefore to provide
for all that is necessary for the state to persist and function. The state has to
demand loyalty, but loyalty cannot be based on merely abstract citizenship.
It is difficult to see either how membership in the state on the one hand and
in the “cultural community” on the other hand could be strictly separate,
or how the state could be fully separate from religion as long as religion
remains an integral part of civil society, both as something handed down
and as a constantly reproduced response to the social need for some form
of (transcendent) resolution of suffering that society fails (immanently)
to resolve: “you can sooner build a city in the skies than see a state endure
without religion,” as the antisemitic The German Guard: Monthly for National
Cultural Interests asserted (quoting a formulation by the Greek writer and
philosopher Plutarch).82
Religious difference that is firmly locked away in the “chamber” of the
private is easy to tolerate. When, however, as is the case with Treitschke, a
strict public-private divide is rejected because the public realm is understood
to refer to inner values (morality linked to religiosity), toleration becomes
precarious. Treitschke articulates a contradiction that might appear as a
departure from liberal theory but is intrinsic to liberal society. If this is the
case, the real scandal is not Treitschke’s position but the reality of liberal
society itself, and it turns out to be a decisive weakness of liberal political
thought that it presupposes conceptually the existence of separations that
at the same time it presupposes not to exist.
The modern state assumes direct, unmediated authority over the in-
dividual, thus challenging and transforming traditional community. The
legitimacy of this authority is supported by the claim that the state is the
political embodiment of a new form of community that (logically, not nec-
essarily temporally) preexists the state. This new form of community, the
nation, is supposed to “speak” through “its” state as it also speaks through
“its” culture. The open-ended and dynamic character of actual culture is
contained and partially denied by the claim that it is the expression of an
306 Conclusion

imaginary entity—the national community—that is an abstraction from

culture in its actual diversity: the claim that culture is “national culture” is
based on a fetishistic reversal.
State politics of toleration were and are always framed by discriminatory
measures that warrant the superiority of the hegemonic creed. As Ghassan
Hage writes, the Christian variety (such as expressed in the English Tolera-
tion Act of 1689), the variety practiced in the Muslim empires (as derived
from the Shari’a prescriptions about the treatment of Christians and Jews
as dhumma, “those to be protected”), the liberal policies of the nineteenth
century, and the “multicultural” policies of the late twentieth century all
have this in common.83 “Where we empower an agent to be tolerant, we
empower him equally to be intolerant,” because “when those who are in-
tolerant are asked to be tolerant, their power to be intolerant is not taken
away from them.”84
In Antisemite and Jew, Sartre writes that “there may be detected in the
most liberal democrat a tinge of antisemitism; he is hostile to the Jew to
the extent that the latter thinks of himself as a Jew.”85 Sartre sees “the anti-
semite” and “the democrat” as complementary forces: “the former wishes to
destroy him [the Jew] as a man and leave nothing in him but the Jew,” while
the latter “wishes to destroy him as a Jew and leave nothing in him but the
man.” “The antisemite reproaches the Jew with being Jewish; the democrat
reproaches him with willfully considering himself a Jew.”86 Sartre argues that
“the democrat” aims “to persuade individuals that they exist in an isolated
state . . . in order to plunge [them] into the democratic crucible whence [the
individual] will emerge naked and alone, an individual and solitary particle
like all the other particles.”87 Sartre’s image of “the democrat” is intended as
a polemic, but his notion of the “democratic crucible” is still too optimistic:
it fails to show that the “crucible”—where the often-mentioned “amalgama-
tion” takes place—does not produce “abstract individuals” but nationals.
Modern society as we know it constitutes the individual twofold, as an “ab-
stract” and a “concrete” individual.88 To the same extent to which Gesellschaft
(society) is always underpinned by some form of Gemeinschaft (community),
the “abstract individual” is always underpinned by a more specific identity
 Antisemitism and the Limits of Liberal Society 307

whose “characteristic role is to structure and limit the choices the individual
makes.”89 This becomes most visible in situations in which the individual is
called upon to sacrifice a degree of his or her liberty (ultimately, life) for the
“common good” that could not be motivated or rationalized by recourse to
a purely “abstract” identity only. So far, no liberal society (and no liberal set
of ideas about such a society) dared rely on the purely “abstract identity” of
its citizen-individuals only. One of the crucial points in this context is which
characteristics of an individual ought to be relevant for how this individual
will participate in state and society, and which (cultural) characteristics are
irrelevant (i.e., purely “private”), and whether the line between the two is
solid, precarious, or perhaps nonexistent.
The separation but mutual dependence of state and civil society (the
state’s re-creating society and society’s determining the shape of the state)
produces a characteristic no-win situation: if you declare you are not differ-
ent from your fellow citizens, someone will show you are different (which
is—fortunately—always true); if you declare yourself different, someone
will tell you that you ought to grow up and become an equal member of
society. A society where one can be “different without fear” would be one
where (“concrete”) difference would not be overdetermined by being the
carrier of social structure, by not being the “border guards” of social divi-
sions.90 Difference needs to be emancipated from being carrier and signifier
of social domination; “concrete difference” freed from having to be “abstract
difference” would be a different kind of difference.91 Only the assimilation of
the human world as it currently exists to the humane world that does not yet
exist would create a situation where giving up the hard shell of given identity
would lose the odor of treason that is founded in the hunch that assimilation
today inevitably means assimilation to the false state of things.
It can be concluded from the Berlin Antisemitism Dispute that liberalism—
as it implies acceptance of the nation-state—has been unable to consistently
refute and indeed immunize itself against antisemitism. (The same is, of
course, equally true of all forms of socialism that are based on acceptance
of the nation-state.) Modern political thought relied almost universally
on the state as the guarantor of liberal progress and modernization, and a
308 Conclusion

modern state that would not invoke some form of national culture to war-
rant its cohesion has never convincingly been conceived let alone practically
realized. If it can be agreed

that the persistence, as well as more specifically the reform, of liberal

society depends on the existence of a state;
that a state in the modern context can only be a nation-state in which
the construction of a national culture mediates among state, society,
and individual;
that national culture consists of inseparably interwoven assumptions
about morality, social behavior (including “the economy”), and re-
ligion;
and that religious and other cultural difference is being tolerated only
on the condition that it is hidden away in the private realm, but that
at the same time the public realm cannot do without invocations of
religiously informed culture;

then “the better state of things . . . in which people could be different without
fear” must within this framework perpetually remain a utopian dream.92
From this perspective, Treitschke’s liberal antisemitism, in combination
with the ambivalence of his liberal-patriotic critics and the brutal frankness
of the confessing racists who translated Treitschke’s ambiguity into support
for their cause, can—against the intentions of all of the above—be put to
work for the critical understanding of the limits of liberal society.
 Appendix 1. Heinrich von Treitschke’s “Our Prospects” (1879)

This is the closing section of Treitschke’s article in Preussische Jahrbücher

from November 1879, which provoked the Dispute. The translation is
based on the one by Helen Lederer, which was published (without date)
as part of the series Readings in Modern Jewish History (which contains
all of Treitschke’s major contributions to the Berlin Antisemitism Dispute
as they were republished as a brochure in 1880 and 1881), edited by Ellis
Rivkin and published by the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of
Religion in Cincinnati, Ohio. The translation is used here with the kind
permission of the Hebrew Union College.

In such a situation we need most of all strong government, loyal harmony

between crown and people. The Prussian electorate has understood this
necessity. We want peace with the government—this was the message of the
recent polls. The ranks of the conservative parties in the [Prussian] diet have
been reinforced not by artificial pressure from above but through the voters’
free will. The conservative current in the people is even stronger than the
election results make it appear to be: some liberal deputies had their man-
date confirmed only due to personal respect or old habit or as well because
of the difficulties that a new party or grouping faces in the borough. The
nation is disgusted and fed up with the quarreling of her parliaments; even
the majority of the opponents of the new economic policy seem determined
to wait for the effects of the reforms and to judge the facts. The Progress
310 Appendix 1

Party finds itself limited to some big cities and a few dispersed boroughs.
The voters have mercilessly cleared out the National-Liberal faction. . . . The
people does not want anymore to be spoon-fed by coteries. . . .
Meanwhile1 a miraculous and powerful excitement labors in the depths
of our nation’s life. It is as if the nation reflected on itself, as if it judged
itself harshly. Who has spent, like this author, the last couple of months
abroad and now suddenly re-enters the stormy German world, is almost
frightened by this awakening of national conscience, by these thousand
voices that defend or indict each other. This process is the more remark-
able as it takes place in almost total independence from the press; for never
have our newspapers less truthfully reflected public opinion. When one
browses through the majority of German papers one is led to believe that
the liberal wish lists and the naïve belief in the unfailing moral force of
“education” still dominate our people. In truth the situation is different.
Economic hardship, the memories of so many disappointed hopes and the
sins of the Gründerzeiten, the sight of the increasing degeneration of the
masses, which keeps pace with, or even overtakes, the spreading of the secret
arts of reading and writing, and last but not least, the recollection of those
days of horror in spring 1878—all this forced thousands to reflect on the
value of our humanitarianism and Enlightenment. Thousands feel that due
to educational conceit we risk forgetting completely the moral groundedness
of human life. While large sections of our people fall for arid scepticism,
in others religious earnestness, the ecclesiastical sense unmistakably have
regained strength. On the Protestant General Synod some ugly zealous words
have been said, the old theologians’ sin, disrespect for the positive right of
the secular state, betrayed itself in a few disagreeable decisions; the hope-
fully unfeasible attempt to subject theological faculties [of the universities]
to ecclesiastical rule was quite rightly frowned upon; but its debates have
proven one thing even to its opponents: this church still lives, it is still an
effective force, firmly rooted in the people, full of moral gravity and not at
all lacking in spiritual powers.
The awakened conscience of the people is directed mainly against the ef-
feminate philanthropy of our age. Quite a sign of the times, O. Mittelstädt’s
 Treitschke’s “Our Prospects” 311

text “Against Prison Sentences” was published recently, a powerful protest

against that pampering and mollycoddling of criminals which has over-
crowded our prisons and has become a cruel insult to decent people. Why has
this strictly objective publication been answered by incensed meetings and
harsh resolutions of contempt from the radical parties? Because the heroes
of the philanthropic phrase silently feel that the brave author—although
his statements on their own often deserve criticism—essentially merely
propounds what hundreds of thousands are thinking. The whole spirit of
the age urges that the most severe majesty of the law be fully restored in our
laws and their execution.
Among2 the symptoms of the deep change in mood that goes through our
people none appears as disconcerting as the passionate movement against
Jewry. Until a few months ago, the authoritative “reverse Hep-Hep call” was
still dominant in Germany. About the national wrongs of the Germans, the
French, and all other nations everybody could freely say the worst things; but if
somebody dared to speak in just and moderate terms about some undeniable
weakness of the Jewish character, he was immediately branded as a barbarian
and a religious persecutor by nearly all newspapers. Today we have already
come to the point where the majority of Breslau voters—apparently not in
wild excitement but with quiet deliberation—conspired not to elect a Jew to
the [Prussian] diet under any circumstances. Antisemitic societies are formed,
the “Jewish Question” is discussed in noisy meetings, a flood of anti-Jewish
pamphlets inundates the book market. There is only too much of dirt and
brutality in these activities, and it is impossible to suppress one’s disgust when
one notices that some of these incendiary pamphlets seem to come from Jew-
ish pens; it is well known that since Pfefferkorn and Eisenmenger, there were
always many who had been born as Jews among the fanatical Jew-eaters. But
is there really nothing but mob brutality and business envy at the bottom of
this noisy activity? Are these outbreaks of a deep, long-suppressed anger really
only a momentary outburst, as hollow and unfounded as the Teutonic Jew-
baiting of 1819? No—the instinct of the masses has in fact correctly recognized
a grave danger, a very considerable fault of the new German life; it is not an
empty phrase when one talks today of a German Jewish question.
312 Appendix 1

If the English and the French talk with some disdain of the prejudice of
the Germans against the Jews we must reply to them: you don’t know us;
you live in happier circumstances which make the rise of such “prejudices”
impossible. The number of Jews in Western Europe is so small that they
cannot have any noticeable influence upon the morality of the nation; but
the Eastern border of our country is invaded year after year by multitudes
of assiduous trouser-selling youths from the inexhaustible cradle of Poland,
whose children and grand-children are to be the future rulers of Germany’s
stock exchanges and Germany’s press; this immigration is rapidly increasing
and the question becomes more and more serious how this alien national-
ity can be amalgamated with ours. The Jews of the Western and Southern
European countries belong mostly to the Spanish branch which looks back
on a comparatively proud history and which always adjusted comparatively
easily to the Western way of life; in fact, the great majority of them have
become good Frenchmen, Englishmen, Italians—as far as can be reasonably
expected from a people of such pure blood and such distinct peculiarity.
We Germans, however, have to deal with Jews of the Polish branch, which
bears the deep scars of centuries of Christian tyranny; according to experi-
ence they are incomparably more alien to the European, and especially to
the Germanic character.
What we have to demand from our Jewish fellow-citizens is simple: that they
become Germans, feel themselves simply and justly as Germans—regardless
of their faith and their old sacred memories which all of us hold in reverence;
for we do not want thousands of years of Germanic civilization to be followed
by an era of German-Jewish mixed culture. It would be a sin to forget that
a great number of Jews, baptized and unbaptized, Felix Mendelssohn, Veit,
Riesser and others—not to mention the ones now living—were German
men in the best sense of the word, men in whom we revere the noble and fine
traits of the German spirit. At the same time it cannot be denied, however,
that there are numerous and powerful circles among our Jewry who clearly
do not intend simply to become Germans. It is painful enough to talk about
these things; even conciliatory words are easily misunderstood here. I think,
however, some of my Jewish friends will agree, with deep regret, when I say
 Treitschke’s “Our Prospects” 313

that recently a dangerous spirit of arrogance has arisen in Jewish circles and
that the influence of Jewry upon our national life, which in former times
was often beneficial, is now often harmful. I refer the reader to The History
of the Jews by Graetz; what a fanatical fury against the “arch enemy” Chris-
tianity, what deadly hatred just of the purest and most powerful exponents
of Germanic character, from Luther down to Goethe and Fichte! And what
hollow, offensive self-overestimation! Here it is proved with continuous
mocking invective that the nation of Kant was really educated to humanity
by the Jews only, that the language of Lessing and Goethe became sensitive
to beauty, spirit, and wit only through Börne and Heine! Is there any English
Jew who would dare to slander in such manner the land which guards and
protects him? And this stubborn contempt for the German goyim is not at
all merely the attitude of an isolated fanatic. There is no German merchant
city that does not count many honest, respectable Jewish firms among its
number. But it cannot be denied that the Semites have contributed a large
part to the dishonesty and deception and the bold greediness of the boom-
time mischief, and that they share heavily in the guilt for the contemptible
materialism of our age which regards every kind of work only as business
and threatens to suffocate our people’s ancient good-natured willingness
to work; in thousands of German villages there sits the Jewish usurer who
appropriates the possessions of his ruined neighbors. Among the leading
men of art and science there are not many Jews; the greater is the busy horde
of Semitic third-rank talents. And how firmly this swarm of literati hangs
together! How safely this insurance company for immortality works, based
on the tested business principle of mutuality, so that every Jewish poetaster
receives his one-day fame, dealt out by the newspapers instantly and in cash,
without fee nor delay.
The most dangerous consequences, however, has the inappropriate Jewish
domination of the press—a fateful consequence of our old narrow-minded
laws, which had denied the Israelites access to most learned professions.
For ten years public opinion in many German cities was “made” mostly by
Jewish pens; it was a misfortune for the liberal party, and one of the reasons
of its decline, that its papers gave far too much scope to Jewry. The present
314 Appendix 1

powerlessness of the press is the inevitable reaction against this unnatural

state of things. The little man cannot be dissuaded from believing now that
the Jews write the newspapers and therefore he will not believe anything they
say any longer. Our newspapers owe much to Jewish talents; the acuteness
and nimble quickness of the Jewish mind always found the arena of the
press a rewarding field. But here too the effect was two-edged. Börne was
the first to introduce into our journalism the peculiarly shameless way of
talking about the fatherland as if from an external position and without any
reverence, as if one did not belong to it, as if mockery of Germany did not
cut most deeply into the heart of every individual German. To this add the
unfortunate busybody impertinence, which has to have a hand in everything
and does not even refrain from passing judgment on the inner affairs of the
Christian churches. What Jewish journalists write in mockery and satirical
remarks against Christianity is downright revolting, and such blasphemies
are offered to our people in its own language as the newest acquisitions
of “German” Enlightenment! The moment emancipation was gained one
insisted boldly on one’s “certificate”; literal parity was demanded in all and
sundry, forgetful of the fact that we Germans are, after all, a Christian nation,
and the Jews are only a minority in our midst; we have witnessed that the
removal of Christian pictures in mixed schools was demanded, and even
the celebration of the Sabbath.
All this considered—and how much more could be added!—the noisy
agitation of the moment appears only as a brutal and spiteful but natural
reaction of the Germanic national feeling against an alien element which
has usurped too much space in our life. It has at least the one involuntary
merit of having taken of us the ban of a tacit falsehood; it is already a gain
that an evil which everybody sensed but which nobody wanted to touch is
now discussed openly. Let us not deceive ourselves: the movement is very
deep and strong. A few jokes about the words of wisdom from the mouths
of Christian-Socialist soap box orators will not suffice to suppress it. Even
in the best-educated circles, among men who would reject with horror any
thought of Christian fanaticism or national arrogance, we hear today the
cry, as from one mouth: the Jews are our misfortune!
 Treitschke’s “Our Prospects” 315

Among those who understand, there can be no talk of an abolition or

even of a limitation of the emancipation; that would be an obvious injustice,
a betrayal of the fine traditions of our state, and would accentuate rather
than mitigate the national divide which torments us. What made the Jews of
France and England harmless and often beneficent members of bourgeois
society was at bottom nothing but the energy of the national pride and the
firmly rooted national way of life of these two old and civilized nations. Our
civilization is young; in our whole existence we are still lacking national style,
instinctive pride, a firmly developed individuality, which is why we were
defenceless against alien manners for so long. But we are in the process of
acquiring these qualities, and we can only wish that our Jews recognize in
time the change which is now occurring in Germany as a necessary con-
sequence of the foundation of the German state. In some places there are
Jewish societies against usury which silently do much good; they are the
work of intelligent Israelites who have recognized that their tribal fellows
must adjust to the customs and ideas of their Christian fellow-citizens. Much
remains to be done in this direction. It is of course not possible to change
the hard German heads into Jewish heads; the only way out therefore is for
our Jewish fellow-citizens to make up their minds without reservations to
be Germans, as many of them have done already long ago, to their advantage
and ours. The task can never be solved completely. There has always been an
abyss between occidental and Semitic being, since Tacitus once complained
about the odium generis humani; there will always be Jews who are nothing
but German-speaking Orientals; also a specifically Jewish education will
always blossom and, as a cosmopolitan power, it has a historical right to
existence. But the antagonism can be mitigated if the Jews, who talk so much
about tolerance, become truly tolerant themselves and show some respect
for the faith, the customs, and the feelings of the German people which has
long ago atoned for old injustice and given them the gift of human and civil
rights. The complete absence of such respect in a section of our commercial
and literary Jewry is the ultimate reason for today’s passionate bitterness.
It is not a pleasant sight, this raging and quarrelling, this boiling up of
unfinished ideas in the new Germany. But we cannot help our being the most
316 Appendix 1

passionate of all nations, although we accused ourselves of being phlegmatic

so often; new ideas never broke through amongst us other than under spasmic
convulsions. May God grant that we come out of the ferment and unrest of
these restless years with a stricter concept of the state and its obligations,
with a more vigorous national consciousness.
 Appendix 2. Moritz Lazarus’s “What Does
National Mean? A Lecture” (1880)

The bracketed subheadings have been introduced by the translator.

[1. Introduction: The Occasion and the Purpose of the Lecture]

Esteemed audience!
A lecture that is by invitation only is unusual; the circumstances under
which it is given, and its occasion, are no less unusual.1 We have invited Jews
only; not because the lecture is to be kept secret; “may the whole world hear
us,” I may say with [Lessing’s character] Nathan. But the primary purpose of
the lecture is to provide clarification and instruction for ourselves, for our
coreligionists. And, do not expect that I will enter the arena to do battle, as
I would have to in a public meeting. For all that has been said and written
lately against us I only can express here my gratitude. Yes, gratitude. The
doctors know it: it is best that the internal illness comes to the fore; then
there is more hope that the damage can heal. Could we, too, contribute to
healing this damage?
Strictly speaking, we should be silent; we should be allowed silently to wait
for the curing to happen. For us as Jews, there is no question that would be
a legitimate matter of dispute. What once again has been called the Jewish
Question is merely a German question. The question of humanity is in this
case not our question but that of the whole German nation, as we are the
object of humanity, as we are the ones who have to expect and to demand
humanity. The question of humanity and justice is always and everywhere
318 Appendix 2

more important for the one who has to grant it than for the one who has to
receive it. But we are Germans, and as Germans we must speak.
|6| On having to read an article from an otherwise highly esteemed pen
that argues on the level of the League of Antisemites, our cheeks blush; but
whoever stands on the standpoint of humanity, will know that on our cheek
burns not the red of anger of the Jew but the red of shame of the German.
But for that very reason I exhort you most of all, not only in this hour but
as for our overall reaction to this affair: let this not embitter us! Let’s keep
the solid calm of those on whose side are truth and justice. But let us seek
clarity, clarity for ourselves and about ourselves, in order to maintain this
solid calm.
This is all that matters, that on the basis of scholarly contemplation and
with the calmness it brings with it we understand what our situation really
is, that we ourselves gain most of all the clearest understanding which of the
attacks directed against us are legitimate and which are not.
The first step we should take tonight is I reckon to answer the question
that I have announced.
For the whole excitement that has recently been created again against the
Jewish community of faith is based on the presupposition that it is some-
thing particular, autonomous, something standing apart from and facing
all other people who inhabit the country. The answer to the question What
is the peculiarity and particularity of the Jews? boils down to the statement
that the Jew has a separate nationality distinct from the German one. This
is what one gets to hear from the meanest hacks to those who belong to the
highest academic circles.
It is therefore very much in our interest to illustrate and define the concept
of nationality, as |7| the concept of “the nation” or “the people” is not only
in this particular case but in all kinds of respects among those most often
wrongly or superficially understood.
This concept “resists definition,” as also Rümelin rightly observed, “al-
though we encounter it on a daily basis in everyday life as in scholarship.” I
am in the lucky position to share with you my altogether nonpartisan view
of this matter, as it developed not in the context of the current occasion
 Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean?” 319

but a while ago and far from any particular application, and also to show
you that my view is being shared in its currently most relevant aspects by
eminent scholars.

[2.1 The Concept of the Nation according to Boeckh]

When in 1859 the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie and Sprachwissenschaft
[Journal for Psycho-Ethnology and Linguistics] was founded, Steinthal and
myself, as its editors, had to outline the program of that new discipline that
was about to join the ranks of the academic disciplines in the first introduc-
tory essay. Of course it was our task, as Völkerpsychologie, i.e., the psycho-
logical exploration of nations, was the subject, to define the concept of the
nation in the first place. Subsequently, in the fourth volume of the journal,
our colleague R. Boeckh further discussed “The Statistical Significance of
National Languages as Marks of Nationality.”
As time is limited, I point only to the most important aspects of this
multilayered examination. In his extraordinarily acute and poignant piece,
Boeckh aims to critique misconceptions and to show what are not the foun-
dations of nationality, in order to come to the positive conclusion that only
language is its defining characteristic. Neither forms of settlement, morals
or customs define the nation, as has sometimes been suggested; within the
same nation different groups with differing morals and customs can be
found, |8| and the same morals and customs, and the same forms of settle-
ment, can be found among different nations. Descriptions of the morals
and customs of a multitude of people cannot therefore result in a definition
of the characteristics of a nation.
The same goes for the territory they inhabit—although people’s living
together is tremendously important for the founding of nationalities: to
the extent that their settlement coheres, also their inner life becomes more
similar, they become an internal unity, too. Territorial separation and con-
nectedness are the basis of political unity as they determine the maintenance
of coherent units, the defense, and liberty of countries from each other.
Only when talking about providence, about fate as it is given to man, we
enter its solid ground. The first determination of fate is where one is born.
320 Appendix 2

However, not even political, much less so national unity can be grounded
on territorial unity. I am not talking about the exceptions, such as when
already strong nations and states expand beyond their coherent territory
into enclaves and colonies, or split into several states within the same ter-
ritory. The point is that we find people of differing nationality on the same
territory, and not only temporarily as strangers, but also permanently, and
vice versa people of the same nationality are distributed throughout dif-
ferent territories.
Most importantly, though, territorial borders change and depend on sub-
jective perspective. The groupings of nations cannot be defined in terms of
which country they inhabit, as, even though the separation of peoples is for
themselves beyond doubt, the borders of the country are object of nearly
interminable struggles.
The same is true about state citizenship. |9| Surely in earliest times, the
borders of the state mostly coincided with those of the nation. In modern
times, though, there is hardly a state that consists of only one nationality,
and hardly a nation that inhabits only one state.
Religion, too, is not different. In the oldest times nationality and religion
followed the same borders; today not one of the somehow higher developed
religions has followers in only one nation; and vice versa there is hardly a
nation all of whose members adhere to only one religion.
But even what is so often and facilely taken as synonymous with na-
tionality, descent, is not its true determination. Not all those of common
descent belong to the same nation, and vice versa we find in every nation
individuals of differing descent. As for the latter, every European nationality
testifies this: no nationality of pure unmixed descent exists. Here on this soil
we consistently find a mixture of Slavs and Germans. In Italy one can find
twice, yes thrice the mixing of descents which have eventually found entry
into the unity of Italian nationality. Vice versa, the Dutch, the Flemish are of
German descent but do not at all see themselves as belonging to the German
nation. “The classification of nations according to descent of individuals
is theoretically wrong and practically unfeasible because it would presup-
pose that the individuals who belong to different nations propagated only
 Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean?” 321

among their own, or else, that every mixing resulted in a new nationality.
Neither is the case. . . . To which nation would one, |10| applying such crite-
ria, count the already quite numerous descendants of Jewish and German
descent, even if they have the physical characteristics of the one or the other
group? To which nation the descendants of two Indo-European or even two
Germanic nations? The bookkeeping about humanity will not deliver the
material to determine the descent of individuals. How many people know
over ten generations the thousands of fathers and mothers to whom they
owe their existence; and is there anyone who could track down his or her
descent twenty generations, i.e. to the million of names who are his or her
ancestors etc. . . .”
What remains as the most essential category after all others have been
refuted in detailed argument is therefore language.
“Language is the unmistakable bond that connects all members of a nation
to a spiritual community. Created in the first human community through
the need for mutual understanding, it continues to create the conditions for
this understanding. The child . . . receives with the language spoken in the
family home the first particularity of human life; in it the child enjoys human
expression and thus consciousness; it first develops the ability to think in
the language of the family. . . . Likewise, the contact among speakers of the
same language means, as far as the same language reaches, the exchange of
the manifold forms of what in its innermost core is the same.”
Boeckh also explores in the same text (Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie and
Sprachwissenschaft, Bd. IV, pp. 264f.) why this understanding of the essence
of nationality has been developed most clearly by the German people, and
concludes: “It was easier for the German thought, once liberated, to discover
the form in which the spirit of any one nation is embodied most truly and
determinedly, the form |11| that marks every individual whose spirit moves
within it, as a member of the nation.”

[2.2 Additional Arguments concerning Descent, Language, and Spirit]

Elaborating on Boeckh’s argument, I want to add two arguments from our own
essay on the subject, against descent and for the relevance of language.
322 Appendix 2

“The answer to the question What is a nation? seems in the first place to
refer to a classification of the human species to be made in the style of natural
history according to its varieties and its less and less numerous differences
and forms, and the respectively increasing similarity and unity; it seems to
be about a scale of greater or lesser difference and unity, and in the same
way that one asks what two plants or animals ought to have in common in
order to be counted as one family or one species, so people think they ought
to ask, what ought two human beings have in common in order to belong
to one nation? Such a classification of the human species seemingly has to
be a genealogical one. But the class nation does not exist on such a scale of
similarity, the sequence of less and less numerous classes, because it is not
based on these natural relations, because almost every nation is governed
by different forms of genealogy, because the concept of the nation is not at
all formed from the corporeal, zoological perspective, but from a spiritual
one. Therefore the question is posed wrongly if it focuses on descent; it
cannot be answered but must be reframed.”
I only want to highlight the following on language as the most important
objective |12| element of the formation of national unity (Zeitschrift Bd. 1, pp.
41f.): “One2 can distinguish content and form of consciousness. The content
consists of sensations and the notions and concepts that are formed from
them, and the feelings that are attached to them. The form consists of the
movement of this content through the consciousness, or in the connections
between its elements. National specificity manifests itself in form as well as
content of language, in form, though, more finely, more tenderly and more
intensely than in content. All elements of national consciousness—religion,
customs, constitution—are thought content; language only, though, represents
in the words, their inflection and in syntax not only notional content but
also thought form and movement of thought. Language not only contains
the world-view of a people, but also represents the perceptive activity itself.
Only late in the development of the culture of a people scholarship and sci-
ence emerge and continue the psychic movement that had expressed itself
in language on a general level, on the level of single individuals.”
And still, although we, too, acknowledge the crucial importance of language
 Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean?” 323

as a mark of nationality, we reject the claim that language, let alone language
on its own, can determine the essence of nationality and the boundaries
of nations.
The true nature and essence of nationality can only be understood as
residing in the spirit. (Zeitschrift Bd. 1, pp. 34f.)
“Spirit, freedom and history intervene in the natural distribution of the
human species according to races, tribal groups, tribes, clans, families. They
separate what by nature would belong together and mix and assimilate
what by nature would be different. Spiritual community and difference are
therefore independent from genealogical community and difference. |13| The
concept of the nation is grounded on the interventions by spiritual, historical
constellations into naturally given differences; and what makes a nation a
nation are not objective conditions such as descent or language as such but
the subjective ideas of the members of the nation who are joined in consid-
ering themselves a nation. The concept of the nation rests on the subjective
view of the members of a nation of themselves, of their identity [Gleichheit]
and communal belonging together. Plants and animals are classified by the
natural historian according to objective criteria, but we ask human beings
which nation they see themselves as belonging to. The researcher determines
also human beings’ belonging to race and tribe with the same objectivity;
national belonging, though, one determines subjectively and on one’s own
terms, one counts oneself into a nation.”—“Do not be surprised by the
subjective character of our definition of the nation. Although the nation is
not independent from material conditions, it is a purely spiritual entity that
does not have anything that could be called—except by analogy—its body.
It is a spiritual creation of the individuals who constitute it; they are not a
people, they constantly create one. To be more precise, the nation is the first
product of the national spirit: for the individuals do not create the nation
as individuals but only by overcoming their isolation. The awareness of this
self-transcendence and of the individuals’ dissolution into a general national
spirit expresses itself in the notion of the people. The national spirit creates
the notion and with it also the actuality of the nation.”
Our task is therefore not to develop out of an examination of objective
324 Appendix 2

givens our own definition of the nation as a discrete, objective concept as

if corresponding to a concrete object, but we have to interpret the existing
subjective definitions that nations implicitly give of themselves. It is obvi-
ous that not every individual nation needs to have the same concept of
the nation, |14| as every nation develops out of particular conditions. The
French recognize individuals as French according to one set of criteria, the
Germans according to another, etc. (Compare Boeckh’s argument on the
German emphasis of language as the mark of nationality.) Every nation has its
particular self-consciousness, as does every individual, and as the individual
is made a particular person by it, so the nation is made a particular nation
by its particular self-consciousness. Self-consciousness—of the individual
as of the nation—is based on specific objective content; self-consciousness
emerges from consciousness, its strength and dignity depends on the latter;
the nation’s self-consciousness will therefore always base itself on objective
conditions such as descent, language, political life and so on; the crucial issue,
though, namely the light in which the self-consciousness illuminates itself,
is the subjective, free act of self-awareness as a whole and as a people.”
The subjective unity in the spirit of a nation is thus based on, developed
and experienced through the nation’s history in the widest sense of the word.
Insofar as an individual—or an individual with his family—over generations
participates in history passively and actively, the subjective bond of belonging
grows. When illness and famine hit a country they do not ask after religion,
descent or language but as common destiny they unite the minds. The bless-
ings of peace and the burdens, sorrows and sacrifices of war are shared by all,
and all share as well the virtues that war has demanded and strengthened.
Fighting shoulder to shoulder, the men grow hearts fit for the unity of the
historical deed. Even separate and hostile tribes proceed toward national
unity. Will—that most personal, most |15| character-forming element of the
human mind—alone, the will of the tribes, decides. In the German Reich, will
alone, proven in deed, has made those, who less than a decade ago had fought
each other as mortal enemies, a unity. Not least, as we Germans know best,
the common history of intellectual life joins individuals and tribes together
to form the unity of the nation. Shared subjects and levels of education, the
 Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean?” 325

exchange of the forces and the products of spirit, the communal elevation
of the mind and purification of attitudes through poetry and philosophy,
incessant mutual support in exploring the same things and exchange in
exploring different things—in short, the flow of the intellect that forms the
inner life creates in everybody, according to the degree of their participation,
the consciousness of their national-spiritual unity.

[2.3 The Nation according to Rümelin]

Gustav Rümelin, chancellor of the university of Tübingen, who holds views
different from ours on various other important subjects, is in complete
agreement with our view on the essence of the “nation.” His speech on the
concept of the nation given in 1872 offers a fine and profound argument
that is based on the richest knowledge of reality as one would expect from
this renowned statistician.
“The development of most peoples,” he begins, “lies in time immemorial
not accessible to research. But even in cases where historical documents
are available, one tends to show us only how specific constellations have
developed, but takes for granted and leaves unexplored what are the actual
grounds of the formation of peoples. These grounds can only lie in the
natural predisposition and aptitude of the human species and are a mat-
ter not for the |16| historian but the psychologist.” Rümelin points to “the
specific and momentous fact that nature has planted into our hearts the
inclination to join a defined group of fellow creatures but has left it open
what kind of group that would be. The motives for acting thus have been
left open to us and we see them change through all ages; one could even
think the changing of the dominant motives for building human groups
constituted the course of world history.”
“If we recall now, apart from the already mentioned longing for spiritual
community, the drive for group building and, as a third (which is actually
the first), the natural underpinnings of human sociability: spatial commu-
nity, speech, exchange of needs and the means of subsistence, geographical
influences and the inheritance of characteristic traits (underpinnings that
cannot constitute a bond of minds but an intertwining of interests and
326 Appendix 2

customs to which higher relationships can easily attach themselves), then

we have exhausted the list of elements which psychology points to as the
first and most effective germs of the formation of peoples. A lot must come
together to conjure up the conditions for the full concept, but the latter also
allows for gradations depending on whether one or the other element is still
lacking. Not every birthplace is a homeland, not every land of the fathers is
a fatherland. I can be chained through the community of state and law to
people whose language I do not understand, whose customs, culture and
belief are alien to me.
“Human freedom again stands above all these individual powers of attrac-
tion; I can break away from it all, join strangers and talk to King David’s
ancestress: Your people be my people and your God be |17| my God. The
concept of the nation is not objectively defined but also depends on subjective
sentiment. My nation are those whom I consider to be my nation, whom I call
my people, to whom I know myself joined by unbreakable bonds. And this is
where a division, a contradiction of sentiments is possible: one motive can
pull me to this, another to that group. Faith can draw me to a group from
which the bonds of community, state and descent separate me. (Examples
are Catholicism and Protestantism.) But our mind will experience and de-
plore any such division and fission in its modulation as a disturbance; it will
always feel a silent longing for a full, unitary community of life. It will aim
at the ideal of a central group that encompasses all matters of life, the pivot
of all particular motives for getting together, in which we have a complete
sense that these are our people, the kin by whom we stand, with whom we
endure, whose fate we share, from whom to part would be an intolerable
thought.
“Our German word Volk in its deeper meaning refers to this ideal aim of
the universal group, of the full community of life, without though excluding
those less perfect forms that are constituted by the individual main charac-
teristics. And thus we may well accept that in the classifications of natural
science any group that differs from its neighbors in descent and language, and
in political discourse any multitude that is governed by a state, are called a
nation or people. We also have to accept, although grudgingly, the confusing
 Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean?” 327

effects of such use of language, such as that an individual can belong to two
or three peoples, or that it can be said that the Belgian people consists of
two peoples, the English |18| people and the Swiss people consist of three
peoples, the Austrian and Russian of I-don’t-know-how-many peoples.”
Rümelin’s conception, which we can wholeheartedly embrace, is summed
up most perfectly in the following: “Many elements need to come together
to correspond to the ideal type, and reality never more than approximates it.”
The ideal type, in brief, is the following: “A country large and fertile enough
to feed a dense, numerous population, fit to defend itself against all its neigh-
bors, varied enough to warrant a multiple development of economic and
intellectual life; on this soil, a linguistically unified population that works it
and has struggled for it and knows itself united in common deeds and suf-
ferings; this multitude protected and ordered through a unified state sprung
from its womb and intertwined with its interests and memories; based on
secure statehood, the flowering and cultivation of all those ideal goods of
humanity and of intellectual, moral and religious life [growing] in free and
manifold forms, including contradictions and struggles that strengthen a
sense of community spreading in sovereignty and reconciliation—this is
what it means to be a nation.”
With this we conclude the theoretical exploration of the essence and the
concept of the nation, and also under the perspective of the ideal of national
belonging as developed above, I may now try to apply these considerations
to a second, a practical question: what are we, the German Jews?

[3.1 Descent Does Not Define the Nation: The Talk about Blood Has to Be
Rejected as Materialist]
[On Treitschke]
Of what nationality are we? Gentlemen, we are Germans, nothing but Ger-
mans. When talking about the concept of nationality, we belong to only one
nation, the German one.
|19| Let us momentarily leave to one side the still somewhat problematic
conception of the pure subjectivity of the national spirit, according to which
328 Appendix 2

nationality is only about what one sees oneself a part of, let us stick with
the more commonly accepted one as advocated by Boeckh: that language is
decisive. Gentlemen, what are we then? Germans, that’s what we are, and
we neither want to, nor can be anything else. And it is not only the language
that makes us Germans. The country we inhabit, the state we serve, the law
we obey, the science [Wissenschaft] that teaches us, the education that en-
lightens us, the art that elevates us, they all are German. Mother tongue and
fatherland are German, the two sources of our inner life; here is where our
cradles stood, here are the tombs of the many generations of our progeni-
tors. The beginning and the ending of our life are here. Only our descent is
not German, we are not Germanic; we are Jews, i.e. Semites. But neither are
the other parts of the German nation Germans by descent, and certainly
not pure Germans; they are not even all Germanic. Only by descent do we
differ from the other Germans; but although we differ by descent from all
others, all others are not the same, and anyway the concept German cannot
today anywhere or anyhow meaningfully be used as if it referred to descent.
There may be many people of purely German descent but they are not rec-
ognizable as such, they cannot be distinguished from the others who are
considered to be of German nationality like themselves; they too belong
to the German nation not because of their purely German descent. On one
hand, one can belong to another nation, or at least not belong to the Ger-
man nation in spite of German descent: like a Swiss or an American. On
the other hand, one can belong to the German nation |20| without being
of German descent. The Slavs from the Elbe region, the Prussians etc. have
been of another nationality but have become Germans. Or else are not “the
Leibnitz and all those” with names ending on -itz,-witz,-itzsch,-ky and-ow
of obviously un-German descent but of German nationality? Are not all
those whose fathers or grandfathers had been Wends or Lithuanians, whose
grandmothers or ancestors had been Kassubes, Sorbs etc., but who speak,
think and live German today, German nationals?
I don’t want to talk about that fraction of the nation, small in numbers
but eminent in achievement and positioning, that stems from the miscege-
nation of Germanic and Jewish blood. Rather, think of the French settlers
 Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean?” 329

who live in our vicinity and in other parts of Germany; who would dare to
deny them the German nationality? They descended from the French, but
they are Germans, although their families have lived a much shorter time
in German countries than most Jews.
Would it not be found ridiculous, and indeed treason of the German
nation, if one wanted to make the claim that Kant does not belong to it
because he descended from Scots? His ancestors, of whose immigration he
was aware, and even his father had still spelled their name Cant.
Also our ancestors were immigrants; many arrived hundreds of years ago,
others later; the Berlin community for example was founded a little more
than two centuries ago. It is well known that the Germans too immigrated,
some even later than that; however, they conquered the land, and conquest
is supposed to constitute the only true entitlement. Whether conquest is
ethically superior to the settling of immigrants who have been welcomed by
the inhabitants of a country would be a worthwhile question for a morally
inclined person to think about; but this is not now our subject. We Jews
immigrated as strangers; |21| but did we come in order to remain strangers?
Our fathers came searching for a homeland and a homeland is what they
found. Throughout seven generations their will has proven itself through
never-failing loyal obedience to the state, through common work with the
nation, through common fate. Gradually one has expanded and ennobled
their duties, from the Jew tax to the highest patriotic service with life and
limb; but we have welcomed every new and higher duty as a holy privilege
that we celebrated as one of the high aims in our lives.
Our blood, though, one opines, remains Jewish even when it flows on the
battleground for the German cause; we are and we remain Semites.
Those who use the words Semites and Semitic in a derogatory way ought
to consider—if they are Christians—whether they are not setting out to
insult their own religion.
For it is an undisputed fact that all the authors of the New Testament just
as those of the Old Testament were Jews, Semites without exception. I do
understand, though, that those who, of a strictly naturalistic mind-set, have
discarded Christian beliefs completely, might want to wish that the German
330 Appendix 2

people shed Christian or Semitic morality and adopt one that seems more
suitable to them. But who still finds the ideal of human morality developed
in the Holy Script, the New Testament, ought never to forget that this ideal
is a product of the Semitic spirit. Anti-Semitism is anti-Christianism for
Christ the founder himself and all the apostles are Semites.
Anyway, this blood-and-race theory is in its entirety a product of a gen-
eral coarsely sensualist-materialist worldview. Those who—on the one
hand—argue for a revival of ideality are critically wrong if they—on the
other hand—do not recognize that materialism has to be fought |22| lock
stock and barrel and replaced by a higher and purer worldview. Who ad-
mits on the one hand—out of hatred or stupidity—that the moral and
cultural characteristics of different nations or fractions of the same nation
are determined by blood and heredity, cannot expect on the other hand
that people will acknowledge and confess to the victorious power of the
idea, the effective forces of thought and mind. The arousal of the meanest
and basest antagonism, of racial or tribal hatred are the effect, sometimes
even the cause of this materialism, always its accompaniment. I call it the
meanest and basest because it is the most bestial, because it flares up among
animals for no reason other than difference. Even dog and cat, having lived in
a peace-breathing human habitat, learn how to get along; humans, however,
in whom the feeling of humaneness has not yet arisen or is already stifled, see
an enemy in every human being who is different, even if the latter intends
no challenges at all to his rights.
If we have to talk about blood then—for my part I declare solemnly
that blood means bloody little to me, while spirit and historical evolution
mean almost everything when it comes to the value and dignity of humans,
individuals or tribes—then I dare say that the Semitic blood is among the
finest that ever ran in human veins. This is not only a Jewish but also a
Christian conviction.

[3.2 Judaism and Christianity]

I could not find a better witness for my case that this is a genuinely Christian
conviction, and indeed would not need any further ones, than Dr. Martin
 Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean?” 331

Luther. In the Erlanger edition of his writings, vol. 29 pages 47ff.; 74, we
read: |23| “We may think highly of ourselves, but we are still heathens, while
the Jews are of the lineage of Christ; we are in-laws and strangers; they are
kin, nephews and brothers of our Lord. If it were proper to boast of flesh and
blood, the Jews belong more to Christ than we; the Jews are blood-relations
of our Lord; so also Paul, Romans 9. God has also demonstrated this by
His acts, for to no nation among the Gentiles has He granted so high an
honor as He has to the Jews. For from among the Gentiles there have been
raised up no patriarchs, no apostles, no prophets, indeed, very few genu-
ine Christians either. And although the gospel has been proclaimed to all
the world, yet He committed the Holy Scriptures, that is, the law and the
prophets, to no nation except the Jews.” Let us also quote what Luther put
before these sentences:
“I hope that if one deals in a kindly way with the Jews and instructs them
carefully from Holy Scripture, many of them will become genuine Christians
and turn again to the faith of their fathers, the prophets and patriarchs. They
will only be frightened further away from it if their Judaism is so utterly
rejected that nothing is allowed to remain, and they are treated only with
arrogance and scorn. If the apostles, who also were Jews, had dealt with us
Gentiles as we Gentiles deal with the Jews, there would never have been a
Christian among the Gentiles. Since they dealt with us Gentiles in such
brotherly fashion, we in our turn ought to treat the Jews in a brotherly man-
ner in order that we might convert some of them. For even we ourselves are
not yet all very far along, not to speak of having arrived.” Likewise (p. 74):
“I would request and advise therefore that one deal gently with them and
instruct them from Scripture; then some of them may come along. Instead
of this we are trying only to drive them by force, slandering them, accusing
them of needing to have Christian blood in order not to stink, and I know
not what other foolishness. |24| So long as we thus treat them like dogs, how
can we expect to work any good among them? Again, when we forbid them
to labor and do business and have any human fellowship with us, thereby
forcing them into usury, how is that supposed to do them any good?
“If we really want to help them, we must be guided in our dealings with
332 Appendix 2

them not by papal law but by the law of Christian love. We must receive them
cordially, and permit them to trade and work with us, that they may have
occasion and opportunity to associate with us, hear our Christian teaching,
and witness our Christian life. If some of them should prove stiff-necked,
what of it? After all, we ourselves are not all good Christians either.”3*
Only our descent is thus not German; I nearly said, also our religion. But
this would be a logical mistake. There is no such thing as a German religion;
Christianity, Catholicism, Protestantism are just as French, English, Italian
etc. as they are German. The same |25| is true of Judaism: it is French, English,
Italian because the French, the English, the Italians are Jews, Judaism is just
as German as Christianity is German. Today, every nationality comprises
several religions, as every religion several nationalities.
Should Judaism prevent us, out of all people, from being fully and wholly
Germans, French, English? Does Christianity hinder the German, the French,
the English in their nationality? But the Jews, they say, are a community of
faith and tribe at the same time. Do not also the Germans, English, Dutch
and Danes share the Germanic racial background as well as the Protestant
religion? Their nationalities are, though, different indeed; country, state,
language, history separate them, just as us Jews. Only the history of reli-
gion connects those as Protestants, these—Germans, French, Spanish—as
Catholics; the same is the case with us Jews.
In the Jewish case, though, the boundaries of religion coincide with the

*We are well aware that Luther in his later years also made hefty anti-Jewish speeches; no wonder!
He felt disappointed in his (see above) often stated expectation that the Jews would convert in
droves now that a purified Christianity was available; he found reproachful that dogma would
even now keep them apart, as he thought he had shown that the teachings of the New Testament
could unequivocally be delineated from the Old Testament. As his own interpretation seemed to
him the only possible one, he could not accept another interpretation and, respectively following
from it, another faith. His absolute confidence in his own reasoning is not a psychological riddle.
His ability to tolerate other opinions could not but diminish as he was forced to do more and more
fierce battle for the newly founded church, to conquer not only outwardly new territories for the
redeeming truth but also inwardly its purity and solidity as he conceived it, in particular to protect
it with his interpretation from deviations such as those of the followers of Zwingli and Calvin. To
posthumous onlookers the emergence of differing opinions may appear as cause for rethinking
one’s own opinion; whoever stands in the thick of battle will strengthen the truth of his convictions
through tightening them.
 Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean?” 333

tribal boundaries; in God’s world, though, does this have anything to do

with the nationality of those who belong to the different nations? Does the
French Jew somehow change depending on whether or not there are also
Jews in Abyssinia? Does it make a difference whether there are not only—
just as in the case of the Christians—French, English, Armenian, but also
Moroccan and even Persian Jews? Do the English and the Germans become
less English and less German when they spread Christianity also among
the Iroquois?
Only in one respect there is actually a difference: the religion of the Jews
is the product of their own race. This one may point out as our particular
achievement, if one so wishes. I think, though, that Christianity can be as
alive in the soul of a truly religious |26| Teuton, deeply, intensely, power-
fully penetrating his whole inner life, as Judaism does in the heart of a Jew,
although Christianity is not of Germanic but of Semitic origin.

[3.3 Judaism, the State, and National Economy]

Individual-civil, political and national activity of any human being, in-
cluding the Jew, is independent from religion; especially if this religion
neither grants to, nor demands anything from any power or dominion, and
therefore as religion can never come into conflict with the state. The precise
formulation that shows that this is the case for Israel has been repeated very
many times—allow me, Gentlemen, to throw in that the need ever again to
repeat the same thoughts, as also the accusations are ever the same and are
fed by ever the same sources, is what makes self-defense so terribly boring
(veritable martyrdom for a thinking and feeling human being!); the same
mistakes, the same lies, the same ignorance, the same falsifications ever need
to be answered with the same responses—this precise formulation is the
one which Mar Samuel has given more than 1600 years ago: the law of the
country’s government, of the state power, is the law for the Jew. This was
not an expression of mere subservience: since Israel has recognized God
as the director of the fate of the world, it has also revered in him the king
of the kings and has seen all legitimate government that is based on right
as an imposition by, even a reflection of God himself. This is undisputed
334 Appendix2

Jewish tradition. Descent and religion do not hinder thus the Jew to fully
belong to the German nationality; we experience no history but the history
of the German people, whatever good or bad happens to it, its troubles,
its struggles, its triumphs are also ours since the constitution has made us
full citizens of the country. Rümelin (p. 114) correctly points out |27| that
the Germans have only most recently become “a nation in the genuine and
true sense of the word”—namely in the sense of the scale of qualitatively
increasing meanings of the concept of nationality—“a nation of which we
know and feel ourselves to be members, which gives us a fatherland,” and
it is our pride and cause of incomparable satisfaction that we German Jews
have been able fully and in every respect to take part in this last, highest
formative act of the German people.* We fought on the battlefield, we dis-
cussed in the parliaments, we sometimes even governed on the communal
level, we worked in the laboratories, healed in the hospitals, taught in the
universities. But we participate also in all national works of peace, to all
ideal interests of the nation we have for a long time now, and the longer the
more widely, contributed our full share. Whatever we do we do as Germans;
when we earn fortunes on the world market—something people like to
point out so much—then we increase the wealth of the nation. Trade and
commerce, crafts and industry, arts and sciences fill our lives, and whatever
kind of work we do, everyone according to his means, we work as Germans,
whether we like it or not.
But we do not participate in every type of work to the same extent; in
agriculture, the honorable foundation of national economy, we hardly do.
But it is unfair to see in this a deliberate shortcoming of the Jewish race. Even
a man like Boeckh, whose humanitarianism is of impeccable integrity, let
slip the sentence (ibid., p. 289): “The Jews have maintained their preference
and expertise in trade even after |28| agriculture and the crafts were opened
to them, while they excel in scholarship as soon as inhibiting legislation is
abolished.” I have long ago, in the psycho-ethnographical interest, suggested

*On the participation of Jews in the German-French war of 1870–71 see the Book of Memories for
German Israelites by Dr. L. Philippson, Bonn. The book is a treasure of not only historical and
statistical data but also good, patriotic thoughts.
 Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean?” 335

to leading statisticians whether one could compile data on occupational

change in family histories. Spielhagen once rightly remarked that “it is as
much a part of natural history as any other that the son of the schoolteacher
will become priest, the son of the sergeant cadet.” This piece of natural his-
tory of man should be examined thoroughly; then the facts cannot anymore
be interpreted unfavorably to the Jews. If one wants to look at facts justly,
then the statistical question must not be: what is the share of Jewish and
non-Jewish farmers in relation to the overall population?, but one will have
to ask, what is the share of the sons of urban residents, artisans, scholars,
businesspeople, who are moving to the countryside to turn to farming? Then
one will inevitably find that the share will be the same among Christians
and Jews whose parents and ancestors were not allowed to own agricultural
property nor even to live on the countryside. Are Jews not subject to the
same psychological laws as other people?

[3.4 The Jewish Contribution to German Intellectual Life]

The statistician Boeckh emphasizes that “they excel in scholarship as soon
as inhibiting legislation is abolished.” How surprised we were lately to read
that “among the leading men of arts and scholarship, there are not many
Jews.” How big ought it to be? Herr v. Sybel has given a well-known experi-
ence succinct expression when he wrote (Vorträge und Aufsätze, Berlin bei
Hofmann, p. 44): “The state concentrates all of Germany’s best academic
minds at the universities, so that the phenomenon of a renowned scholar
without academic position, common in England and France, |29| is in Ger-
many a very rare exception.” Everybody knows though that Jews were excluded
from academia until one generation ago; should those very rare exceptions
be recruited from the Jews alone? Indeed they have been, often rather than
very rarely. I am not talking about those Jews who are currently holding
academic positions although most of them have received their academic
training much earlier than the right and the hope for a lectureship. I don’t
want to remind you of Valentin and Traube as they were at least able to study
medicine with the prospect of subsequently practicing it; I don’t want to
remind you of Munck, Franck and Oppert, German Jews who studied in
336 Appendix 2

Germany and then, being excluded from academia in Germany, rose in

France to be members of the Institute. As the academic inclination and
capability of Jews is being questioned, I should perhaps mention Eduard
Gans, or, as the latter is less well regarded these days, even more so Stahl,
the intellectual leader of the Conservative Party in Germany, and August
Neander and the physicist Magnus. However, I keep silent about all these; I
merely ask you to consider the following:
The Jews constitute about one and a third percent of the population of
Prussia; until 1848 they were excluded from academic careers; the highest
institution in the country with respect to original research activity is the
Akademie der Wissenschaften. It currently has 45 members: 21 in the sciences,
24 in humanities; among them five Jews, all of them trained before 1848 (Peter
Rieß, Kronecker, Borchardt, Ewald and Pringsheim). Can numbers talk louder
than that? Can they give stronger evidence? And yet the number of leading
scholars among the Jews |30| is not very big? How big ought it to be?
Of course history talks in vain to one who mentions Felix Mendelssohn
and is silent about Moses Mendelssohn. It is now customary to measure
Mendelssohn against Kant and Hegel and to find him rather petty. Men-
delssohn was certainly not one of the great philosophers; he can be compared
neither with the German Kant nor with the Jewish Spinoza. One must not
forget Mendelssohn, however, when one is concerned with the evolution of
the specifically German national spirit, the development of thought in the
German language, however little one likes to remember him. His presenta-
tion is a model of a purely German philosophical style, still today rarely
matched, whose clarity and beauty promote the elevation of the thought
rather than to compromise its depth. Kant himself, who assured M. in a
letter of April 8, 1766, that he will “never write anything that I do not think,”
wrote to him (August 18, 1783), “few are so lucky as to be able to think for
themselves and at the same time in others’ stead, and to find the expression
that is most adequate for all. There is only one Mendelssohn.” Many other
witnesses could be quoted; but they would be superfluous for some, in vain
for others. Another remark from the same letter by Kant, though, ought to
be mentioned especially in our context, in which he states “with how much
 Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean?” 337

admiration for its acuity, refinement and prudence he read ‘Jerusalem.’”

“I think of this book as the revelation of a big, though slowly progressing
future reform which will affect not only your nation but also others. You
have understood how to combine your religion with such an extent of free-
dom of consciousness as one would not have expected to be possible, and
of which no other can pride itself etc” (Kant’s Collected Works |31| edited
by Rosenkranz and Schubert, vol. XI, I, 17). Still, Mendelssohn is not a great
philosopher; but the consistency of the thinker, the intimate connection of
a noble strength of will, purity of attitude and depth of soul with the clarity
and acuity of intellect, i.e. the unity and totality of the philosophical char-
acter has rarely since been matched. Not what is being created on the level
of systems, but on the level of personality (on which Mendelssohn shares so
much with Socrates as described by Plato) enjoys lasting and never ageing
life in the spirit of the nation. It was fortunate for Mendelssohn and his time
that he lived in it and was seen by it as a sage rather than a philosopher; his
contemporaries and immediate successors hardly ever called him anything
other than that honorable epithet. He appears almost like a psychological
miracle, if one considers the circumstances of his upbringing, his life and
thought; but Mendelssohn is not a miracle but merely a German Jew of the
most noble kind. It will be the task of better times, in which unprejudiced,
level-headed and truthful research of facts will again be conducted, to explore
the particularly profound and momentous affinity between the Germanic
and the Jewish spirit. Nobody will deny that lately it carries rich fruit also
on the dark side of human activity. Materialist theory has promoted and
anticipated an alienated and materialist lifestyle. Whoever still directs his
life toward ideal purposes will deeply regret this; he will also indict this
tendency and attitude; but sense of justice will prevent him from accusing
the whole racial or faith community on this or that side.

[3.5 Jewish and German Religious Thought]

All better Jews, though, used as they are to remembering history on a large
scale, are aware of and |32| grateful for this affinity to the German spirit. After
all, that one field of scholarship that is still particularly interesting to the Jews,
338 Appendix 2

as it concerns their religion, the philological and historical exploration of the

Old Testament, has blossomed in the German spirit more than in that of any
other nation. The Jews are so devoted to both reception and production of
German scholarship and culture as a whole that an inner separation from it
appears to them totally unthinkable and incomprehensible. Even our efforts
and our contributions to that one field that separates us from the majority of
our fellow citizens, religion, feed into the general interest. First of all, when
we look after the religious education and religious institutional life of our
coreligionists—or can the nation as a whole be indifferent toward whether
and how the religiosity of one of its parts is promoted? Alas, if only we were
more successful in this! then many of the legitimate complaints about us—
which are illegitimate only in their generalizing form—would have to fall
silent. But we also care for the blossoming and the welfare of the Christian
religion, and for the same reason; namely, we recognize the high value of
religion for the ideality of a society in general. We do not always have an
adequate understanding of what is the best of the Christian church, or the
different churches; the prudent ones among us will not utter any opinions
on these issues and interfere in the debates among religious factions. But not
only in our hearts can we wish every church whatever will be best for it; but
also with our judgment—very discreetly and modestly pronounced—can we,
completely impartially, take sides with whatever represents the higher, more
dignified, more beneficial stage of the religious development of humanity.
In all modesty and in all decency we are allowed to prefer the religion of
Lessing over that |33| of Göze4; and if we wish in the innermost of our hearts
that the former may triumph over the latter, then we can be confident that
reason and the future will fulfil this wish. The different religions, and the
differing factions within them, may struggle about possession of the truth;
adherents of a third religion will not interfere in the struggle but will wish
that any religion, whatever the specific content of its teachings, may reach
the highest purity and intensity of the religious mind of which it is capable.
Individuals, but also historical epochs, differ from each other religiously
not only with respect to which dogmas they hold to be true but also by
kind, degree and profundity of religiosity. We can acknowledge, revere and
 Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean?” 339

even admire the religiosity of an adherent of another faith irrespective of

the specific content of his faith; we even can be strengthened or elevated by
the intensity of faith, the devotion of the adherent of another faith through
exemplarity and teaching. Perhaps this is because in all religions, religiosity
itself is the ultimate and the deepest and it is what is common to all of them.
It is what strives toward the highest in humanity.
Nevertheless we have been accused again lately that we despise Christianity.
We, we should have hostile feelings about Christianity? The Talmud (Baba
Kamma p. 92) tells occasionally that it is not permitted to the Jew to talk
badly about the Egyptian, and underpins this with the saying, you must not
throw a stone into the well from which you drank. And we, who drink daily
from the wellsprings of the German spirit, one of whose deepest sources is
Christianity, we should want to throw a stone into it? The causes of the former
and long-lasting, increasing antagonism are well known; I will only briefly
point to them. When, in the beginning, |34| the new religious community
split from the old one, of course there were animosity and bitterness. One
only has to recall Rome and Wittenberg! And—I ask this again—are not the
same psychological laws valid for all times, do not the same causes have the
same effects? Then came the long period we call the Middle Ages. We do not
need to go into any detail about how domination of the Jews was exerted
then. I quote only one out of all the witnesses, Luther; in his powerfully
earthy manner he wrote (ibid., p. 46): “Our fools, the popes, bishops, soph-
ists and monks, the crude asses’ heads, have hitherto so treated the Jews that
any good Christian would have wanted to become a Jew. And if I had been a
Jew and had seen such dolts and blockheads govern and teach the Christian
faith, I would sooner have wanted to become a hog than a Christian.—For
they have dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs rather than human beings;
they have done little else than deride them and seize their property. When
they baptized them they showed them nothing of Christian doctrine or life,
but only subjected them to popishness and monkery etc.”
This is over! The mutual appreciation of Christianity by the Jews, slowly
also of Judaism by Christians, especially by the more prudent on either
side, increases annually, in spite of small interruptions. How would we,
340 Appendix 2

who again and again accumulate evidence that our ethical teachings are the
same as those of the Christians, despise the latter? Would a mother despise
her own child? Is not the morality of Christianity, in spite of differences in
dogma, spirit of our spirit? We have often, heavily and deeply had to suffer
not from Christianity and its doctrine but from their corruption, inver-
sion and decay (see Peschel Völkerkunde, p. 315). And this is true not only
of ethical doctrine. |35| Do not the whole religious practice and experience
still carry traces of common origin? Go and visit the churches! There, too,
whenever the soul most intimately rejoices in the Lord of all creation, when
the mind is most deeply touched, the spirit most highly elevated, whenever
the religious ardor most violently bursts into flames, the words used are
Halleluja and Hossanna! And the deepest affirmation is the Amen! And we
should not respect this religion?

[3.6 The Logic of Generalization]

If, though, some Jewish writer is stupid or crude enough to make an improper
or unfair judgment on Christianity, is it permissible to say that “the Jews”
despise the latter? The very same Dr. August Rohling, professor of Catholic
theology in Prague, who wrote a few years ago “The Talmud Jew,” made in
his book Antichrist of 1875, published with the consent of his church authori-
ties, the following judgment on Protestantism: “Wherever Protestantism sets
foot the grass dies; intellectual vacuum, decaying of morality, horrendous
wretchedness of the hearts are its fruit; a Protestant who follows Luther’s
recipes is a monster; vandalism and Protestantism are synonyms.”
Would one be allowed to say, on the basis of this evidence, all Catholics,
or “the” Catholics despise Protestantism?
When will the barbaric logic finally disappear from people’s heads, which
prioritizes generic judgment over the experience of the individual or the
particular? What is the good of logic, where is the nobility of scholarship,
where the dignity of thought, if one simply writes, facilely mocking logic
and justice, the Jews instead of a Jew or some Jews, at a crucial moment
where well-being, honor and reputation of thousands upon thousands are
at stake?
 Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean?” 341

Had an education existed that would have saved |36| human beings from
that one logical mistake, to put the generic in the place of the particular,
rivers of tears and blood would have remained unshed.
But alas, this logical mistake is not one of the intellect but one of the
heart.
The general prison of generic judgment into which all are thrown although
only some are guilty, tends to have a small back door through which some
can escape after they bribed the logical prison warders with their good
characteristics. One admits that there are exceptions, which one might even
accept as “friends.”
I for my part declare explicitly that I prefer to be among the least and the
lowest, the most simple and unrefined, if they are decent men; I very much
prefer to be among those accused anonymously and condemned without
hearing than among the flock of those who are pardoned as “exceptions.”

[3.7 German Nationality as an Unfinished Project and the World-Historical

Role of the Jews]
What, then, might it mean that we are asked “without reservations to be Ger-
mans”? And being asked that in the same breath with talking about us, harshly
and unkindly, as a separate whole, an alien body. Or can there be anything
more harsh and unkind than telling somebody, “you are my misfortune”!
The concept and the ideal of nationality, also that of the German nation,
are, as we have seen, capable of being permanently deepened and elevated.
In the striving for that deepening and elevating all of us who care for the
ideal and its fulfillment ought to unite; we should struggle together against
all those who fail to participate truly and energetically in the national idea,
against all those who hinder and damage the ideality through their base
attitudes and their mean ways of living and acting. But sincere and base
attitudes, high and low elements |37| of the people do not correspond to
confession or descent; the separation into confessions—Christians and Jews,
Catholics and Protestants—is wrong and detrimental here, and will deeply
damage the idealist forces that ought to win the struggle together. Let the
highest development of the idea of German nationality be the standard
342 Appendix 2

around which we flock. But we aim at a Germanity that must be free of any
felony against received traditions as well as against universal human principles.
True Germanity must not be narrow-chested, fainthearted and short-sighted,
it must not be distorted by base envy and petty meanness, it must be high-
minded and generous. Burke once said in the English parliament: “To make
us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”5 We love and we praise
the German nation—although one belongs to it, one is allowed to praise
one’s own nation as one ought to love it—as the most noble in terms of
spiritual power and depth, we praise and worship it because we think it is
the one that struggles most ardently for the fulfillment of a human ideal.
Therefore we are glad to be sons of this nation, which we uphold with all
our soul and of which we are proud.
Rümelin has, as I believe, depicted succinctly the true ideal of the German
nation (in the conclusion of the already cited text). “The idea of humanity
stands higher even than any nationality, humanity displays its riches in the
chain of spirits of peoples who have forebodings of it. Never, though, had
the particular spirit of any one people a more direct relationship to this idea
of humanity than the particular spirit of the Germans has. Other nations
might have served humanity unintentionally. The particular course of our
history has led us, though, directly and consciously to embrace the idea of
humanity as our trademark. |38| We have often been reprimanded for not
esteeming our own but instead admiring the alien; it has never been pos-
sible to vaccinate us with a decent dosage of national pride, and after having
accomplished the greatest deeds we hardly even bring up the enthusiasm
to celebrate and commemorate them. With all the will in the world we do
not manage to despise the alien, to answer the hate of the enemy with equal
hate; we cannot help searching for and acknowledging the good wherever
it may be. We have been led to a consciousness of our national task by
cosmopolitanism and world literature. The poetry of no other people has
as directly aimed at the heights of humanity; the scholarship of no other is
of such universal and international character. Germans, you hope in vain
ever to form a nation, we were told by Schiller, Strive instead, as you can,
to a state of greater freedom than that: Strive to be humans. Some of our
 Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean?” 343

characteristics hold us back or throw us off course, but this ideal trait, the
love of truth and justice and humanity, will always lead us back onto the
right path. And given this particular drive toward the generically human we
are perhaps allowed to hope that we will not undertake the coming severe
struggles and the tasks that are awaiting us all alone, but that the genius of
humanity will be at our side as our silent ally.”
We German Jews can and ought to contribute to the fulfillment of this
most supreme ideal of German nationality in full accordance with ourselves.
In order to be perfect, most efficient Germans, we not only can but must re-
main Jews. We are not only entitled but obliged to maintain what intellectual
particularity we own as a race, what inherited virtue and wisdom we own as a
religion, in order to put it to the service of the German national spirit as a part
of its strength. Every nationality that is meant to reach a high level of develop-
ment must be |39| equipped with a large variety of communities, aims and
tendencies. The differentiations of coastal and interior areas, of mineral-rich
mountains and fertile valleys and planes must be matched by a diversity of
spiritual talents and their respective inclinations and capabilities to cultivate
arts, sciences and trades richly and variedly. It has long been established, too,
that the most diversely mixed peoples tend to be culturally and historically
strongest. Seeing this as an effect of merely the mixing of blood, though, is
stupid and limited. No! Nations climb higher stages of the performance of
humane ideals when intellectual abilities, moral drives, the view of the world
as it is given and the longing to shape it take individual form in tribes or races
and are united in continuous struggle and growing harmony.
From this point we can now, I believe, understand the determination of the
Jewish race in the diaspora, the Jewish religion in its continuity. I don’t like
being one of those who pretend they sat in the Council of Providence and
listened to the determination of the times and peoples. But that Providence had
a part to play in that this tiny tribe continued to exist while on all sides large
and powerful empires and nations fell apart, must seem plausible to everyone
who still thinks that Providence is more than just an empty word.
More than anything else, though, we must wish to recognize and build
on the moral benefit that can be drawn from this.
344 Appendix 2

I don’t even want to talk about the fact that people, whose vision and
purpose are limited to the short day of their existence and their petty per-
sonal ambitions, judge the legitimacy of the existence of that race |40| whose
testimonies are nearly the oldest and that has survived the rise and fall of
the old great historical peoples.
How natural and self-evident it must have seemed to the Romans that
they, who thought they had expanded their power over the whole world and
eternally, would be able to grind this little nation to nothingness. Where are
the Romans now? The Jews though enjoy everywhere in Europe the sun of
liberty and a multifaceted energetic life.
But sometimes we witness these days even serious, far-sighted people
make narrow-minded judgments about Israel. The main reason for this is
that most people form their judgment on the character of the Jews merely
with reference to their own view of Christianity and their, and their peers’,
relationship to the latter. The fact that Jewry is the mother of Christianity
has caused only in few minds a simple sentiment of grateful recognition,
or at least made them grant uninhibited, unimpeded continued existence.
Most people think that with the successful creation of Christianity the sole
reason for the existence of Jewry has ceased. After having fulfilled its world-
historical mission, which they celebrate highly, they think Jewry should have
disappeared. But does a mother have to die after she gave birth to a child?
Ewald6—certainly not a friend of the Jews—assigns them a continuing
mission (History of the People of Israel, 2nd edition, vol. 7, p. 445): “Jewry
had a right to continue to exist next to Islam although it was initially im-
prudent enough to flatter it; likewise it still has that right today next to all
the flawed forms of Christianity. Nothing is without its usefulness, and the
existence of Jewry still today can and should remind us to what little an
extent our own contemporary Christianity already is what it should be, in
scholarship as in life.”
But even here the goal of Jewry is looked for |41| only in its relationship
to Christianity. Jewry as the mother of Christianity is supposed through its
critique to further its education and upbringing. I will not go into any detail
about how narrow and unpleasant this merely critical task is.
 Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean?” 345

[3.8 Cultural Diversity as a Value in Itself]

Certainly, one might argue that being a mother is a woman’s essential des-
tination, and having given birth to a child her greatest achievement. But is
she only a mother? Is she not also a human being in her own right? Must
she only live for the child, not also the child for her? This whole viewpoint is
flawed by a false presupposition: by that petty and narrow worldview which
may sometimes talk about humanity and totality but views their whole
history merely as instrumental to the purposes of its own self or its own
little community. The whole great diversity of spiritual life and production
is supposedly not valuable in itself but merely as a step that is part of the
development toward something else.
Here lies the deepest root of all intolerance. This is why for the Catholic,
Protestantism is nothing but secession and heresy, while for the Protestant,
Catholicism is but a preparatory stage. Has Protestantism not engendered
countless sects? And always the same antagonism: one camp shouts secession,
heresy, decay; the other, backward, retarded preparatory stage. The same is
true with respect to culture in general: it has been held as an ideal that the
whole world should adopt the culture of one people: all should become
Roman or French. True culture, though, consists in diversity.*
*This mistake of the notion of “a step that is part of the development toward something else” is
one of the noble mistakes as it derives from the best intentions. It is the drive toward knowledge
and truth which seeks them as absolutes.
For one, it is only an ideal to find an absolute, eternal truth that is accessible to all in the same
way. While it is possible to find an exact and therefore complete truth with respect to simple objects,
actually given things, the same is not possible with respect to ideals, insights of the infinite within
the particular. One must not deny the obvious fact that the absolute is always grasped in individual
ways in these higher spheres; absolutely progressing perhaps, but not absolutely fixed.
Furthermore, the absolute is not limited to knowledge and truth. There is art, too, which not
only allows but demands in its progressing development individuality and diversity. Would we talk
about a blossoming of the arts if it allowed for only one kind of creativity, form and representation,
even if it was a most perfect one? The same goes for ethics. Mores, customs, strivings, lifestyles can,
may and should be diverse; they will have to be objectively different because they are meant to be
the ultimate, the most pure, the most certain for everyone.
Everybody ought to seek justice for everybody, sympathy for everybody. Everybody ought to seek
with equal zeal, with equal zeal confess the truth; the diversity of knowledge, opinion and belief will
never then do any moral harm, and the cause of truth itself will be served best.
How will truth grow if not through spiritual struggle, through the struggles of different insights,
through the competition of forces?
346 Appendix 2

|42| Stages of development, progress, developments toward something

higher do exist. The ultimate though consists for humanity not in unity, the
one culmination, but in totality, in the various manifestations of the highest
ideal, just as the natural givens (from the soil, the position of the sun and
water compared to human beings) include a diversity which cannot, indeed
should not be, destroyed.
From this can be deduced a permanent vocation of the Jews, which, in
itself diverse, leads to an ongoing enrichment through the participation in
various national spirits.
Every nation can learn from every other nation; the general gains from
this process; but they remain, in the first place, separate nations.
The Jews, however, totally immerse themselves into the particular cultures,
and draw therefrom heightening and deepening of their own. The particular
characters of different nations share essential moments of generality, and
because the particular character of the Jews has been fed by many diverse
influences, |43| and is therefore closest to the general, they are able to rein-
force anywhere, in any particular nation, the element of generality. Although
the Jews differ from each other in language and thus form of thought, they
are able to strongly affect each other and mutually increase their impact on
others because they share an ethical-religious content that towers in power
and dignity over any individual deed.*
The Jews do not have a nationality of their own anymore; there simply is
no Jew anymore who has an exclusively Jewish spirit. They draw therefore

*The church created a similar constellation for all European peoples in the Middle Ages; the dif-
ference is that the use of a single language—Latin—that was alien to all of them, has alienated the
peoples from their own nationality, or rather has prevented them from developing it. Shared intel-
lectual work decreased and separate intellectual work increased only in the modern period when
national difference conquered and individualized linguistic form as well as the common content
of thought. The Jews did not have the same kind of shared base in the Hebrew language, not even
in the Middle Ages, let alone in the modern period: even in the Middle Ages the Iberian Jews used
Arabic for their principal works, and the difference between the Hispanic and the Provençal schools
will have been shaped considerably by the use of different written languages, in spite of regular
translating. In the modern period Jews write even their theological and ethical works in vernacular
languages, while Hebrew is used only occasionally to clarify their interpretation, rarely to facilitate
common creation, although it remains the shared source of inspiration.
 Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean?” 347

by necessity on all the national spirits of which they have become parts and
react upon them; even in their religion, which is what is most exclusively
and originally their own, they are essentially also individualized according
to the nations within which they live,* and are therefore able the more
energetically |44| to transform their receptive participation in culture into
a productive one. Philo wrote Greek, Maimonides Arabic, Spinoza Latin,
Munck and Dernburg French, Mendelssohn German.
Their specific capability owes itself not to their being aliens but to their
being an individually shaped distinct element inherent to each nation, recip-
rocally and individually appropriated. This capacity for appropriation and
assimilation, this quality of being nutritious to the other spirit and in turn
hungry for it, certainly is a prominent trait of the already mentioned affinity
between the Jewish and the German spirit. “Most things and the best of what
our education-proud time can boast of still comes from the heritage of those
three classic nations, the Jews, the Greeks and the Romans” (Rümelin).
The notion of One Shepherd and One Flock—God as the father of all
humanity—of a universal empire of peace, all these have their birthplace in
the Jewish spirit. And if it was Christianity that developed the most poignant
articulation of these thoughts as an ethical system for the whole of human-
ity, it must be acknowledged, too, that this happened in the New Testament
which was written by Jews only.
In the ancient people of Israel these thoughts struggled with those dictated
by political praxis, and at a time when governance by the cruel Romans bur-
dened them heavily, this burden threatened to suffocate them. The Christian
community had voluntarily withdrawn from the national struggle; the Jews
suffered a devastating defeat. That rabbi may have had a foreboding of the
true destination of the Jews who said that the Messiah was born on the day
the temple was destroyed. The ideal |45| concept of humanity was the Phoenix
that was reborn to the Jews out of the ashes of the temple on Zion.

*Just listen to what the Jews call each other: this one is a Pole, that one a Russian, that one a German.
Only in a geographical sense? No! this refers to character, spirit, even the ways of reading the Talmud.
Even differences in ritual, or of the agendas of the synagogue, are given national names—just read
the front pages: French, Spanish, German, Polish, Moravian, Bohemian etc.
348 Appendix 2

[3.9 The Proximity of the Ideals of Judaism to Those of Christianity and

of the Modern State]
I do not want to explain to you how modern Jewry defines its relationship
to the nation and that of the nations with each other in my own words but
with the quasi official formulation from the first and second Israelitic Syn-
ods:* “The Jewish Synod understands that Jewry is in accordance with the
principles of the new society and the constitutional state, as these principles
have been pronounced in Mosaism and developed in the teachings of the
prophets, i.e. in accordance with the principle of the unitary character of
the human race, the equality of all before the law, the equality of all in du-
ties and rights against nation and state, and the complete freedom of the
individual in his religious beliefs and their enactment; the Synod sees the
development and realization of these principles as the most reliable sureties
for Judaism and its adherents in the present and the future, the most vital
conditions for the unrestricted existence and the highest development of
Judaism; the Synod sees therefore peace among all religions and confes-
sions, mutual respect and equality, and a struggle for truth that is fought
with spiritual weapons only and in a strictly ethical manner as among the
principal aims of humanity.” The first sentence of the resolutions taken by
the second Synod at Augsburg** reads: “Judaism has since its inception in
early |46| pre-history gone through different phases of development and in
these has progressively unfolded its inner essence. Another most significant
turning point has occurred in its history. The spirit of true knowledge of
God and of pure morality is spreading more and more in the consciousness
of humanity as a whole and shows itself more and more clearly in the life of
the nations, in state and civil society, in the arts and sciences. Jewry gladly
recognizes in this an approximation to the goals that have always directed
its own historical path.”
Like the determination of any higher community, that of Jewry is an ideal,
*The first topic on the first Synod’s agenda, Leipzig 1869, was the following resolution tabled by Dr.
Ludwig Philippson, as edited by a commission, that was accepted unanimously.
**Tabled by Dr. Jacob Auerbach, Frankfurt/M, edited together with Dr. Szántó, Vienna, and unani-
mously accepted.
 Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean?” 349

which is realized only with difficulties and slowly. On whether or not those
who confess to this determination bring with them the necessary character,
leaning, ability and progressing achievements, on this issue I want to quote
now some non-Jewish voices.
They are rare. It is difficult to find one’s way into the essence of the appear-
ance-less Jewish idealism. Pompeius was surprised not to find an idol when
he came to Jerusalem and entered the temple, even in the Holy of Holies;
the god without an image was invisible to his inner eye. The evidence of
cases in which non-Jews correctly understood the spirit of Judaism is rare
but important.
I want to point again to Luther’s words as already quoted above (page
23). Then Goethe. He cannot be suspected of having been a philosemite
(Wanderjahre vol. 2, chapter 2): “The people of Israel,” he said, “has never
been much good at anything, as its leaders, judges, governors, prophets have
reprimanded it a thousand times (of this later more); it possesses few virtues,
and most of the flaws of other peoples . . .” (nevertheless he continues:) “. . .
but it is without equal when it comes to autonomy, steadfastness, courage,
and when all these do not suffice, doggedness. It is |47| the most tenacious
nation on earth; it is, it was, and will be existing in order to celebrate the
name of Jehovah through the ages.” Do these words not almost recall what
Jeremiah said (31, 35): “Thus spoke the Eternal: “Who gives the sun for a light
by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night,
who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar, the Eternal of hosts is His name:
Only when these ordinances depart from before Me then the seed of Israel
also shall cease from being a nation before Me for ever.”
But what is it that gives that Jewish tribe its eternal destination?
The most important ethnologist of recent times, the sadly much too early
departed Peschel has expressed a main thought as follows (Völkerkunde
p. 302): “The high significance of Israel’s history lies in that this people
has been forced to develop an ever deeper and purer understanding of the
concept of God by what it had to experience and suffer. From among all
the ancient nations only the Jews own a history that aims to recognize the
forces of a ethical world order in earthly events.” And furthermore (p. 307):
350 Appendix 2

“An inclination to clemency and humanitarianism emerges already in the

older Talmudic writings, an inclination that Christianity in particular has
elevated to an idealist dogma of consolation of the oppressed and from
which it has drawn its best impulses for the last eighteen centuries. Those
Talmudic passages stem from the time of the Babylonian captivity, of misery
and oppression: the purifying school of one’s own misfortune has made its
authors just and soft, tender and loving of others.”
Let us now hear, with a feeling of joyous gratefulness, how (a long time
before Peschel) a German philosopher, Professor Hermann Lotze of Göt-
tingen, has looked deep into the Holy of Holies of Judaism. In the third
volume of his Mikrokosmos (page 147) he wrote: “Among the peoples of the
Orient governed by theocracies |48| the Hebrews appear to us like sober
people among drunks; in antiquity, though, they appeared to be the dreamers
among those awake. The others had looked into the beginnings of the world,
the origins of its becoming and undoing with profound imagination, and
as they felt themselves to be members of the big divine body of the world
they lived in accordance with all the spasms of its mysterious life, the annual
metamorphoses of a dying and returning nature, the struggle of light and
beneficial, against dark and hostile powers in extravagant cults of sensual-
ity or asceticism. And the discreet science of the priests promised further
countless mysteries beyond the wisdom known by life. The Hebrews were
utterly indifferent to all this; the powerful and zealous God who wants the
justice of the hearts and persecutes sin because it is sin had also, of course,
created the world, all those plants and animals, stars and planets large and
small so that all may be good; but the imagination of the people did not
concentrate on this creation which expressed His magnificence only in pass-
ing; it saw God as a God of history, to whom nature is merely a stepladder of
his power, but the life of humanity, his chosen people, the sole focus of his
Providence. The Hebrews threw away all the useless luxury of the mysticism
of the philosophy of nature that had bogged down the other religions of
antiquity, in order to meditate on the sole riddle of the inner world, that of
sin and justice before God; they felt subject not to the whirl of the eternal
cycles of nature but the progressing of a history; they were bothered not so
 Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean?” 351

much by the mysteries of past events but much more by those that concerned
the tasks of the future; and these were not meant to remain secret but divine
inspiration drove the prophets to announce the future coming of the King-
dom of Heaven to all people as a consolation, and God’s commandments
|49| as atonement.” And, further down: “Classical civilization’s meaningful
mythology and philosophical concepts of God lacked the immediate belief
in their reality, and it came to take notice of a people that owned the living
conviction that it lacked to such an extent, and that did not see the notions
of God and His Kingdom as poetic adornments of a completely secular
worldview but as profound and most serious reality.”
This concerned the moral character of the Jewish religion. Concerning the
system of morality itself, though, Ernst Renan (Life of Jesus, page 122f. of the
German translation) wrote that Jesus “. . . had little to add to the teachings of
the Synagogue in terms of charity, piety, good deeds, clemency, peacefulness,
complete altruism of the heart”; and further: “. . . but he knew how to lend
novelty to long known aphorisms through his mild tone.” This is absolutely
true. He continues: “Christian morality is in itself hardly original, as it can
almost completely be restored from older maxims, but nevertheless it remains
the highest creation that ever sprung from human consciousness, the most
beautiful law book of perfect living ever written by any moralist.”
Whenever anyone wants to attack the Jews, talk turns to the Talmud;
the accusations against the latter have been refuted as null, void, unjust a
hundred times—in vain. Every time a thorough refutation of the attacks has
been accomplished, one thinks: So! Now at least no one who makes claims
to being scholarly can refer to Eisenmenger and Pfefferkorn as authorities!
All in vain! The Hydra of Jew-hatred lacks heart; |50| one may cut off as
many heads as one wishes, Hydra-heads always grow back.
I have already mentioned Mr. Rohling; I quoted his assessment of Protes-
tantism above (p. 35), which, as I believe, has clearly enough demonstrated his
intellectual capabilities and reliability; and yet—what noble impartiality!—
Protestants quote the same Mr. Rohling as witness and judge against the
Talmud.
Rather than sharing with you my own judgment, which you might be
352 Appendix 2

able to anticipate anyway, I want to quote a few passages from Professor

Delitzsch of Leipzig, without doubt one of the foremost and most thorough
experts on the Talmud in Germany.* He writes: Rohling’s “The Talmud
Jew” “is a sin. It is not born out of the spirit of Christ nor the spirit of truth.
Firstly, the author attributes to the Talmud much that comes from the na-
tional point of view of Old Testament morality and can thus equally be
used to attack the Old Testament, especially the Mosaic Law; secondly, he
has swept all the scandalous things that are voiced in the Talmud—a book
that is actually a parliament and more than a thousand years old—onto one
dung heap without looking at the pro and contra that is articulated there,
and without paying attention to the many sentences that approximate the
spirit of Christianity; not being able to read the Talmud himself, he has ex-
cerpted Eisenmenger and has ignored other works such as those by Lightfoot
and Hottinger. Thirdly, he acts against Judaism like someone who wanted to
indict Christianity through excerpts from the Jesuit casuists whose works
contain much more abject principles and conclusions than the Talmud
|51| if compared to the morality of Jesus and the apostles.” Furthermore:
“What Rohling (p. 44 etc.) makes the Talmud say about the Messiah, these
two pages alone show how ignorant he is or how irresponsibly he pretends
to be ignorant.” Finally, Professor Delitzsch writes (on the occasion of his
review of Dr. Bloch’s “Professor Rohling’s Forgery in Talmud Studies”): “This
work shows that Prof. Rohling knows neither the Talmud nor rabbinical
literature, that he has manipulated rabbinical sentences for his purposes
and even fabricated some himself.”
On the post-Talmudic period I want to be short. Among others, we possess
an excellent short contribution by the well-known philosopher and botanist,
Professor Schleiden: “The Significance of the Jews for Preservation and Resusci-
tation of the Sciences in the Middle Ages,” Leipzig, published by Baumgärtner.
I allow myself to remind you that this contribution must not be missing in
any Jewish house. Not only the men but especially the women, too, should be
familiar with the history of Jewish intellectual life; they ought to know that
once it looked much more splendid than today. Admittedly, and fortunately,

*Zeitschrift f. d. Mission der Kirche an Israel. “Saat auf Hoffnung.” 14. Jahrgang, S. 183]
 Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean?” 353

we do turn toward general sciences lately quite a lot, but we neglect the science
of Judaism so much that the flame of this intellectual activity only burns on
small stoves. Throughout the Middle Ages both took place in parallel, exercised
by the same persons; let me quote one example, not even one of the more
important ones: the same Mr. Minz who had to leave Germany for Italy—in
Germany there was no space for his activity—was rabbi in Padua for 47 years
and at the same time professor |52| of philosophy at the university there. The
good man died in 1508 when he was more than a hundred years old. We could
quote many more examples like this, and I think it is our task to continue to
cultivate the inherited core of our intellectual life.
As for the spirit of Judaism in the more narrow sense of the word and its
progressing, ascending development over the centuries and especially in the
latest times, I want to quote again the words of a Christian, a Catholic; a man
who was in his days a seminary director, then a member of government and
minister of education in the Swiss republic of Aarau. He wrote the book The
Moral Theology of the Jesuit Priest Cury, Explored by Dr. A. Keller, Aarau 1869. It
contains a chapter that explicitly criticizes the morality of this Jesuit textbook
where he writes for example (pp. 167f.): “The founder of Christian morality
has already kept dividers and numbers of the old rabbinism away from its laws.
Among his students he does not know a top one, and in the Kingdom of God
no-one is the greatest.” Furthermore: “I have mentioned ‘old rabbinism.’ Alas,
we should be silent about it in embarrassment! The sages of Israel have risen
these days so far above dead formalism; this is evident in the words, spoken
on the fourth of July of this year by the president of the first Israelitic Synod
in Leipzig, the philosopher” (here follow some lines which modesty forces me
to omit, but the same modesty must not stop me from quoting the passages7
which Keller is referring to) “in his concluding speech, under the applause of
the theologians of his religion”: “We have to look upon the inner, rather than
merely the outer form . . . I am firmly convinced that all ideality culminates in
religion, all ideas are in the service of religion, and religion in turn lends them
their glory. By religion I mean, though, not merely the confession, the dogma,
|53| the conventions, but religiosity itself, that generically human elevation
and deepening, that rise onto the higher planes of humanity, the ascendance
354 Appendix 2

from the small to the great, from the everyday to the sublime, from the finite
to the infinite, from the secular to the eternal. . . . What has destroyed other
religions? The deeper moral content that people recognized after they had
already formed their religion, received either through foreign ideas that were
brought to them through immigration, as it happened to the Romans, or, as
in the Greek case, through their own intellectual development. The deeper
moral content destroyed the belief in the lesser moral content of their own
religions. The spirit of the people itself spoke out against the spirit of its own
religion. The living blew up the dead . . . when a seed happens to fall into a
crevice and finds enough soil to develop into a plant, sometimes a tree might
grow from it that will explode the rock. A small seed! But the living overcomes
the dead; this is the power of life.”
Now, one may assume that only we who attended the Synod and confessed
to these principles were the progressive ones while the orthodox Jews are
lacking behind and still remain on the standpoint of that old rabbinism
which initially may have blossomed with the most noble ethical illuminations
but then, evolving through severest circumstances, under external pressure,
ossified. Far from it! The orthodox may impose limitations onto their own
way of life and follow strictly, perhaps too strictly, the ceremonies; but they
too acknowledge the writings of Cabriol and Maimonides, of Bachia and
Albo, and all the other philosophers of religion of the Middle Ages; they
too have inherited |54| the whole development of the idea throughout the
centuries rather than merely its most ancient core, only perhaps a little bit
more than they are ready to admit to themselves.
The gist of the dynamism and progressing profundity of the Jewish spirit
thanks to the work of men such as those just mentioned can be gleaned from
the following sentences by Renan, quoted from his latest work, volume six of
Origin of Christianity (p. 247 of the original edition): “. . . There are excellent
maxims in the Talmud, and more than one precious pearl of the kind that
Jesus idealized by making them his own. The Talmud played a larger role for
the preservation of the ideality of the Jewish people than any other book in
the history of any people. Dispersed from one end of the world to the other,
the Jewish people soon had no other nationality than that of—the Torah. An
 Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean?” 355

iron chain was needed to hold together this dispersed nation without clerics,
without bishops, a pope, a holy city, or a theological central college. Nothing
is as firmly connecting as shared duty, and this is pronounced in the Torah.
The Jew who carried his religion with himself, who needed neither temple nor
clerics for his cult, was incomparably free in his emigrations into all parts of
the world. His absolute idealism made him indifferent to all things material;
loyal memory of his tribe, the schema and the practice of the laws sufficed.
When one attends service in a synagogue, one finds everything on first sight
modern, borrowed, banal. The Jews have never tried to settle for a style of
building places of worship that could be called distinctly their own. Their
prayer leaders resemble priests; their sermons are borrowed from the Catholic
pulpit; the interior of the synagogues is made by the same artisans who pro-
vide benches, chairs and lamps for the |55| neighboring church. Nothing in
their music and singing reaches further back than the fifteenth century. Even
some elements of the cult emulate the Catholic cult. Originality and tradition,
though, erupt in the chant of ‘Listen Israel! Adonai, our God, is unique; holy
be His name!’ This obstinate proclamation, this penetrating call is the one
and all of Jewry. This people has laid the foundations of God, and yet there
has never been a people less busy discussing God than the Jews. It is indeed
a sign of great reasonableness to make practice rather than dogma the basis
of religious confession. Christian is connected to Christian by shared belief;
Jew to Jew by shared observance. Excommunication happened among Jews
normally on the basis of deeds, not opinions.
“Cabbala always remained a voluntary discipline; it has never become an
obligatory belief. Immortality of the soul has always been seen as a mere con-
solation and hope. A famous scholar was even allowed to doubt redemption
by the Messiah; the Talmud quotes him without reprimand. An obligation
to believe in something is a real nonsense, whereas greatest strictness about
forms can apparently go together with complete freedom of thought. This
is the reason of the philosophical independence that is a characteristic of
medieval Jewry and still of today’s. The famous scholars and oracles of the
Synagogue, such as Maimonides and Mendelssohn, were pure rationalists.
A book such as the ‘Iccarim’ (the Fundamental Principles) by Josef Albo,
356 Appendix 2

which explains religion and prophesy as symbolism that is meant to con-

tribute to the moral betterment of man; which calls revelation a mere mode
of presentation of inner reasoning; which holds that all divine laws can be
modified |56| and that individual punishments and rewards in future life
are mere images; that such a book can reach fame and is not anathematized,
that is a feat that no other religion has achieved.”
The already quoted comment of Kant’s on “Jerusalem” (p. 30) and Keller’s
on the Synod should be sufficient proof that the progressive deepening as
well as simultaneous liberation of the spirit has not come to a halt within
Jewry until the present day; we trust that our Hochschule will help both to
continue in the future, too.

[4. Conclusion: Self-Criticism as a Jewish Virtue]

Today I have spoken almost exclusively about Jewry rather than about the Jews.
We could say much in their favor, but also against them; perhaps another time.
I don’t want to praise our virtues, and there is no need to highlight our flaws
as they are more obvious even than our virtues, especially for one particular
reason: the Jews have always been the classic people of self-criticism. They
cannot find the same among any other people. This benefit is paid for by a
severe disadvantage; our self-praise has been justly reprimanded, but our
self-reprimand has unjustly been affirmed. Like in Goethe, as quoted above,
it is often argued that the Jews must be so much worse than other peoples
as their prophets, orators, leaders have accused them of their baseness time
and time again. Perhaps, though, our faults were not bigger but only their
critique more open and more severe than among other peoples. Anyway, the
Jews have criticized themselves not merely through their prophets and judges
but self-criticism has become part of vernacular culture. Today unfortunately
it has become much less so; I |57| wish we had continued the custom more.
You will all remember: whenever anything unfortunate, tough luck, bad
coincidence, or even a perfectly obvious injustice by anybody else happened
to our parents and grandparents their first word when talking or hearing
about it would have been, “because of our many sins!” One used to think of
oneself as primary and essential cause of the misfortune. Emulating their
 Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean?” 357

prophets whose example was present in front of everybody’s soul, the Jews
have always been proud of their ideal but humble about the reality, includ-
ing their own historical reality as a whole, as I could prove with countless
examples. Other nations also tended to be eulogists of past times; only the
Jews said in prominent places: “We and our fathers have sinned!”
Even for our forefathers they had open confessions, not eulogies. Who
would want to claim that a similar attitude has been articulated in the ver-
nacular or the literature of any other ancient people? No literature is even
remotely as rich in reprimands and admonitions as the Jewish literature from
ancient times to the present. One will not want to compare Aristophanes’
comedies or the Roman satire to the Prophetic reprimand. The Greek and
Roman discourses are sophisticated, beautiful, sweet, flattering, but the word
of the Prophets is powerful and stirring. The penitential hymn and sermon
of the Christian church is almost completely based on and draws on the
Psalms and the Prophets. Today we are not lacking the art of the prophetic
word but its bloodcurdling power. If as monstrous a deed of moral degrada-
tion as the attempts on the most honorable head of the nation would have
happened in the times of the Prophets, sounds of enormous power would
have arisen, whose ringing we would still be hearing today like we still today
hear the penetrating call of Jeremiah and |58| Isaiah. Perhaps somewhere in
a German mind a spark of that ardor might still be glowing under the ashes
of the centuries; it might light up—even if less bright—and illuminate for us
the path of justice and clemency and be to the benefit of the whole German
people: may God bring that to pass!

Appendix on Jewish Immigration and Emigration in Prussia

It sounds so eerily beautiful that “. . . the Eastern border of our country is
invaded year after year by multitudes of assiduous trouser-selling youths
from the inexhaustible cradle of Poland, whose children and grandchildren
are to be the future rulers of Germany’s stock exchanges and Germany’s press;
this immigration is rapidly increasing and the question becomes more and
more serious how this alien nationality can be amalgamated with ours.”
But is this factually true? That is the first question.
358 Appendix 2

I remember the same fear was voiced in the 1850s and was then answered
with a statistical survey. Its results were that between 1834 and 1843 the num-
ber of immigrating Jews exceeded the number of emigrating Jews by 2,394.
Between 1843 and 1855 inclusive the number of emigrating Jews exceeded
that of immigrating Jews by 12,870 so that in the whole twenty-two year period
(1834 to 1855) 10,476 more Jews emigrated than immigrated. I concentrate on
the essential point; the details can be found in the “Calendar and Yearbook
for the Jewish communities of Prussia,” edited by Ph. Wertheim, third year,
1859, Veit u. Co, pages 159ff, by Dr. S. Neumann.
For the period from 1855 to the present currently no complete survey ex-
ists, but there are enough data to suggest |2| that emigration continued to
exceed immigration. In 1858, 242,365 Jews lived in Prussia, as against 254,785
in 1861, an increase of 12,420. Births have exceeded, though, deaths by 13,147,
which means that emigration exceeded immigration by 727.
In 1864, 262,001 Jews lived in Prussia, which means an increase as against
1861 of 7216, while births exceeded deaths by 12,516; in these three years 5,300
more Jews must have emigrated than immigrated.
For the period 1865 to 1867 the same calculation results in an excess emi-
gration of 9,267 persons.
After 1866 the argument is more complicated due to the extension of the terri-
tory of the Prussian state, and especially because data on births and deaths have
not been differentiated with respect to confession between 1868 and 1872.
The numerical share of the Jews to the overall population of the Prussian
state is perfectly clear: in 1855 the Jews made up 1.361% of the population; in

1858 1.366%
1861 1.377%
1864 1.360%
1867 1.305%
1867 in the old provinces 1.335%
1867 in the new provinces 1.182%
1871 1.321%
1875 1.322%
 Lazarus’s “What Does National Mean?” 359

The Jewish share in the population clearly has not increased; as births exceed
deaths much more among Jews than among non-Jews, it has to be assumed
that emigration exceeded immigration even more than suggested above in
order to explain that the Jewish share of the population remained stable or
even decreased.
|3| I do not believe any statistical surveys and calculations are ultimately
reliable; but compared to those vague claims that are inspired by deadly fear
and are supported by no evidence at all, they can be seen as actual facts.
But even if all these statistical data were wrong, even if a handful more
Jews were actually coming to Germany every year, what danger would it
be? And I am not invoking here the concept of humanitarianism toward
strangers, which certain circles seem not to appreciate anymore at all. What
I mean is that an Englishman would laugh into our faces if we suggested
that he control the immigration of some group of foreigners into the British
Isles. He might consider it an insult to his nation to suggest that a handful of
foreigners could corrupt the ideals, morality and character of his people. If,
though, also in Germany it is “impossible to make the hard German heads
Jewish”—what’s the noise about then? Why the fear?
The heightening of national consciousness is a serious issue; a purified
and energetic sense of nationality is an ideal for the German as well as for
any other people; it is an important task to inspire ever expanding strata
ever more strongly and deeply with it. Can this task be helped, though, by
arousing antagonism in one part of the population against another one? Is
it a sign of that authentic national consciousness that we long for, can it be
a means of strengthening it, to alarm the imagination with a strong fear of
facts that are not facts at all?
Appendix 3. Open Letter on the Jews by Löb Baruch (Dr. Ludwig Börne)
to the Member of the German Reichstag and Heidelberg Professor
Dr. Heinrich Gotthard von Treitschke (Berlin, 1880)

Motto: In this dispute time will win, as it always does—and love always
wins as love alone is immortal.

Our fools, the popes, bishops, sophists and monks, those coarse asses, have
hitherto treated the Jews such that a good Christian would have wanted to
become a Jew. And had I been a Jew while such idiots and good-for-nothings
were ruling the Christian faith, I would rather have wanted to convert into a
sow than a Christian.—ma rtin lu the r

Nathan: We must, must be friends! Are Christian and Jew Christian and Jew
more than they are Humans?—got thold ephr aim lessing

The Jews are Germans, nothing but Germans. German is their mother tongue
and German is their fatherland. In Germany stands their cradle, in Germany lie
their ancestors’ tombs. Their beginning is here and so is their ending. They have
no other history than the history of the German people. One likes reproaching
the Jews for gaining big fortunes. But they merely increase the wealth of the
nation. When they work they work for the better of the German. In scholarship,
the arts, crafts, and industry, they do so as Germans, intentionally or not, and
they are very aware how much they owe to the specific nature of the German
spirit.—prof. l a zarus
 Open Letter on the Jews by Löb Baruch 361

e lys i u m , i n a dven t 1 8 7 9

Dear Professor!

It is half a century since I wrote the words, “I beg you, do not despise me
my Jews.” Back then of course a German Reichstag did not exist yet in
which a liberal professor from Heidelberg could have taken a seat, but the
good old German Bundestag ruled over the Germans like a father, and
like a stepfather over the Jews.1 Had you studied in Heidelberg at my time
I am sure because of only a fraction of the liberal ideas that you hold now
you would have been caught up in the persecutions of the “demagogues”;
had you published your “Gesellschaftswissenschaft” or your historical and
political essays at the time when I studied for my doctorate at Giessen you
would have been given ample opportunity for practical research on solitary
imprisonment; and I am afraid your “Prussian Annals” would have meant
penitentiary unless you had preferred like myself to cross the border at Kehl
and to make the journey via Lüneville and Dormans to Paris. For your sake
I feel sorry we missed the chance to write my “Letters from Paris” together;
perhaps you would have been granted a little plaque at the pedestal of my
monument in Frankfurt—some immortality is not at all to be despised, not
even for a professor from Heidelberg. Well, at least you wrote about “The
Acid Test of the North German League,” while I merely put the Bundestag
to such a test, and even found its nightgown and nightcap indestructible.
You gave an answer also to the question, “What do we demand of France?”
and you had some good thoughts on the subject. You would have had am-
munition for another ten thousand brochures; so what drove you to rage
against “my Jews”?
|5| Did I hear you say that I, Löb Baruch, am partisan and the whole affair
was none of my business? Fine! But then at least listen to what I once wrote,
a long, long time ago—you as a professor of history should know what half
a century means—when people were not yet calling me the Psalmist of Pas-
sion. On “The Poor Germans” I wrote back then: “As they live on the ground
362 Appendix 3

floor and the weight of the very large number of higher estates burdens them,
speaking of people even lower than they, of those who inhabit the basement,
eases their anxiety. At least not to be Jews is their consolation for not even
having become Court Councillor. No, having been born Jewish has never
embittered me against the Germans. I would not be worth the light of the
sun were I to reward the great mercy God showed me when he made me a
German and a Jew at the same time with base moaning—because of an insult
I have always looked down upon, because of suffering I have long overcome.
No, I appreciate the undeserved luck of being a German and a Jew, to be able
to strive for all the virtues of the Germans without having to share any of
their faults. Yes, having been born a serf I understand liberty better than you
do. Yes, having been trained in slavery I understand freedom better than you
do. Yes, having been born without a fatherland, I wished a fatherland more
fervently than you do, and as my birthplace was as small as the Judengasse [the
ghetto in Frankfurt/Main], and as behind the locked gates the foreign parts
began, the town would not suffice for me as a fatherland, nor the region, nor
the province; nothing less than the whole wide fatherland would do, as far as
its tongue reaches. And if it was in my power, I would not tolerate that even
a path as wide as my hand would separate region from region, German tribe
from German tribe; if it was in my power, I would not tolerate that a single
German word had to reach my ear from beyond the borders.”
Are you perhaps even more national than that, Professor? It took a long
time before some of my dreams became realities. When I once observed
that the Jews and the Poles were fighting for freedom while the Germans
were passively looking on, I wrote: “That really takes the biscuit, this is the
sublime ridicule that German history has been waiting for, that Jews are
leading the German people’s struggle for liberation.” OK, I was exaggerat-
ing, but have they not taken part bravely in the struggle? Professor! |6| “I
beg you, don’t despise me my Jews.” Think of 1870 . . . did you hear Kutschke
speak of Jews or Christians? Germany has buried in the Reformation the
League of St. Sebastian, and likewise will it bury the League of Antisemites,
and you, Professor, should be careful that you don’t get buried with them!
It is bad to be dead during one’s lifetime!
 Open Letter on the Jews by Löb Baruch 363

Baptism could not wash off from me my understanding of Judaism. But

you do not even understand that the bell of general freedom could not toll
before in the modern state the Jew was liberated!
In 1807, when I was a student, I applied in Frankfurt for a passport to travel
via Mainz to Heidelberg. I came from the life of freedom, returned into it,
and touched upon the land of equality. The scrivener in the town hall who
issued the passport was a monster with the spiteful face of a toad. When I
received the passport, I read: Jew of Frankfurt [Juif de Francfort; French in
original] . . . my blood stood still. I took an oath in my heart: you wait! One
day I will write you a passport, too, you and all of your kind—and have I
not, have I not kept my word?
Don’t you agree, Professor? You do not love the Jews. It is bad for the Jews
that even educated Germans are subject to the relentless government of
their hearts. Even to be just, the German needs to love. But the champion
of truth and justice ought to be able to master his heart, too!
You think a Jew can’t teach you anything? Jew, Jew! That is the last penny
in the pathetic piggy bank of your intellect. After all, I wish I could ask back
the three Loisd’or that I gave the priest as the fee for my Christianity. I am
baptized and it doesn’t help me at all. Three Loisd’or for a place in the Ger-
man loony bin! Talk about a stupid waste of money!
What does “pure Christianity” mean? There is only one pure spring, and
from it spring the manifold streams of the religions, which by and by wash
off the mud from the riverbanks and muddy themselves with whatever dirty
people throw into them.
|7| Supposing you know this, and as a professor of history you ought to,
why are you so arrogant? Are you afraid of the Eternal Jew because you are
a Christian or because you are a German scholar?
You know that I have been moved a thousand times in my lifetime to the
exclamation, “The Eternal Jew”!
When at the time a Jewish merchant went bankrupt, the courts pronounced:
the Jewish company N.N. went bankrupt. Was a Jew a doctor or a lawyer, the
almanac would designate him as a doctor of the Jewish nation or a lawyer
of the Jewish nation. Did a Jew steal something, and it was asked who did
it, the answer was, a Jew did it. Was a Jew well mannered and educated, the
364 Appendix 3

detractors would say “and yet he remains a Jew,” and the benevolent would
say, “he does great honor to his nation.” If a Jew went to a tailor and ordered
a coat, the tailor would unfailingly point out that some Jacob or Isaac has
had made a similar coat. If a Jewish woman bought flowers, the gardener
would let her know that Mrs. Esther bought a rose tree just a few days ago.
When a Jew died in Frankfurt, was born or married, the gazette would have
separately printed Judengassen for those moving in or out, and thick walls of
ink would separate Jewish cradles, coffins and wedding beds from Christian
ones. If one sat down at a restaurant table in Stuttgart, Munich or Vienna, or
any other place where people were educated and unprejudiced, not preoc-
cupied with talking about Jews, and a traveler from Frankfurt was among
the patrons, the Frankfurter would have started a vivid discussion on the
Jews even before the beef roast arrived. Whoever, like myself, has observed
this foolishness for decades, has become accustomed to exclaiming, with
anger or smiles, with censure or with pity: the Eternal Jew!
I have been up here now for forty-two years, far removed from worldly
turmoil, glad that even the Jews are now slowly enjoying full equality, and you
cross my path, so that, whether I like it or not, I have to address the Christian-
Germanic professor: Oy! Eternal Jew! You should have your thoughts on the
Jews printed as a clean copper-plated pocketbook, entitled “Mutual Love and
Friendship,” so that Christian women would inadvertently pick it up: they
would then start loving the Jews on the grounds of their enemies’ dullness.
|8| Jew-hatred is one of the Pontine Swamps that pollute the beautiful
spring country of our freedom. One can see the most hopeful friends of
the fatherland stumble around ill and pale-faced. The German intellect
lives on top of the Alps, but the German soul is panting about in humid
marshes. The Dutch phlegm in our hearts does not like the crisp air of the
mountains. This is sad because liberation comes not from the intellect but
from the heart. Jew-hatred is the whetstone on which every blunt mind
tries to sharpen itself, and on which every sharp one tries to give them a
hiding. But the stone is too hard, it has made the sharp minds jagged, and
they have not managed to make amends. In this dispute time will win, as it
always does—and love always wins as love alone is immortal.
 Open Letter on the Jews by Löb Baruch 365

Don’t you agree, Professor, that everything written today against the Jews,
and everything that could possibly be written, is merely a collection of dated
views, set in faded letters, covered by the dirt of the thousands of hands
through which they have passed? There is not a single new coin, not a single
shining penny. Without the powerful drive of homespun ideas people would
never be able to muster the perseverance to write ever new invectives: the
lust for speculation rules them more than hatred. The bad thing is that in
this case intellectual dullness inevitably brings immorality with it.
Should you think now, Professor, that I failed to understand your point,
then I promise you I will not contradict you in this. I never understood the
Hep-Hep, wherever I encountered it. Do you understand how one can divide
the world into two parts, call the one Jewry, the other non-Jewry?—the
worse for you, because that means you fail to understand the world! And
you want to teach world history?
To the enemies of the Jews, non-Jewry is the solid ground on which flow-
ers and plants flourish, birds sing, springs murmur and peaceful shepherds
live innocent lives; Jewry however is to their dizzy glances a savage sea where
sharks attack and hypocritical crocodiles cheat. They say that hatred, envy,
miserliness, greed, malice, brutality, godlessness, and all other vices are steady
companions of the Jews. Surely there are among them also noble human
beings but they are not to be regarded as Jews |9| but as quasi-Christians.
They would also admit that all these failings and illnesses of the human spirit
and heart can also be found among Christians but such degenerate people
are not Christians but are to be regarded as Jews. Could Jews not argue
likewise? They could say: greed, envy, stupidity, vanity, malice, rashness,
and the other vices not mentioned here attach to the Christians. There may
be a few exceptions but they are noble Jewish souls and cannot be counted
as Christians. Also among ourselves there are good-for-nothings, but such
rabble do not deserve the epithet of Jew, they are Christians. Well, if this is
not insane then open wide the doors of your madhouses and let their inmates
step out, so that they become teachers, preachers, judges and writers. If it
gives you pleasure, so divide humanity into sheep and goats, and put the
one on the right side, the others on the left side; but declaring that all who
366 Appendix 3

happen to stand on the right are sheep and all who are standing on the left
are goats—that is terribly godless, and you do not deserve to be spoken to
as a rational human being.
Things are not better in literature. When Christians write something in
favor of the Jews then the Jew-haters inevitably say it was written by Jews in
disguise; but if the writers are Jews, they say they belong to the most unpol-
ished class of human beings and they point to their unbounded audacity
and their unparalleled cheek. I have read only few Jew-pamphlets, either pro
or contra the Jews. Most of them I have chosen not to read because I find it
equally ridiculous to write massive volumes to prove that two and two are
four as it is ridiculous to try and prove the opposite. Either bored me.
In my times, Professor, it used to amuse me to see that writers against
the Jews first climbed the heights of argumentation by trying to prove that
the sun, the moon and the stars are part of the big Jewish conspiracy, and
soon thereafter came down a bit and could be seen in a dirty little dead-end
street, in a sugar barrel, in a money-changing booth, a storehouse. First they
discussed death and immortality, man’s destiny, theocracy and morality, they
showed that Jewry is an atmospheric poison that envelopes the whole of the
earth; then they came to admit that the atmosphere is different at any given
place, and they aimed to defend specific anti-Jewish interests in every single
town, even in every single street |10| in every single town. In this street Jews
should be allowed to live, but not in that one; here they should be allowed
to live on the right side but not on the left; on this right side they should
be allowed to own houses but not houses on the corner; in the houses with
two entrances they should be allowed to trade on one door but not on the
other; at that door they should be allowed to trade in this commodity but
not the other—and thus the big log of stupidity was cut into a thousand
match-size pieces.
Well, many things have turned out for the better, Professor, should not
one day all be fine? Or do you, too, believe in Jewish domination, the dan-
gerousness of rabbinical dogma, the triumph of the Talmud?
You ask me what’s to be done?
An old children’s fable shall give you the answer: the fable of the sun, the
 Open Letter on the Jews by Löb Baruch 367

storm and the wanderer. The storm and the sun had an argument about who
was more powerful. The storm tried to snatch away a coat from a wanderer—
in vain; the more it blew the more the wanderer wrapped himself into the
coat. The sun came out in its light and mildness—the wanderer took off
the coat. The Jews are such wanderers, Rabbinism is their coat, you are the
storm—but the sun has started to shine!
When the Jews write bad books, then the critics shall shout Hep-Hep, but
the state shall not intervene. Let them do their business, let them do their
business, Jews and Christians. If it was up to me I would grant the German
professors a monopoly in the trade with paper so that they may earn more
from selling the paper than from filling it with words.
Nobody knows whether there are more usurers among the Jews than
among the Christians. I do not have to defend the world of commerce. I
profoundly hate its Jewishness—that manifestation of the demon of money,
this heightened fury of greed, this bodily devil of gold—whether it comes
in Hebrew, Muslim or Christian shape. But is this Jewishness the sole flaw
and responsibility of the Jews? Is it not the nitrogenous atmosphere that
surrounds the whole world of trade, maintaining life because it restores life
but deadly when it occurs split off? You nag and say that the Jews are the
priests of Mercury and bag the sacrificed |11| monies. Well, if so, then they
are smarter than you, but not more malicious. Not the priest makes the
idol but the adoration. Overthrow your idols, destroy its temples, and the
Levites whom you hate so much will lose hold of the meat fork. Among the
Greeks and Romans, the slaves did the trading, but you are slaves to trade,
and you earn nothing but money and despise. You say: we have connected
continents, made peoples become friends, made mores alike, discovered the
hidden and brought the discovered over here. Well done! If you want to limit
yourselves to being the carters of wisdom, and receive only the transporta-
tion costs of all life’s goods, then your modesty must be applauded. But do
not pride yourselves of lofty ideals, virtue and piety, when you are driven
only by base greed and vulgar sensuality. The Jews may well be hate-worthy
but it is not for you to hate them.
One has stopped demanding from you to be Christians, but it is truly
368 Appendix 3

ridiculous when you demand from Jews the Christian values that you do
not hold!
I used to mock people who sit like you, Professor, in the headquarter of the
Jew-haters, by saying: slit open a Jew, however much your own heart would be
bleeding about it; convince yourselves that lungs and liver, heart and kidneys,
brain and stomach are shaped and located just like those of Christians, and
then tell me where is nature’s instruction not to treat the Jews like human
beings. But my irony can’t sharpen anything, truth is sharp enough already.
On reading the latest hate-pamphlets, one finds that their authors deal with
the Jewish bodies no different than with the Jewish souls. They are horrified
by the increase of the Jewish population and explain it by the Jewish habit of
often eating onions. They call them unclean although cleanliness is demanded
by their religion. They opine that it is necessary the state founded washing and
bleaching houses for the Jews. When one of them observes a small pustule on
the lip of a sweet-toothed Jewish girl, he makes an elephant from a fly as the
saying goes and claims the clean-cut kid had elephantiasis. If a louse crosses
his liver, which happens quite a lot, he claims it was a Jewish one, and that all
Jews had that infamous illness of which, among other crowned heads, Herod,
Philipp II and the Roman dictator Sulla died. The Jews are supposed to suf-
fer from countless illnesses, and from all this you conclude that one ought to
drive |12| the Jews from the streets of the towns and kick them out. Back to
Palestine! So feverish is the aristocratic delusion!
It is feared that the Jews want to become princes or even senators in the
free towns. I value the truth over everything else, and what is right must
remain right. The Jews were close to the princes even in my time, and they
get closer by the day. I personally knew a rich Jew who extended his garden
within seven years by four acres of field, which clearly betrayed his plans to
hand the garden to his children as a Duchy. But claiming the Jews wanted
to become senators of free towns would be an exaggeration. Madness and
ruthlessness have limits. There are innate sentiments of the human heart
which not even the basest villain can suppress. The Jews are arch-villains
enough in wanting to become arch-dukes; but Senators! No, unbelievable,
man cannot sink that low.
 Open Letter on the Jews by Löb Baruch 369

All the things I am currently hearing about the Jews’ domination of the
press, the power of their money and their humanitarianism which culminates
in their international association, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, I have
already heard quite similarly fifty years ago. Already then it was said that the
Jews were aiming at editor positions in many periodicals and newspapers,
were trying to enter state publications, to win over censors, to make men
write apologetics for them who do not know anything about Judaism, to gain
control of the theaters through New Christians in order to satirize anything
not Jewish. Finally they had tried to enter the book market in order to gain
complete control over the world of ideas, thinking of the effects of which
must make anyone shudder. The fear has also been voiced that the rabbis
combine and vote for a Jewish Pontifex Maximus who will subsequently rule
the world. I wrote then what is true today, too: there is no urgent need for
spiritual and secular government by the Jews. As long as there are govern-
ment bonds the High Priest can leave the sword in its shaft, the Jews tend
to avoid dangerous sabers; and for the censer, the High Priest may throw as
much smoke as he likes, the Jews don’t let dust be thrown into their eyes!
Rothschild, back then, kissed the hand of the Pope and |13| on leaving
expressed in most gracious expressions how highly satisfied he was with
Peter’s successor. Everything fell right into the order that God had had on
his mind when he first created the world: a poor Christian kissed the Pope’s
feet, and a rich Jew kissed his hand. Had Rothschild received his Roman
bond on 60 instead of 65 percent, and had thus been able to donate another
10,000 ducats to the cardinal’s treasurer, he would have been permitted to
fall the Holy Father round the neck.
We all know that money always played a role among the Jews. Among
whom not, though?
The ancient Jews from Abraham to Solomon the Wise always appeared
to me as if they intended to travesty general world history. Read the books
of Joshua and Kings and you will find how Blumauerisch everything in
there looks.2 That was bad enough. But the modern ones, by God, they at
the very best parody the travesty. There are three things they appreciate:
firstly, money, secondly, money, and thirdly, money. As the pinnacle of their
370 Appendix 3

wit they translate Hamlet’s soliloquy as “To cash or not to cash, that is the
question!”
Is money anything other than the expectation of pleasure, as well as the
pleasant remembrance of its laborious acquisition? Is it not past as well
as future, and does one want to deprive a poor Jew who has no present of
these, too? Is money not the tomb that is common to all, that welcomes
kings and paupers, happy and unhappy, persecutor and persecuted? Is not
shared decomposition what mixes Jews and Christians and overcomes the
signs of their separation?
Professor, you have the rights of nature, of nations, and of the state in
your view (although I cannot actually testify to this), but you certainly fail to
have them in your heart. There is no doubt that you find it easy to fill many
pages with comments against the Jews (you have shown often enough that
filling pages is no problem for you).
But I do not accept that human rights should be so different from civil
rights, as well as religious from political toleration, or that one could have
claims to the one while not to the other. You do not believe this yourself.
Basically you have always been a hater of the Jews, but intellectually you have
made progress: now you try to justify your hostility. You do not hate the Jews
because they deserve it; you |14| hate them and then you try to prove as well
as you can that they deserve it. And you hate them—because they earn.
Remember what I wrote on the human rights of the Jews! What you call
human rights are merely animal rights: the right to find food, to eat, to
digest, to sleep, to propagate. These rights are also enjoyed by the animal of
the wilderness—until you shoot it, and these are the rights you intend to
grant the Jews, too. Only civil rights are human rights: for man becomes man
only in civil society. This is where he is born, and he is born a citizen. This
is the principle of England, France and any free state. The exercise of these
rights cannot be conditional on anything but the complete development of
intellectual power, and the latter must be presupposed as given as soon as
the physical powers appear mature. Every human being is therefore a citizen
upon maturity. You say the Jews don’t reach maturity because nature had
condemned them body and soul to eternal childhood—granted, but also
 Open Letter on the Jews by Löb Baruch 371

among Christians there are many lost sons of nature; let them not be citizens
then, create classes. After all, you enjoy creating classes, and you rejoice when
you find yourself one class above anyone just below you, even if you are
hundred classes below any higher class. Because you are slaves, you cannot
make do without slaves. Your civil rights are no human rights because they
are inhuman rights. In your world, the tailor’s pin, the shoemaker’s awl, the
shopkeeper’s yardstick make the citizen; the shroud is your toga, and you
turn into social beings only in your graves! You profess to exercise religious
toleration against Jews, but when did you adopt this language? Since you
stopped caring about religion, and since you stopped caring whether the Jew
adores a true or a false God, since your only concern is that Jewish haggling
does not outperform Christian haggling. Your ancestors were better than
you. They burned Jews and heretics on the stake, but they did it for God,
although of course for that God they were deluded enough to invent; but
they were not as unscrupulous as to venerate publicly the heathen god of
the thieves and merchants while at the same time teaching that one ought
to slaughter the Jews in order to stabilize the market. It is the German way
to derive everything from egomania. As the Germans lack a public life, every
public deed and speech is looked at as if it were a domestic one; because
they always sit by the oven they get a stiff neck from the smallest draught of
liberty, |15| and every wind seems a villain to them; and finally, because they
know from experience that talking doesn’t lead to anything when dealing
with their kith and kin, they think every reasonable person should share
this knowledge, and anyone who still speaks must therefore be suspected
of a hidden agenda. When anybody claims not to hate the Jews but only
rabbinical Judaism, we may believe this claim. But why does this person not
then distinguish rabbinical Judaism from physical Jewry? Rabbinical Juda-
ism does not have an eye to cry, no heart to be hurt, no flesh to be wounded,
no honor to be injured; feel free to persecute it as much as you like. But the
actual, living Jew has eye, heart, flesh and honor which to spare humanity
demands. You say the Talmud is a hard, indigestible stone that lies in the
stomachs of the Jews, and one needed to kill them in order to take out that
stone. But what are the Jewish stomachaches to you? Do rabbinical teachings
372 Appendix 3

lead their adherents to crimes that are beyond the reach of penal law? I would
not know of any; they are silly but harmless. Furthermore, you receive all
your knowledge from your nannies, you don’t know modern Jewry. Today’s
Jewish youth in its entirety is ignorant of the Talmud, or at least does not
follow it, and in another thirty years Jews will remember the Talmud only
in order to have a laugh. It should be very easy for you to prove that the
business of Christian merchants gains from limiting that of Jewish ones;
but what exactly did you prove thereby?—your advantage, not your right.
Fiat justitia pereat mundus [Justice shall be, even if the world has to die for
it]—that is what you say yourself whenever it suits your interests; whenever
it doesn’t, you say vivat mundus pereat justitia [Long live the world, justice
may die]! In the past you used to savage against Catholics the same way you
savage now against Jews; well, time has forced you to become more humane,
and you even stopped complaining about this compulsion; truth and right
have so many attractions that one only needs to get close to them to start
loving them. Don’t you think that the day will come which will command
you to consider also the Jews as your equals? But you want to be forced. The
German is deaf, and although the driver of time’s carriage can shout at the
top of his voice asking you to give way, he shouts in vain; you do not start to
feel before the wheel has smashed your limbs. You do not follow voluntarily,
fate must grab your chest and drag you here and there. Under French rule
the Jews of Hamburg and Frankfurt enjoyed full civil rights |16|, and—as
I have seen with my own eyes—you lived peacefully with them and cider
sealed many a fraternal bond. After a few more years of equality you would
have overcome your weakness completely. But times changed again; the cat
left the house and the mice danced on the table; you were liberated; you went
back to your old principles that had dried and shriveled like old bread; you
watered them to make them look fresh; but they are now soggy and tasteless
and only a beggar of the mind would have them. Shame on you!
The Jews did well to disaccustom the world of this their own name, because
it was irredeemably laden with the notions of slavery and dishonor, and
words, those awful secret rulers of the world, govern in the subconscious.
The name Israelites is not blasphemy; it does not imply men that are above
 Open Letter on the Jews by Löb Baruch 373

God but men who are likenesses of God. The Bible gives the necessary infor-
mation. Jacob the Patriarch once traveled by night and encountered a man
with whom he had a fight. When morning broke the man said to Jacob: now
let me go, as I must leave, and here is a memory for you, and he dislocated
Jacob’s hip. Jacob asked, man, what is your name? And the man responded,
you need not know that, but your name shall henceforth not be Jacob any-
more but Israel, “as you have competed in struggle with divine beings and
with men and you showed that you can hold your ground.” A divine being
though means nothing here but a strong man, a hero. Furthermore, Jacob
was meant to be called Israel not only because of that but also because he
fought with men. Jacob obviously had to deal with a street robber, as the
man disappeared when day broke in order not to be caught by the Arabic
police, and refused to give his name in order not to be detected. Jacob was
limping henceforth, and, as we still say, was a man marked by God. Still the
Jews do not eat from the hindquarter of any cattle out of respect for their
forefather. One may think of this gesture as not being too flattering, but
one should consider that drawing a parallel between a man and an ox is not
insulting; as is known from mathematics, parallels never meet.
|17| I address you who do not talk but only act against Jews in hostile ways.
And indeed, acting stupidly is less stupid than talking stupidly because acts
cannot be proven wrong. I do not love the Jew, or the Christian, qua being
Jew or Christian: I merely love them because they are human beings and
born to be free. Freedom has ever been the soul of my pen.
To live is to love, but you are slaves of your own hatred!
You are serfs of habit, and habit is a severe mistress. Wanting to be free is
being free. Your heart is too small to love thoroughly even a single person,
but your chest harbors the hatred of thousands. You are standing safely on
the beach, looking out into the stormy sea; you see ships fighting the waves,
human beings fighting death—and what occupies your mind are the pettiest
quarrels of the old days of a complacent peace? You see rich load drifting
toward the threatening abyss, and you are able to argue about small change?
The foam of a raging sea covers your feet, you need to look straight ahead in
order to save yourselves, and you look back thousands of years? Time is ripe
374 Appendix 3

with great things. Lucky you—you need not be among the reapers who,
soaked in sweat, bring in the harvest, you merely turn up on Thanksgiving.
Love one another and unite. But you are compelled to hate, hatred is the sour
dough of your life, the one thing that gives it taste and smell; well, then hate
what is worthy of hatred: falseness, violence, egotism. Be whatever you wish
to be—good or evil, decent or unscrupulous, a sage or a madman—but be
something! Be mulled wine or fresh water from the well, but not the stale
water that is disgusting to anyone—don’t be philistines!
The persecution that the Jews suffer in ignorant Germany is not a freshly
reinvigorated one; it merely has pulled itself together once more in its
last death throes. The fire of hatred lit up once more before being extin-
guished forever. This may console those who suffer. Shakespeare and his
sister Experience say:

Before the curing of a strong disease,

Even in the instant of repair and health,
The fit is strongest; evils that take leave,
On their departure most of all show evil.
[Cardinal Pandulph in King John 3.4]

I expressed once the hope, dearest Professor, that one day all people who
write diatribes against the Jews will be locked up in the penitentiary or the
madhouse; |18| later I hoped that in fifty years’ time the talk about the Eternal
Jew would come only from a drunken wine tourist or a discontented road
sweeper. I was wrong. It faces me now in the shape of a German professor.
Nothing is too insane that some professor would not take it up and propose
it in scientific form. Professors smell the soul but they don’t feel it. Hail the
soul of the League of Anti-Semites that it entered the body of a professor! In
order to keep Germany disunited God would have made a professor Imperial
Chancellor, not a representative of the Brandenburg or Pomeranian nobility.
The “Eternal Jew” is now embodied by a Jew-hating professor—this is too
much for Ahasverus! This is his last hour!
How lucky has the wicked cobbler been so far!
I always thought it blasphemous to suggest that the Messiah, the god of
 Open Letter on the Jews by Löb Baruch 375

love, compassion and reconciliation, would take so terrible revenge for a

brief insult that happened to him on his way to eternal life that he would
condemn the offender to never-ending misery. The Jewish cobbler Ahas-
verus was a timid man, like all Jews and sedentary artisans, and he silenced
his compassion and acted toward the tyrant’s sublime sacrifice the way he
did perhaps only so that governor Pilate would not suspect him of involve-
ment in demagoguery. Ahasverus is not, though, as unhappy as generally
assumed, if one disregards of course the suffering caused to a man of great
understanding and decency by having to witness the stupidities and acts
of malice of all times and peoples, including even Jew-hating professors,
without being able to heal the former or punish the latter. The Eternal Jew
says “I am an Israelite from the tribe of Zabulon.3 I left Jerusalem in the
year 33 of the common era and have since traveled incessantly and have
to continue doing so until the end of the world. This is my fate; this is the
irreversible decree pronounced to me by a voice coming from the skies on
the day I left Jerusalem. I was 45 years old then and have not grown older
since. Death and illnesses have no force over me; I am incombustible and
cannot be injured; I eat and drink only for pleasure not for need; I never
sleep; I am never tired; I understand and speak all languages.” Listen to this!
Can you call that man unhappy who is never beyond his best years, who is
never hungry |19| but always enjoys good appetite, who never needs a doctor
or a pharmacist, who does not leave behind a laughing widow; who never
burns his fingers; whom Cupid’s arrow cannot injure; whom no boring
book can send to sleep; who does not have to rely on bad translations as he
reads all languages, and who can pile debts upon debts because he cannot
be imprisoned, given he cannot stay more than three days at the same place?
Such a man must be called fortunate and many would want to swap their
fate for his. And yet, the man is sick of his life, or else he would not have
entered your mortal body, professor!
Stupid people, comical world! They pride themselves of their liberty; but
whenever they do the bad thing they absolve themselves of the responsibility
by declaring themselves slaves of destiny. How often were these and those
people told, you understand your wrong and acknowledge your mistake;
376 Appendix 3

why don’t you make good this, why don’t you abandon that, why don’t you
leave behind your prejudices? They respond, this will come with time, it
will happen by and by. But why not straightaway? If you think of yourselves
as free, then don’t sit in the carriage of fate to be taxied to that last stop,
maturity. Swift travel gives you vertigo, millions fall off the wagon, whole
generations get trampled over by the hooves of the horses and the wheels
of the carriage. Therefore walk, and you reach the goal faster and without
exhausting anyone. Destiny has business also in other worlds, and if you are
too lazy to walk you may have to stand and wait for centuries until it will
give you a lift. If you are free, anticipate time! If you are not free, then don’t
complain! Stupid people, comical world!
Religion is love and reconciliation; it is in the word: it re-aligns what used
to be separate. If all people were equally wise, talented and likewise inclined,
religion was unnecessary. It is the unity of the manifold, the eternity of the
finite, the gravity of the unsteady; it forgives guilt and dissolves sin into the
general light. But what have people made of it! A river of blood flows through
eighteen centuries, and Christianity has populated its banks. How they have
dishonored the most holy! Religion has been used as a weapon for robbery and
murder. How they have insulted the god of love and abused his teachings as
the laws of their domineeringness, as the rules and regulations of their greedy
traders’ law! |20| Has Christianity ever served as anything other than either the
tool of persecution, or the last consolation of defenseless victims of slaughter?
Reconcile its sects, and it becomes impotent; destroy Judaism, and Christianity
dies. Destroy the religions, and religion is destroyed. Or is Christianity only
the violent plowshare of humanity? How laborious and painful has then been
the cultivation of that land, and until the day of harvest will come, I cry at a
low and suffocated voice: Stupid people, comical world!
Has it been of any use, or not, Professor, that I instructed you out of my
old writings? I do not know.
Thinking minds will applaud my instruction, but those whom I wish to
reach do not think. Your hatred and contempt of the Jews is a drive, implanted
by nature or by nurture, that has never taken account of itself. To provoke
this to happen, this is my wish!
 Open Letter on the Jews by Löb Baruch 377

The cause of the Jews must be turned from an object of sentiment into an
object of reasoning, then the good cause will have been won; for whoever is
able to reflect upon his dreamings, stops dreaming.
You have been dreaming, Professor, and you continue to dream!
Go on sleeping!
Hate the Jews or love them, oppress or uplift them, show them benevo-
lence or persecute them: all this is left to your arbitrariness. But one thing
I tell you:
Try and see how far you get with the liberty of the German lands, as long as
liberty is not meant to be for all!
Good night, Professor!
Your awake commilitio
Dr. Ludwig Börne
 Appendix 4. The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute in the Literature

Almost every book or essay on the development of antisemitism in the Bis-

marck period makes at least a passing reference to the Berlin Antisemitism
Dispute and adds another layer to the now more than 120 years of interpre-
tations of Treitschke’s remarks. Increasingly in recent years, scholars have
also commented on the statements of those who responded to Treitschke,
usually concentrating on Mommsen, while Lazarus tends to receive the
second-biggest share of the attention.
In one of the classic anti-antisemitic statements from within German
liberalism, “On Antisemitism: A Pentecostal Contemplation” (originally of
1893), Gustav Freytag contrasts “the patriotic complaint of a well-meaning
man of sincere intentions” to the concerns of “angry and discontent agita-
tors.”1 As can be concluded from the context, this “well-meaning man” was
Freytag’s political and personal friend, Treitschke (the “angry agitator” was
the anti-liberal cleric, Stöcker). Similarly positive was the assessment by the
socialist Franz Mehring, formulated already in 1882.2 Like his National Liberal
opponent, Mehring contrasts Treitschke favorably to Stöcker, against whom
he fiercely polemicized: Treitschke fulfilled “a serious political obligation
to bring into the open the hatred that was smouldering under the ashes.”
To have done this, and “in the only dignified manner possible, namely with
manly frankness and scientific seriousness, is the great and unforgettable
contribution of Treitschke” and a “patriotic deed.” Mehring held that Tre-
itschke analyzed “the Jewish question as a contemporary phenomenon under
 The Berlin antisemitism Dispute in the Literature 379

scientific, historical, psychological, social aspects” while Stöcker made it “the

substance of political party strategy,” which meant playing with the fire of
“unleashing the beast” of “the three most potent sources of hatred known
in history: a religious, a racial, and a class conflict.”3
Both Mehring and Freytag, leading representatives of the socialist and
liberal traditions, respectively, are themselves well known for having harbored
anti-Jewish feelings. More surprising might therefore be the mild judg-
ment on Treitschke by Julius Bab, the influential left-wing liberal cultural
and theater critic in Berlin in the years before and after World War I. In
his book Leben und Tod des deutschen Judentums (Life and Death of Ger-
man Jewry) (written in 1939 but not published until 1988), Bab argues that
Treitschke (“an intellectually eminent [geistig hervorragenden] German”)
broke from the liberal tradition but still stood “unconditionally” behind
legal emancipation. He emphasizes Treitschke’s distance from what later
became National Socialism with the astonishing remark (considering that
his formulation “the Jews are our misfortune” sat on the front-page heading
of every copy of the Nazi publication Der Stürmer) that Treitschke would
“without doubt end up in the concentration camps of the Third Reich.”4
Bab writes that Treitschke “was critical merely of the literary attitude of
the Jews” and their “lack of nationalism.”5 A similar, if less amicable, view
was expressed by Theodor Wolff in his book Die Juden (written in 1942–43
but not published until 1984). He, too, points first of all to the massive dif-
ference between antisemitism then and in his own time, little more than
half a century later. Wolff makes fun of Treitschke’s affirmation that he did
not want to see Jewish emancipation reversed: “One cannot rely even on
Treitschke. . . . Compared to today’s standards, what half-heartedness, what
hesitation, what inability to get away from Humboldt’s humanistic spirit,
from culture! A little thunder, a few lightnings, and Treitschke confesses to
the acquired rights, to the fact of emancipation!”6
Very different was the assessment by the Marxist sociologist Arthur
Rosenberg in 1930. Seventy-five years after its publication, Rosenberg’s
essay on Treitschke’s antisemitism remains one of its most intriguing in-
terpretations. Rosenberg relates Treitschke’s rejection of “Jewish-German
380 Appendix 4

mixed culture” to his view of Christianity as the “rejection of the bour-

geois spirit” and of “the Jew” as that spirit’s “most obvious embodiment.”7
Rosenberg argues that the discovery after 1871 that the Prussian state and
military apparatus, not the political organizations of the bourgeoisie, had
proved to be the backbone of successful German national unification,
led to an identity crisis among the German educated classes. A fraction
of the academic “support troops of the bourgeoisie” now gradually en-
dorsed an (imagined) aristocratic life-ideal from the vantage point of
which they reinterpreted the (commercial and industrial) bourgeoisie as
greedy, selfish materialists: “aristocratic man” as opposed to the bourgeois
“does not indulge in haggling and usury but obediently serves Emperor
and Fatherland. He does not mock but he believes. He secures discipline
and morality in household and family, in community and state.” Treitschke
and others attacked “the Jew” so heavily “because they want[ed] to liber-
ate themselves from the ‘Jew’ that inhabit[ed] themselves.”8 Rosenberg’s
analysis implies that Treitschke and other (former) liberals who drifted to
the far right failed to understand that Bismarck’s struggle against the liberal
parties did not indicate a “fundamental split with the bourgeoisie.”9 In
this perspective, Treitschke’s position appears as an over-assimilation to a
perceived anti-liberalism on the side of Bismarck’s government. Rosenberg
points to two decisive elements of understanding the Berlin Antisemitism
Dispute: first, a growing discrepancy between the politics adopted by an
increasingly bourgeois state and the specific politics of the liberal parties
that for a significant period had managed to determine that state’s poli-
tics decisively; and second, the identification (by Treitschke and others)
of “the Jews” with core elements of the political liberalism that seemed
now a hindrance to, rather than an instrument of bourgeois progress.
However, Rosenberg overstates his case: Treitschke and other right-wing
liberals did not have to abandon bourgeois values altogether in order to
reject the “excesses” of bourgeois society that they saw embodied in “the
Jews.” As this study has shown, they merely rearticulated them.
Rosenberg’s analysis reverberates in the most recent publication on the
subject, by Uffa Jensen (2005), who subjected it, though, to the “cultural
 The Berlin antisemitism Dispute in the Literature 381

turn”: like Rosenberg, Jensen takes an identity crisis of the educated bour-
geois (such as Treitschke) as his starting point and argues that they perceived
assimilated Jews as doppelgänger onto whom they projected their doubts,
ambivalences, and uneasiness about their own identity and role in a crisis-
ridden society.10
The original impulse of Rosenberg’s sociological interpretation lives on
strongest in Detlev Claussen’s assertion that Treitschke “articulates the con-
tradictions of German liberalism: in the conflict between nationality and
liberality, the national remains triumphant.”11 He points out that Treitschke’s
opponents, like Treitschke himself, cannot but argue “within the national
framework.” Claussen suggests that this reflects the fact that liberal “social
progress”—although theoretically not national in character—has to realize
itself within the limits of the concrete historical framework, which is that of
the nation-state. Claussen sees as Treitschke’s underlying aim the desire to
homogenize “antagonistic capitalist society” into a strong national state.12
Treitschke wants the necessity of assimilation to be pronounced “consciously
as an imperative,” while his liberal opponents “from Harry Breßlau through
Bamberger to Mommsen” expect “assimilation and integration into the
national state” to take place “spontaneously.” Claussen likens the two posi-
tions to “the moderate and the brutal face of bourgeois society.” The “liberal
arguments against Treitschke” are limited by the “illusion of a perpetually
moderate form of nationalism.”13
Coming from a similar background, Jan Philipp Reemtsma points to
the—perhaps surprising—prominence of religion in Treitschke’s argument:
Treitschke’s antisemitism is religious as well as nationalist.14 The case of
Treitschke is therefore an important reminder that modern antisemitism
cannot simply be opposed to (allegedly pre-modern) religious forms of Jew-
hatred, nor can it be assumed that even late-nineteenth-century nationalism
and liberalism were entirely secular. Furthermore, with his demand that the
Jews “become Germans,” Treitschke “merely reformulates in a nationalist
manner an idea that had formed the basis of many approvals of Jewish
emancipation: giving up one’s own traditions is the price for the ending
of civil discrimination.”15 In a similar vein, Gary A. Abraham writes that
382 Appendix 4

Treitschke’s attitude toward the Jews “contains both liberal and antisemitic
elements.” Not unlike Stöcker’s or Marr’s, it combined “many of the old,
Christian-inspired charges” with “new, essentially secular fears of national
diversity.”16 Abraham points out that “not far in the background in these
discussions was the Mischvolk idea,” that is, the conception widespread in
the nineteenth century (and subsequently taken up by Max Weber) that
a nation draws strength from having multiple cultural or racial origins.
While most liberals interpreted the Mischvolk idea culturally, Treitschke (like
Hermann Cohen in his response) argued for racial mixing. Treitschke may
therefore have been a “racist,” but he was “not a proponent of race purity.”
His “proposals for legislative exclusion of Jews” were designed to further
“miscegenation.”17 Hans-Joachim Salecker asserts that in the context of the
Dispute, the Judenfrage was a Kulturfrage. The question was whether or not
the Jews made adequate use of their civil rights, and whether they needed
to be taken care of by the state in a specific way “like criminals or those of
ill health.”18
Sanford Ragins writes that Treitschke was “a liberal with impeccable creden-
tials” who attacked the Jews from within liberalism. His concern was neither
with race nor with religion but with the Jews’ “maintaining national traits
that were alien to the German character.”19 While Jews “should have equal
rights in the state, he maintained that membership in the German nation was
a different matter.” However, because Treitschke saw “no room for double
nationality” on “German soil,” the Jews had to fully assimilate into the German
nation or emigrate. Ragins asserts that “Treitschke’s assault was particularly
serious” because it was “an attack on the emancipated Jew mounted from
within liberalism.”20 He “was in truth the spokesman for a major tendency
within German liberal Protestant circles.” For them, “Christianity still had
to be the foundation of the state by acting as a moral and educational force
suffusing all areas of life with religious self-consciousness.”21
Donald L. Niewyk argues that the position held in common by Treitschke,
Stöcker, Wagner, and de Lagarde was “more a demand to accelerate the pace
of amalgamation than a threat of reprisal.”22 He underlines that antisemites
in 1879 had more in common with the defenders of Jewish emancipation
 The Berlin antisemitism Dispute in the Literature 383

than with later Nazi-style antisemites: likewise, the principal complaint of the
liberal “notables” in their anti-antisemitic Declaration was that antisemitic
demagoguery slowed down the process of assimilation. Albert S. Lindemann
notes, too, that Treitschke was a “liberal in the Junkerized sense of the time”
and finds that his argument was “relatively sober and intelligent.”23 Most
of what Treitschke brought up in 1879 and 1880 “had already been widely
discussed by liberal intellectuals in the 1860s.” Treitschke merely reformu-
lated “in a more forceful language—and in a much more emotion-filled
context”—the common liberal concerns that many Jews “seemed unwilling
to sacrifice enough of their sense of separateness” in order to blend into the
German nation. Treitschke was like most liberals “torn between the demands
of personal liberty and those of state power.” Lindemann writes that “con-
ceivably, if men of the caliber of Treitschke, Cohen, and Mehring had set
the tone of the debate in the ensuing generation, some happier resolution
or at least diminution of the tensions between Jews and non-Jews in Ger-
many at this time might have emerged.”24 Lindemann asserts that “German
Jews themselves, in seeking to limit the influx of Ostjuden in Germany, had
often made points similar to those of Treitschke, especially that Jews from
Eastern Europe were too much attached to the idea of Jewish nationhood
to be absorbed into German national feeling.”25 Lindemann’s presentation
is directed by his desire to make the point strongly that the antisemites of
the nineteenth century were not “proto-Nazis” and that antisemitism was
not a quasi-inherent trait of a specific “German culture” (as, e.g., Paul Rose
argues in German Question, Jewish Question). Similar to writers from the
Marxist tradition (Massing, Horkheimer, Adorno, Claussen, Reemtsma),
Lindemann presents antisemitism as part of the normality of liberal society.
Due to the absence, though, of a clear critique of liberal society (that would
have to include that of antisemitism), some of his formulations could be
construed as apologetic of antisemitism.
Klaus Holz, who provides a detailed analysis of the semantic structure of
Treitschke’s first statement, argues that the national-statist framework of
Treitschke’s thinking held back its ethnic-ontological undercurrent: Treitschke
could not allow himself to conclude that emancipation should be revoked,
384 Appendix 4

because this would have destabilized the national state and its constitution.
Holz writes that Treitschke’s is a founding text of a specific “worldview”
that he refers to as “national antisemitism.” Within the broader category of
“national antisemitism,” Holz characterizes Treitschke’s position as “post-
liberal antisemitism.”26 Holz argues that Treitschke’s (modern, national)
antisemitic “worldview” is both “anti-liberal” and “post-liberal” insofar as
it “inherited some essential characteristics of the liberal world-view”: it is
“historical, national and secular.” Treitschke’s “attractivity” was that he was “a
formerly liberal” thinker who challenged the liberals’ “predominant eman-
cipatory self-perception . . . from within.”27 “Post-liberal antisemitism” takes
up and stresses the older liberal demand for the Jews to assimilate, while it
reevaluates the other side of the older liberal position, legal emancipation,
without challenging it directly. In spite of his embrace of “system theory,”
Holz’s contribution is more or less close to the critical theory tradition of
Massing, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Claussen, but the addition of the prefix
“post-” does not further the understanding of liberalism. Holz’s attempt
to refashion what the latter describe as the intrinsic dialectic of the liberal
position as a contradiction between “liberal” and “post-liberal” elements
merely translates the problem into a nondialectical language that is less
suited to grasp the dynamics of the historical process.
It is only rarely suggested in the literature that Treitschke had clearly
“distanced himself ”28 from the liberal tradition or that he opposed “modern
liberal society.”29 Such statements are misleading, as they overstate the anti-
liberal elements of Treitschke’s thinking and distract from what is essentially
at stake in this discussion: the complicity of liberalism and liberal national-
ism in their own undoing. One of the questions most often discussed in the
literature is whether or to what extent Treitschke was “a racist.” Treitschke
is rarely seen without qualification as a representative of racist antisemi-
tism.30 A majority of commentators seems to have come to the consensus
that Treitschke did not employ a concept of race. Michael A. Meyer asserts
that “Treitschke’s criticism of German Jewry arises neither from racism nor
from a desire to strengthen Christianity” but mainly from a concern “with
the strength of the nation”: “Since he equates diversity with divisiveness,
 The Berlin antisemitism Dispute in the Literature 385

he must consider the Jews a distinct danger to German national life.”31

Hans Liebeschütz underlines that both Treitschke and Mommsen “demand
undivided loyalty” to the modern nation-state and holds that Treitschke’s
“emphasis on the religious aspect . . . raises a problem” when at the same
time “his leading ideal, the power and health of the state, belonged to the
secular sphere.”32 For Liebeschütz, “Treitschke did not profess a philosophy
of racialism.”33 Stanley Zucker refers to the same observation when he states
that for Treitschke as well as Mommsen, “Christianity and modern nation-
alism were so intertwined that to be truly a national, one had to become
a Christian.”34 Peter Pulzer argues that Treitschke gave a merely indirect
service to (racial) antisemitism by promoting aggressive national pride.35
Many of these contributions, however, seem to be informed to some extent
by the unacknowledged assumption that Treitschke’s antisemitism could be
motivated either by religion, racism, or nationalism. The detailed textual
analysis has demonstrated, though, that Treitschke was indeed able to be
all of the above at the same time.
The other dimension of the Dispute, the ways in which Treitschke was
responded to, is much less developed in the literature.36 From among the
respondents, Theodor Mommsen has most often been commented upon.
Bab and Wolff made enthusiastic remarks about Mommsen that can be ex-
plained by the specific context of their writing,37 while more recent positive
assessments of Mommsen seem rather unwarranted: Kampe sees Mommsen
as the defender of Enlightenment and tolerance.38 Mosse held the view that
Mommsen “castigated” Treitschke for his nationalist views, while Dorpalen
writes that he “gently slapped his hand.”39 Wehler, apparently in a fit of wish-
ful thinking, finds that Mommsen “campaigned uncompromisingly against
the ‘delusion.’”40 Jensen calls Mommsen an “upright liberal.”41 Langer finds
Mommsen’s intervention “a true masterpiece of liberally minded political
publicizing,” although “even” Mommsen’s liberalism had its limits: “The
limitations of even a determinedly enlightened liberal of the nineteenth
century become apparent here: he sees the continued existence of a particular
minority that is bound together by religion and tradition . . . as a danger for
the existence of a society that is modeled on the ideal of the nation and the
386 Appendix 4

national state. He has not yet managed to progress towards the belief in a
peaceful coexistence of different religious and cultural milieus on an equal
footing.”42 The “not yet” seems to indicate that Langer considers the lack
of enthusiasm for cultural diversity an infantile disorder of liberalism that
has since been overcome.
Most of the literature, though, tends to stress the commonalities be-
tween Treitschke’s and Mommsen’s positions. Meyer asserts that pluralism
seemed a danger for Mommsen and that Cohen, Breßlau, and Bamberger
held views close to Treitschke’s.43 Meyer notes that the “Jewish reaction” to
Mommsen was “quite critical,” because Mommsen, like Treitschke, “could see
only danger in cultural pluralism.”44 In his discussion of the Dispute and its
context, Uriel Tal draws on a range of important primary sources otherwise
not discussed or mentioned anywhere.45 He discusses especially Mommsen
and Cohen in detail as well as the concept of the Mischvolk, later taken up
by Abraham (Max Weber and the Jewish Question), for which he gives rel-
evant early-nineteenth-century references. He comments on Mommsen’s
formulation of the Jews as a ferment of national disintegration: “the ques-
tion arises whether it is purely accidental that precisely these words should
lend themselves to an interpretation that is diametrically opposed to the
one originally intended.”46 Abraham points out that Mommsen was “no
more pluralist than Treitschke.” While both see the nation as based on
unitary culture, Mommsen reproaches Treitschke merely for escalating
social antagonism.47 Keith H. Pickus writes that Mommsen rearticulated
the Enlightenment argument about Jewish “character defects” that needed
amelioration.48 Volkov writes that the similarity between Mommsen and
Treitschke “is undeniable,” and Schoeps also stresses the similarity between
Treitschke and Mommsen.49
Georg Geismann argues that Mommsen as well as Cohen failed to de-
fend liberal principles against Treitschke. He criticizes Mommsen’s demand
for “toleration of Jewish particularity” as inconsistent with the concept of
liberal right: “Wherever there is right, the talk of toleration is suspect and
dangerous.”50 Geismann finds Cohen’s failure to oppose Treitschke “incom-
prehensible and shocking” and believes that the Kantian philosopher Cohen
 The Berlin antisemitism Dispute in the Literature 387

should have been expected to defend the liberal notion that the state is
obliged to “grant” civil rights to every citizen on the grounds that human
rights included a claim to civil rights.51 As Treitschke’s relinquishing of any
concept of universal right remained unchallenged, the Dispute marks for
Geismann the final stage of a long decline of the tradition of jusnaturalism.52
Ulrich Sieg points out the philosophical strengths of Cohen’s position and
the strategic limits of Lazarus, the Jewish and German aspects of whose posi-
tion he argues contradicted and destablized each other. He concludes that
in the Dispute “leading Jewish philosophers” reacted with an “ideology of
compromise” to the fact that large sections of society moved from humanist
to anti-emancipatory values and politics: “Rather than assertively defending
their political rights, they emphasized universal ethical principles and the
inner relatedness of German and Jewish spirit. This offered little, though,
in terms of strategies for solving the problems of a politically fractured and
culturally girded class society.”53 Christhard Hoffmann—closer, for example,
to Claussen’s position—goes further and explains the inability of liberals
to oppose modern antisemitism (for which Mommsen’s contribution is
emblematic) in terms of the rejection by liberals of “cultural pluralism.”
Furthermore, he argues that liberals could not explain the “dynamism of
the antisemitic movement” because they “lacked a theory of its [liberal-
ism’s] own crisis.”54
Ragins sees Lazarus’s speech as “an eloquent restatement of emancipa-
tion ideology and, in particular, of the Jewish understanding of German
nationalism.” Lazarus “reaffirmed Jewry’s long-established self-perception
of the compatibility of Jewish identity with full German identity.”55 Ragins
notes that Lazarus’s position “was to underlie all subsequent justifications of
Jewish self-defence.” Meyer writes that Lazarus’s speech displayed “consider-
able ingenuity in showing the logical inconsistencies of any argument that
would make the Jews a special case.”56 He underlines that, on the other hand,
Lazarus makes Judaism “fit the pattern of the Christian denominations,”
while strongly arguing for cultural pluralism. Van Rahden finds that “no
one developed a more fundamental critique of Treitschke than . . . Moritz
Lazarus.”57 Bacharach writes that Lazarus harbored “spiritual racism” and
388 Appendix 4

“spiritual chauvinism” but that Cohen went even further in the anti-liberal
direction and demanded racial unity for the state.58 Langer, however, sees
Lazarus’s speech as a strong and influential rejection of “narrow-minded
nationalism.”59 Hamburger writes that the “most militant refutation of Tre-
itschke’s pamphlet” was by Paulus Cassel.60
 Notes

Introduction
1. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 23.
2. From the “Declaration of the Notables” (“Erklärung,” 202, 204).
3. I translate Völkerpsychologie as “psycho-ethnography” (rather than “ethno-psychol-
ogy”) because it is concerned with the “souls” of peoples, not with ethnographic aspects
of the psychology of individuals.
4. The scholarly literature on the Dispute is discussed in appendix 4.
5. The type of general argument I am proposing cannot easily be verified or falsified
on an empirical level, as it is arrived at on a conceptual level. If antisemitism did not gain
hegemony in other nation-state contexts, this is because other factors, or the absence of
other factors, prevented this from happening. Which factors these were, and how relevant
these are in the present period, cannot be discussed here. It must suffice to point to the
existence of antisemitism even in quintessentially bourgeois and liberal countries such
as the United States and the Netherlands, and the fact that some postcolonial national-
isms are now more antisemitic than any nineteenth-century European nationalism, the
German case included, ever was.
6. The only exception as far as my selection of texts is concerned is Naudh, “Profes-
soren über Israel.”
7. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 26, 23.
8. The term “cultural code” was coined by Volkov (“Antisemitism as a Cultural Code,”
25–46), but I use it in the sense it is presented in Volkov’s “Antisemitismus und Anti-
feminismus,” which seems to me clearer than the original version. The main point is
the difference from radical, potentially violent antisemitism that is directly targeted at
Jews. Volkov chose “cultural code” as an alternative to “ideology” or “worldview.” In 2006
(differing from earlier versions of the argument) Volkov defines “subculture” or “milieu”
as that of which antisemitism is a “code” (Germans, Jews, and Antisemites, 111).
9. See appendix 4.
390 Notes to pages 7–8

10. The more theoretically informed contributions are few: Claussen, Vom Judenhass
zum Antisemitismus; Abraham, Weber and the Jewish Question; Reemtsma, “Die Falle
des Antirassimus”; Claussen, Grenzen der Aufklärung; Salecker, Erfahrung der Differenz;
Holz, Nationaler Antisemitismus; Jensen, Gebildete Doppelgänger; Tal, Christians and
Jews in Germany.
11. Pulzer, “Third Thoughts,” 146, 154.
12. This quote is from “Elements of Antisemitism” (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dia-
lektik der Aufklärung, 179; Dialectic of Enlightenment [1997], 200, [2002], 165). This re-
mark is made in the context of Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument that in the 1880s
antisemitism started to turn into merely a “plank in the platform” of “the whole Fascist
ticket” while the antisemitism of liberals (such as Treitschke)—the “most recent,” i.e.,
in this sense the last genuine, bourgeois form of antisemitism—still was “a competing
motif within a range of subjective choices” (Dialektik der Aufklärung, 179; Dialectic of
Enlightenment [2002], 166). The argument that “there are no longer any antisemites” (in
the same paragraph) is based on the theory that market capitalism and the individualist
subjectivity that it brought forth have irreversibly been replaced by (fascist) monopoly
capitalism, a conception that has been shown to be flawed (Postone and Brick, “Critical
Theory and Political Economy”). The distinction between (still sort of) bourgeois-liberal
and (already sort of) fascist forms of antisemitism cannot be maintained in the strict
fashion proposed by Horkheimer and Adorno in “Elements of Antisemitism.” This adds
further urgency to the effort to understand the former.
13. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002), 166.
14. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 270; Negative Dialectics, 274.
15. The text that would become the afterword of Boehlich’s book was published earlier
the same year in the journal Der Monat.
16. Recent German gesellschaftsgeschichtliche and kulturgeschichtliche scholarship tends
to include all the various disputes on antisemitism in Berlin at the time, such as those
that refer to the priest Stöcker and the so-called Berliner Bewegung (the efforts to reor-
ganize the conservative far right and the more populist attempts to found specifically
antisemitic parties) into the concept (K. Krieger, Der “Berliner Antisemitismusstreit”;
Jensen, Gebildete Doppelgänger). My interest in maintaining the distinction between
these different discourses on antisemitism certainly results from the stronger interest in
the problems and limitations of specifically the liberal tradition of social and political
thought that I share with Boehlich.
17. Most of the texts I am looking at were published in high-profile journals and
newspapers, and often subsequently also as brochures with high circulations (whereas
those without access to the “official” media, such as the petit bourgeois antisemites
Naudh and Endner, were published, as it were, in do-it-yourself mode, by which they
could nevertheless also reach considerable circulations).
18. Neither in English nor in German has such an account been attempted so far. In
2004 and 2005, after I completed my research, two works were published in Germany
 Notes to pages 8–12 391

that will need to be consulted by future examinations of the Dispute: the Zentrum für
Antisemitismusforschung, Berlin, published a two-volume, 900-page Kommentierte
Quellenedition, edited by Karsten Krieger, and also Uffa Jensen’s study (Gebildete Dop-
pelgänger) of the antagonism of Protestant and Jewish members of nineteenth-century
“bürgerliche Bildungskultur” is based on a presentation of the Berlin Antisemitism Dis-
pute. Both publications provide additional and previously unpublished source material,
chiefly from private correspondence and other archival materials. By and large, these
additional sources confirm the general picture established in the existing literature.
19. Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus, 115.
20. The influence of the Dispute on Weber is discussed in Abraham, Weber and the
Jewish Question.
21. I take this term from Balibar (“Racism and Nationalism” and “The Nation Form”).
“Nation-form” implies that “the nation” is a social form, i.e., the form taken by a specific
(modern) kind of state and society.
22. In the same vein, I understand “the state” to be the specific (institutional) form
taken by a specific society. This use of the concept “form” implies, vice versa, that the
“essence” of the state is society in its totality, i.e., the social-historical dynamism whose
specific (if not exclusive) institutional expression is “the state.” The perplexing charac-
teristic of this specific “form” is, of course, that it also has a separate existence of its own:
the dialectic between “form” and “essence” must, in this sense, be kept alive and open.
They are non-identical without actually being separate entities.
23. At the very least, the commodity is that of labor-power.
24. I consider “patriotism” a near synonym that differs only insofar as it tends to carry
an implicit claim to a high degree of individual, rather than collective, commitment.
This seems to be an echo of the original implication of a personal relation to a pater
patriae; the word Landesvater is still used in German along with Vaterland. A look at
the now huge literature on “liberal nationalism,” much of which has been formulated
in debates about Yael Tamir’s examination of this concept in the context of Israel (Lib-
eral Nationalism), confirms my position. See, e.g., Levinson, “Is Liberal Nationalism an
Oxymoron?”; Canovan, Nationhood and Political Theory; Vincent, “Liberal Nationalism”;
and Varouxakis, Mill on Nationality.
25. The most powerful recent challenge to this residue of “Whiggish triumphalism”
is Anthony W. Marx’s Faith in Nation.
26. For a discussion of the contents of the article “Our Prospects,” see pp. 91–94. For
a complete translation of the section presented here, see appendix 1.
27. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 19–21.
28. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 21–22.
29. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 22–23.
30. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 23–26.
31. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 26–27.
32. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 27–28.
392 Notes to pages 12–14

33. Jensen, Gebildete Doppelgänger, 41.

34. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 367.
35. Compare Adorno’s characterization of “The Essay as Form”: the essay’s “efforts
reflect the leisure of a childlike person [die Musse des Kindlichen]. . . . Luck and play are
essential to it. It starts not with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to talk about; it says
what occurs to it in that context and stops when it feels finished rather than when there
is nothing left to say” (Notes to Literature, 4; Noten zur Literatur, 11). The essay “finds its
unity in and through the breaks and not by glossing them over” (16–17; 35–36). Its “transi-
tions repudiate conclusive deductions in favour of crossconnections between elements.
. . . It co-ordinates elements instead of subordinating them” (22; 46–47).
36. Talking of the Sonderweg: when I consulted Collins German dictionary of 1991
for an equivalent of Gretchenfrage (Gretchen’s all-important query how Faust felt about
religion) I found “crunch question” and “$64,000 question.”
37. This split in the National Liberal Party is discussed in White, The Splintered Party,
5–6.
38. See chapter 9.
39. Ruggiero, History of European Liberalism, 264.
40. Joël was the successor of the more liberal Abraham Geiger (Liebeschütz, Das
Judentum im deutschen Geschichtsbild, 143).
41. S. B. Smith, Jewish Identity, xii.
42. Ragins calls Lazarus the first representative of “the leadership of the established
community” to speak out against Treitschke (Jewish Responses, 29). Lazarus gave up
a promising academic career in Switzerland, where he had been Professor Ordinarius
(i.e., salaried) from 1862 to 1866 to become in 1866 a Professor Honorarius, i.e., professor
without salary in Berlin. The reasons seem not quite clear; probably he wanted to have
more possibilities of public influence (Belke, “Einleitung,” xxvi). He was a celebrated
speaker and entertained after his return home [“in die Heimat”] “one of the last Berlin
salons” dedicated to literary, scholarly, and political discourse (xxxii).
43. M. Meyer, Response to Modernity, 188. Because of the war, a second synod was de-
layed until 1871. After Augsburg no further synods were held due to “a lack of sufficient
drive” (190). One of the results of the synods was the foundation in Berlin in 1870 of the
Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (191) as a more liberal alternative to the
theological seminary at Breslau.
44. In his later text An die deutschen Juden, Lazarus claimed that “What Does National
Mean?” was the first public reaction against the antisemitic current (3). In this text he
defended his support for a coalition government that included antisemites because the
left-liberal Freisinnige Party needed to be fought on the grounds of being “unpatriotic.”
Lazarus plays down the danger of antisemitic influence on government policy with the
argument that “a state that has climbed the ethical height of the German Reich cannot
possibly fall back behind that height” (19), a strong example of the confidence that
National Liberals still shared in this period.
 Notes to pages 14–16 393

45. Ragins, Jewish Responses, 29; Belke, “Einleitung,” xlvii.

46. Lazarus argued here that the fundamental characteristic of “Germanic national
spirit” was the drive to assimilate all previous history into a harmonious synthesis. The
“German national spirit” constitutes the most successful amalgamation of the Germanic
spirit with Christianity, and the Prussian state, dubbed “the state of intelligence,” was its
most adequate manifestation (Belke, “Einleitung,” xlviii).
47. Compare note 3 above.
48. Kalmar, “The Völkerpsychologie of Lazarus and Steinthal,” 674, quote on 675.
49. Bunzl suggests that Lazarus’s and Steinthal’s specific biographical experience as
small-town German Jews of a traditional background who were “exposed to the radical
program of Jewish reform emanating from Berlin” (“Völkerpsychologie and German-
Jewish Emancipation,” 63), leading to a lifelong process of self-transformation, may
have influenced their idea that Volksgeist and culture are dynamic, “malleable,” not static
categories.
50. Although Lazarus borrowed the word Gesamtgeist from Hegel, the concept was
different from Hegel’s: “objective spirit” in Lazarus’s usage meant “all intersubjective
[überindividuellen] articulations and objectivations of spirit [des Geistigen] in a com-
munity [Gemeinschaft]”; it is an empirical concept (Belke, “Einleitung,” l). Lazarus’s
positivist rearticulation of Hegel’s concept was certainly an expression of the intellectual
climate of the 1850s and 1860s (Belke, “Einleitung,” lv). The Völkerpsychologie as founded
by Lazarus and Steinthal is influenced by Comte’s psychological sociology and more
especially by the similar conception developed in about the same period by Johann
Friedrich Herbart, who emphasized the mutual determination of individual psyche
and society (while he described society as if it was an individual “soul” writ large) and
the central importance of language and tradition (see Belke, “Einleitung”). Belke notes
that Lazarus’s case for “diversity” in his contribution to the Dispute contradicted his
own advocacy of Prussian and Protestant supremacy and his view of Catholicism as a
“retarding element” in German history (“Einleitung,” lxviii).
51. Boehlich, Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, 244.
52. Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites, 282; most of the articles quoted were
unsigned or editorials. It is assumed here that they were written by Philippson. The
Allgemeine Zeitung was the preferred reading of “the acculturated German-Jewish edu-
cated bourgeoisie” (K. Krieger, Der “Berliner Antisemitismusstreit,” 102). On Philippson
see also Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 85–89, 145–58, 161.
53. Liebeschütz, Das Judentum im deutschen Geschichtsbild, 153.
54. M. Meyer, “Graetz and Treitschke,” 1.
55. M. Meyer, “Graetz and Treitschke,” 6; Graetz, like many others of the time, refers
to the Jews as Stamm, Volk, and Rasse interchangeably (10).
56. Liebeschütz, Das Judentum im deutschen Geschichtsbild, 143.
57. Liebeschütz, Das Judentum im deutschen Geschichtsbild, 151.
58. Liebeschütz, Das Judentum im deutschen Geschichtsbild, 152.
394 Notes to pages 17–21

59. Liebeschütz, Das Judentum im deutschen Geschichtsbild, 154.

60. Hamburger, Juden im öffentlichen Leben Deutschlands, 219.
61. According to K. Krieger, Der “Berliner Antisemitismusstreit,” xvii.
62. The writer (and German liberal patriot) Ludwig Börne was born as Löb Baruch
in 1786 and died in 1837.
63. Liebeschütz, Das Judentum im deutschen Geschichtsbild, 206, 207.
64. Liebeschütz, Das Judentum im deutschen Geschichtsbild, 208.
65. Liebeschütz, Das Judentum im deutschen Geschichtsbild, 212.
66. Zucker, “Ludwig Bamberger,” 342.
67. R. Weber, “Ludwig Bamberger,” 244.
68. R. Weber, “Ludwig Bamberger,” 245.
69. Jansen, “Ludwig Bamberger,” 207.
70. Jansen, “Ludwig Bamberger,” 247.
71. Jansen, “Ludwig Bamberger,” 210.
72. Jansen, “Ludwig Bamberger,” 249.
73. Pulzer, Emancipation and Its Discontents, 8.
74. R. Weber, “Ludwig Bamberger,” 250.
75. R. Weber, “Ludwig Bamberger,” 251.
76. Quoted in R. Weber, “Ludwig Bamberger,” 251.
77. R. Weber, “Ludwig Bamberger,” 259;
78. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 317.
79. Hamburger, Juden im öffentlichen Leben Deutschlands, 267.
80. This publication drew together several articles published since 1871, when Op-
penheim first coined the term Kathedersozialisten. On Katheder socialism see the section
“Liberal State Socialism in the German Reich” in chapter 3.
81. Hamburger, Juden im öffentlichen Leben Deutschlands, 268.
82. Braun-Wiesbaden, “Obituary for Heinrich Bernhard Oppenheim.”
83. He notes that “we have to discover” that “among us, too, the Germans, the people
of poets and thinkers, and even in the metropolis of the German Reich and of German
intelligence, there still exist remnants of the waning Middle Ages which poison the air
and threaten to draw us down onto the same level as that Jew-eating mob in Bucharest
and Jassy” (Braun-Wiesbaden, “Obituary for Heinrich Bernhard Oppenheim,” 228).
Jassy lies in Romania.
84. Fischoff, “Hermann Cohen,” 107.
85. Hackeschmidt and Sieg, “Hermann Cohen,” 161.
86. Fischoff, “Hermann Cohen,” 112.
87. Heinrich Heine’s On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1836) is a
classic expression of this tradition. Cohen had published—shortly before the Dispute—
a hostile criticism of Lazarus’s work Ethics of Judaism (Liebeschütz, Das Judentum im
deutschen Geschichtsbild, 214).
88. Liebeschütz, Das Judentum im deutschen Geschichtsbild, 217.
 Notes to pages 21–23 395

89. “Cohen remained an ardent German nationalist all his life” (Fischoff, “Hermann
Cohen,” 114); during World War I he argued in a widely read pamphlet that German
and Jewish cultures were identical and that therefore Jews everywhere ought to support
the German cause (115). He was also a steadfast opponent of Zionism (129). In his later
years he became known as an advocate of universal manhood suffrage and a theorist of
“ethical socialism” and the sozialer Rechtsstaat (the constitutional and welfare state), a
conception of the state as bound by law as much as committed to social reform (Hack-
eschmidt and Sieg, “Hermann Cohen,” 160).
90. The Handbuch der Judenfrage by Fritsch states that Naudh is assumed to be a
pseudonym for the agriculturalist Heinrich Nordmann, of whom otherwise nothing
was known, and adds that Lothar Bucher, an adviser of Bismarck, was allegedly involved
in writing Die Juden und der deutsche Staat (Fritsch, Handbuch der Judenfrage, 10). The
forty-second edition of the Handbuch der Judenfrage (1938) suggests that Bucher was
the author and refers to Nordmann’s authorship as hypothetical. Emil Weller’s Lexicon
Pseudonymorum gives H. Nordmann for Naudh (Weller, Lexicon Pseudonymorum, 379), as
does the Deutsches Pseudonymenlexikon by Holzmann and Bohatta (193), quoting Weller,
Lexicon Pseudonymorum. However, the Deutsches Anonymenlexikon by the same editors
lists two possible authors for Die Juden und der deutsche Staat, Marc Anton Niendorf
and H. Nordmann (Holzmann and Bohatta, Deutsches Anonymenlexikon, 169). Jacob
Katz writes that Johannes Nordmann is the author of Die Juden und der deutsche Staat
(Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction, 213, 356n), quoting Theodor Fritsch’s introduction
to the thirteenth edition (1920) of Die Juden und der deutsche Staat. Katz also quotes
Fritsch saying that the pamphlet seems to have been written in cooperation with Her-
man Wagener, a former editor of the Kreuzzeitung. I have not been able to see Fritsch’s
edition of Naudh’s pamphlet, but if Katz quotes correctly then Fritsch must have made
contradictory statements on its authorship. Johannes Nordmann was apparently the
pseudonym of an Austrian poet, Johann Rumpelmayer, an unlikely candidate to be
Naudh. There was also at the time another pamphletist called M. G. Nordmann who
wrote on the agrarian question, which is of course much closer to our topic.
91. The bound edition of the first year’s issues shows on the cover a different subhead-
ing: Monatsschrift für nationale Entwickelung (Monthly for National Development).
92. Deutsche Wacht, February 2, 1880, quoted in K. Krieger, Der “Berliner Antisemitis-
musstreit,” 391. This is from an article that attacks the satirical magazine Kladderadatsch
for ridiculing Treitschke while in the same issue running advertisements for erotica
and condoms.
93. K. Krieger, Der “Berliner Antisemitismusstreit,” 445.
94. K. Krieger, Der “Berliner Antisemitismusstreit,” 193.
95. Regneri, “Neumann’s Statistical Challenge,” 132.
96. Regneri, “Neumann’s Statistical Challenge,” 133.
97. It is not clear from Regneri’s account which party he represented, if any.
98. Belke, “Liberal Voices on Antisemitism,” 61–62. In February the synagogue of
396 Notes to pages 23–27

Neustettin in Pomerania was burned down only days after one agitator of the same
group held meetings in the area (Hoffmann, “Political Culture and Violence,” 75); in the
summer of 1881 a series of riots broke out in Pomerania and West Prussia, again appar-
ently fanned by agitators from the same group. Although initiated by an assemblage of
radical antisemites of diverse backgrounds, the petition gained popularity, according to
Hamburger, because it “merely demanded the legalization of what was the predominant
administrative practice anyway” (Juden im öffentlichen Leben Deutschlands, 37), such as
that only converted Jews should be admitted to state office.
99. Treitschke, “Die jüdische Einwanderung in Deutschland.”
100. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 319. The Declaration is documented with the list
of signatories in Liebeschütz, Das Judentum im deutschen Geschichtsbild, 341–42, and also
in K. Krieger, Der “Berliner Antisemitismusstreit.” An English translation is in Pulzer,
Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 326–27. It was published one week before the Prussian
Diet debated the antisemitic petition that demanded curbing Jewish emancipation (the
Antisemitenpetition). It was primarily motivated by the debate on the petition, among
other related debates, but also contained a passage that referred to Treitschke, linking
the dispute on Treitschke to other current disputes on antisemitism.
101. Hamburger, Juden im öffentlichen Leben Deutschlands, 34.
102. Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum, 88.
103. Quoted in Minogue, Nationalism, 72.
104. Deuerlein, “Die Konfrontation,” 230.
105. Quoted in Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum, 120.
106. Quoted in Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum, 120.
107. Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum, 126–27.
108. Volumes 1–3 were published between 1854 and 1856, a fourth volume was never
written, and volume 5 appeared in 1885.
109. Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum, 89.
110. Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, 529–30 (vol. 3, bk. 5, chap. 11).
111. Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, 529–30.
112. Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, 529–30; Hoffmann points out that the notion of
the Jews as Gärungsmittel (ferment) being instrumental to the development of Western
civilization was already developed by Moses Hess in his Europäische Triarchie (1841)
(Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum, 95); in Hess it is of course not an antisemitic topos
but a source of Jewish pride.
113. The first three volumes of Römische Geschichte formed a narrative that culminated
in Caesar’s epoch, while volume 5 presented the histories of separate provinces in the
Imperial time.
114. Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum, 106.
115. Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum, 108.
116. Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum, 109.
117. Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum, 112.
 Notes to pages 27–33 397

118. Treitschke, “Zur Judenfrage.”

119. In his lectures on Politics, Treitschke paraphrased Mommsen’s argument exactly
in the sense Mommsen insisted his remarks on the Jews should be understood (Hoff-
mann, Juden und Judentum, 98). Treitschke might in the context of the Dispute have
deliberately changed his reading of Mommsen’s argument in order to use it as support
for the antisemitic discourse. Liberal defense of the Jews was henceforth vulnerable to
pointing out the embarrassing fact that Mommsen himself had provided a formulation
that had become a much-used antisemitic slogan (Hoffmann points to references by
Lagarde, Ahlwardt, Hitler, and Goebbels [102]).
120. “vollkommenen Verschmelzungsprozess,” in the words of its longtime president,
Georg Gotheim.
121. Brenner, “‘Gott schütze uns vor unseren Freunden.’” In a letter to Treitschke,
the orientalist Karl Geldner pointed to another passage in Mommsen’s Römische Ge-
schichte: “The Semitic tribe (Stamm) stands below and yet also outside the peoples of
the old classical world” (vol. 3, beginning of chap. 1; quoted in K. Krieger, Der “Berliner
Antisemitismusstreit,” 427).
122. Quoted in Kohn, The Mind of Germany, 184.
123. Kohn, The Mind of Germany, 184.
124. Kohn, The Mind of Germany, 184.
125. Kohn, The Mind of Germany, 186.

1. Liberals, Antisemites, and “Educated Men”

1. The kleindeutsche position refers to a Prussian-led Empire that does not include the
German-speaking areas of the Habsburg Empire. After the Prussian-Austrian war of 1866
(and before Hitler) this was generally accepted as the shape a German nation-state had
to take. Had a German Empire been founded in the nineteenth century that included
what later became Austria, it would have been less clearly Prussian and Protestant in its
demographic character than the small-German Reich of 1871.
2. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 18.
3. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 18–19. The final phrase reads “das Volk will sich
nicht mehr von Coterien gängeln lassen.”
4. Boehlich, Nachwort, 240.
5. “Unterdessen arbeitet in den Tiefen unseres Volkslebens eine wunderbare, mächtige
Erregung. Es ist als ob die Nation sich auf sich selber besänne, unbarmherzig mit sich
in’s Gericht ginge” (Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 19).
6. The boom period of the Gründerzeit began in 1867 and intensified massively af-
ter the Franco-Prussian war. Pulzer translates Gründer (more commonly translated as
“founder”) as “promoter,” which seems to be the correct technical term denoting a person
who participates in the foundation of a company and for that purpose “promotes” this
company for fund-raising (Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 19).
7. Treitschke alludes here to the attempts on the life of the kaiser.
398 Notes to pages 33–36

8. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 20.

9. Treitschke “wanted workers to have no more than an elementary education. Better
educated labourers might wish to rise above their place in society, endangering the exist-
ing order” (Dorpalen, “Heinrich von Treitschke,” 33). His point can be illuminated by a
sequence in a text by the similarly “liberal” antisemite Otto Glagau from 1881: “even the
peasant is now meant to become educated; . . . a whole army of ‘the educated’ march up
and down the country, and step by step, by giving a bad example, dissolves the order of
the productive classes, infinitely expanding its own useless numbers” (quoted in Weiland,
Otto Glagau und “Der Kulturkämpfer,” 146).
10. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 20–21. Otto Mittelstädt, a judge in Hamburg, rejects
in his pamphlet “Gegen die Freiheitsstrafen: Ein Beitrag zur Kritik des heutigen Strafen-
systems, Pro Libertate!” (Against Prison Sentences: A Contribution to the Critique of the
Contemporary Penal System, For Liberty!”) the ideas that underlie nineteenth-century
reforms of the justice system. In the absence of general religious consciousness (which
he does not seem to deplore) only strict assertion of an ethical “categorical imperative”
(26, 29) can warrant social order: punishment ought to be understood as a punitive evil
(“Strafübel”) that creates justice, deters, and neutralizes (“Unschädlichmachung”), not
as a form of “forced education” (27, 71). He also argues that the state should not exclude
the use of the death penalty (75), deportation (77), and corporal punishment (81). He
argues that prison confinement is an infliction of corporal suffering that can be worse
than corporal punishment; he denounces the denial of this as liberal bigotry (81).
11. “die unerbittlich strenge Majestät des Rechts”; Treitschke had argued for death
penalty already in 1870 (Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 144).
12. “gegen das Judentum” (Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 21); German words end-
ing on-tum (or-thum) are ambivalent as to whether they refer to an abstract, spiritual
entity or a concrete object: Judentum can be “the Jews” just as well as “Judaism” or even a
“Jewish principle” of whatever sort. Anti-Jewish rhetoric seems to play on this semantic
ambiguity. (Holz, Nationaler Antisemitismus, 177–80, states that Judenthum only refers to
an abstraction as opposed to “the Jews.” Judging from Treitschke’s use of the terminology,
I do not find this convincing.)
13. See chapter 8.
14. The number of Jews involved in the publishing business was certainly higher than
the Jewish share of the overall population (in Germany less than 1 percent), but the idea
of “Jewish domination” is without grounding in reality.
15. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 22. In the elections to the Prussian Diet in October
1879, “the Left Liberals lost one of the city’s three seats to a candidate supported by both
the National Liberals and the Conservatives,” after an increasingly antisemitic campaign
(Rahden, “Words and Actions,” 420).
16. Johannes Pfefferkorn (1469–1523) converted to Christianity and wrote a number
of anti-Jewish works. Johann Andreas Eisenmenger (1654–1704) is the author of “Ent-
decktes Judenthum” (“Jewry Uncovered”; 1700) and was wrongly assumed to have been
a converted Jew (Holz, Nationaler Antisemitismus, 190n).
 Notes to pages 36–40 399

17. Paulus Cassel interpreted this statement as proof of Treitschke’s particular dislike
of converted Jews. Cassel insinuates that the basis of this dislike is envy of the person
who deliberately adopts a particular belief, suggesting that this belief might be stronger
or “truer” than merely received belief (Wider Heinrich von Treitschke, 17). Joël (“Offener
Brief an Treitschke”) also rejects the allegation that many of the anti-Jewish pamphlets
have been written by Jews.
18. Hitler used this phrase in a September 1919 letter to Adolf Gemlich; quoted in
Claussen, Vom Judenhass zum Antisemitismus, 190–93.
19. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 26.
20. Treitschke might be alluding to Luther, who had referred to the Jews as a “misfor-
tune” in his “Von den Jueden” (Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 17). Treitschke
might also have picked up the term “misfortune” from reading for example the following
in a Kreuzzeitung article from 1878: “Modern Judaism that denies its ancient faith and its
ordinances, vaunts its enlightened liberalism and marches everywhere in the vanguard
of progress, is a real misfortune for our people. Judaization is making giant strides, and
this is furthered by liberalism . . . the children of Israel . . . have become a curse to the
nations” (quoted in Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany, 155). Volkov comments that
Treitschke applied here “the familiar propaganda technique of the ‘wrong metaphor.’
The ‘Jewish Question’ was not one problem among others, but the essence of all evil. A
quick turn of the pen made a single problem stand for all others . . . a stroke of genius.
By using a simple rhetorical technique, an unsatisfactory situation was suddenly made
comprehensible” (Germans, Jews, and Antisemites, 99).
21. Treitschke had used a similar formulation in a letter from August, 25, 1879: “The
hate against this alien being that has usurped the domination over our press and public
opinion erupts from one hundred thousand Germanic hearts like a sound of nature”
(H. Rosenberg, Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit, 107).
22. This text is predominantly a response to Breßlau, Lazarus, and Cassel.
23. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 49.
24. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 49.
25. Graetz, “Erwiderung an Treitschke,” 26; S. Meyer, Ein Wort an Treitschke.
26. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 58.
27. The actual name of the so-called Kreuzzeitung, the voice of orthodox Prussian
Protestantism, was Neue Preussische Zeitung, founded in 1848. The articles are in nos.
148–52 (June 29–July 3, 1875). One of the editors of the Kreuzzeitung was Hermann
Goedsche, who had published the novel Biarritz (1868), which was later used as one of
the sources of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Mosse, Crisis of German Ideology, 128).
At the time there were two Conservative parties: the “Free Conservatives” (officially
called Deutsche Reichspartei since 1871) (Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 920),
the “Partei Bismarck sans phrase” (Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 921), which
cooperated with the National Liberals; and the “Old Conservatives” (since 1876 officially
called Deutschkonservative Partei), which was anti-liberal, anti-state, and anti-modern,
400 Notes to pages 40–42

and defended, for example, clerical control of education. Their organ was the Kreuzzeitung
(Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 918). The articles followed a massive election
defeat of the Conservative parties by the National Liberal Party and the Catholic Center
Party. The antisemitic articles of the Kreuzzeitung seem to have been a deliberate offer
of cooperation to a new potential ally reflecting the new situation.
28. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 56–57; the Catholic journal Germania argued that the
anti-Catholic Kulturkampf had been a device deployed by the Jews “to distract the at-
tention of the German people in order to be able to exploit it properly at the same time”
(Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 56). Breßlau suggests that the Catholic press obviously hoped
to improve its positioning in the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf by joining Protestant con-
servatism for an anti-Jewish campaign.
29. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 57.
30. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 58; in his response, Treitschke (“Noch einige Bemerkun-
gen zur Judenfrage,” 48) exploited the extent of agreement that Breßlau conceded and
the rather defensive tone of his text. Endner applauded Treitschke’s defiant response
but stated that Breßlau “deserved a more gruff reprimand [derbere Zurechtweisung]”
(“Zur Judenfrage,” 123). Seligmann Meyer (Zurückweisung des dritten judenfeindlichen
Artikels, 5) reproached Breßlau for having published a brochure on the Judenfrage—
because there is no such thing. He declares that Breßlau’s “recognition by the enemy
is for a reason [ist erklärlich].” Naudh sarcastically “acknowledge[d] the reconciliatory
tone” used by Breßlau (Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 180). However, he writes that
“practical problems” should not be left in the hands of professors (such as Treitschke
and Breßlau), who tend to find “a convenient formula” that would merely cover up and
perpetuate “the evil.”
31. Breßlau, “Nachwort zur zweiten Auflage,” 92.
32. Breßlau, “Nachwort zur zweiten Auflage,” 92.
33. Joël, “Offener Brief an Treitschke,” 21–22.
34. S. Meyer, Zurückweisung des dritten judenfeindlichen Artikels, 3.
35. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 181.
36. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 181.
37. “If history was not a fable convenue [a story/narration agreed upon because it is
convenient] but really the science of what has actually happened, then its students would
be able to understand or at least to sense what is happening in the present from what has
happened in the past, and Herr von Treitschke would not have had to continue spinning
yarns [fabuliren] for so long, and it would not have taken him so long to discover to his
great surprise that liberalism was fatally disgraced by the Jews [dass der Liberalismus an
den Juden zu Schanden geworden sei]” (Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 181). Naudh
does not, though, indicate how this methodological criticism (betraying a positivist
understanding of the concept of “science”) relates to his (unsupported) claim that “the
Jews” disgraced liberalism.
38. Naudh expresses similar reservations about the organizers of the Antisemitenpetition.
 Notes to pages 42–45 401

He claims that the petition is also an expression of a popular sentiment but its immedi-
ate purpose of merely changing legislation is rather too “moderate” (“Professoren über
Israel,” 183).
39. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 183.
40. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 184.
41. Bamberger and Oppenheim are the only contributors who referred to the argu-
ment of “Our Prospects” as a whole.
42. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 156–57.
43. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 156, 158.
44. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 157. Lasker (1829–84), a lawyer and former
1848 radical, had been a member of the Progress Party and was one of the founders of
the National Liberal Party in 1866. He was one of the main authors of the liberal legal
framework of the Bismarck Reich.
45. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 175–76.
46. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 177.
47. Oppenheim, “Stöcker und Treitschke.”
48. Gerson Bleichröder was a financial adviser to Bismarck. Oppenheim points to his
own article on this subject in Die Gegenwart from October 2, 1875.
49. Oppenheim’s distinction between the older, as it were more honest antisemitism
and its current, disingenuous form sounds a lot like the formulation by Horkheimer
and Adorno quoted above (see 390n12).
50. Oppenheim, “Stöcker und Treitschke,” 3.
51. Oppenheim implies that Treitschke’s text is like a piece of badly written fiction:
“The lowest ranking novelist would be obliged to motivate such a psychological turn in
his characters” (“Stöcker und Treitschke,” 3).
52. Oppenheim, “Stöcker und Treitschke,” 4.
53. This is quoted from the second part of Oppenheim’s article, which was published
in Die Gegenwart on January 10, 1880 (p. 17).
54. Philippson argued similarly against the notion that there has been a fundamental
change in the public mood (Allgemeine Zeitung, December 9, 1879, 785). He suggests that a
number of writers from the ultramontane, reactionary, and radical camps have increased
their clamor while the apparent weakness of the liberals has encouraged all Jew-haters
to join in. The current anti-Jewish agitation in the press also proves wrong all claims
about Jewish domination of the press: there is nothing that would explain why Jewish
domination would suddenly have given way to an antisemitic campaign. (Philippson
was the editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung and—I presume—wrote in this function the
editorials, which are, however, unsigned. Most of what I attribute to Philippson is from
unsigned articles and editorials.)
55. “La sauvagerie est toujours là à deux pas, et, dès qu’on lâche pied, elle recommence”;
quoted in French by Oppenheim.
56. On the concept of realpolitik see pp. 223–30.
402 Notes to pages 45–48

57. Oppenheim, “Stöcker und Treitschke,” 2.

58. He suggests that simply the judiciary might have become more effective, rather
than that the people have become more vicious.
59. Cassel, Wider Heinrich von Treitschke, 8, 9.
60. “man gönnte ihnen die Freiheit nicht . . . man war selber nicht frei”; Cassel, Wider
Heinrich von Treitschke, 11.
61. “Pharisäischer Neid gebraucht das alte Vorurtheil”; Cassel, Wider Heinrich von
Treitschke, 12.

2. Jew-hatred and Nationality

1. Cassel, Wider Heinrich von Treitschke, 7.
2. Treitschke, “Zur inneren Lage am Jahresschlusse,” 225.
3. Allgemeine Zeitung, December 9, 1879, 785.
4. Allgemeine Zeitung, November 18, 1879, 737. Bourdeau wrote in the cited article that
after emancipation the French Jews did not dissolve into “our purely French community”
but still developed into useful and loyal citizens. He asserted that emancipation turned
the Jews of France into the most “ameliorated” of all Jewish groups. Bourdeau suggested
the Germans should not resent the high level of involvement of Jews in the life of the
nation but appreciate its usefulness: the Jews “unite the religious and the practical spirit,
the taste for metaphysical and for financial speculation” (739).
5. The Allgemeine Zeitung (November 23, 1880, 741–42) documented the complete text
of the Declaration, including all seventy-five signatures, introduced with the comment:
“Finally there seems to be light on the horizon! Finally the nightmare that weighed on
the minds is being shaken off!” On November 30, Philippson comments that the Dec-
laration “is written in the most noble style and despite its briefness it touches upon all
relevant moments with satisfying determination” (753–54). On December 7 he adds that
the Declaration “already is a momentous fact like Lessing’s ‘Nathan,’ the Prussian con-
stitution or the German Imperial law” (778). In the December 14 issue he writes: “Every
sincere patriot is deeply hurt to observe the confusion and divisiveness [Zerfahrenheit
und Zerrissenheit] in the German fatherland that has grown so hugely through the latest
agitations against the Jews, and the humiliation of the German spirit which this perpe-
tration constitutes. On top of this now comes the regret that these weaknesses and the
weakening of the German nation is being watched and condemned abroad; Germany’s
prestige, honor and her civilizational influence suffer so much from this” (785). This
comment is followed by several quotes from the English press (786).
6. “nothwendigen Zusammengehörigkeit”; Pulzer (Rise of Political Anti-Semitism,
326) translates this as “essential community.”
7. “in treuem Zusammengehen mit der Nation die Sonderart abzuwerfen.”
8. “Erklärung,” 202.
9. The use of the formulation “Jewish fellow citizens” also seems to exclude from the
defense Jewish immigrants who are not citizens.
 Notes to pages 48–52 403

10. “Erklärung,” 202–3.

11. It significant that for the Declaration these two attributes seemed not to contradict
each other. “Racial hatred” was then not generally recognized as a specifically modern
(as opposed to medieval) phenomenon as it is now.
12. The image that everyone should enjoy “the same sun in competition” seems to
connote that a social order based on merit and competition is a natural order—under
the sun (i.e., out there, in the open field, in the real world), after all, every human being
has the same opportunity. This is, of course, an ideological mystification not only of
society but also of nature.
13. The Catholic journal Germania emphasized in a comment on the Declaration that
it is wrong to denounce the current antisemitic movement as “medieval”: today, as op-
posed to in the days of Lessing, “the religious side of the question” has been resolved “as
religious freedom is constitutionally guaranteed.” The issue is “national as well as social,”
it is a question of “culture and economy”: the people want the state to save them from
immorality and exploitation (quoted in K. Krieger, Der “Berliner Antisemitismusstreit,”
574–75).
14. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 210. Mommsen writes that
he does not want to contribute to the more public debate on the Jews, which he refers
to as a “hullabaloo [Charivari]” “to whose dissonances the rabble [Pöbel] on either side
contribute to the best of their capacities” (210) and a “machination” against which “a
single voice” can hardly hope to be heard. His concern is exclusively with the debate
among former (National Liberal) allies and friends, that is, the Berlin Antisemitism
Dispute in a more narrow sense: “I will be happy when the few words that I want to make
will explain my attitude to this affair to those who want to know it. It separates many,
who have otherwise been close and long time allies, and separation hurts. Although the
word of conciliation [Verständigung] will fade away in general, it will perhaps find its
destination here or there on a personal level” (210).
15. In Germanic mythology, the three sons of the god Mannus are the founders of
the Germanic tribes.
16. This is a technical term meaning the priest as representing church authority.
17. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 211. “Kultur” and its composites
are at the time still sometimes spelled with “c”.
18. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 211; this seems to have been a
widely used image in contemporary comments on the “Terror” of the French Revolution,
immortalized in Francisco Goya’s painting from 1821–23.
19. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 211.
20. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 22.
21. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 23.
22. As Holz (Nationaler Antisemitismus, 199) writes, the commonality of trade and
journalism is that both are activities of mediation.
23. “Wie wir dies fremde Volksthum mit dem unseren verschmelzen können.” Volksthum
404 Notes to pages 52–56

was coined as a neologism around 1800 and became commonplace through Friedrich
Ludwig Jahn’s book Deutsches Volksthum, from 1810 (Holz, Nationaler Antisemitismus,
200). The term refers to the Wesen of a Volk as well as the (everyday life, cultural) ap-
pearances of the Wesen.
24. I usually translate Stamm as “tribe,” but when it refers to the distinction between
Ashkenazim and Sephardim I translate it as “branch” (the primary meaning of the Ger-
man word Stamm is the trunk of a tree). Since Mommsen, e.g., also refers to the Ger-
man Stämme (in contemporary academic parlance, one would probably write “ethnic
groups”), Stamm seems to be mostly descriptive and value-free, though from a National
Liberal perspective with a connotation of being anachronistic. Rahden writes that Stamm
“was a central concept in German debates about national unity and diversity between
the mid-nineteenth century and the late 1920s” (“Germans of the Jewish Stamm,” 29).
He suggests that Jews in particular invoked the concept of Stamm because of “its very
vagueness” (31): it was a way of expressing the particular character of the German Jews’
ethnicity after the relative decline of “religious visions of community.” In the 1819 edition
of Brockhaus encyclopedia, nations emerge from the mixing of tribes (Stämme) (Rahden,
“Germans of the Jewish Stamm,” 36).
25. Holz, Nationaler Antisemitismus, 204.
26. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 24. Treitschke gives two examples: the example
for Jewish arrogance is his colleague, the historian Heinrich Graetz; the example for
harmfulness is the current Jewish involvement in the economy.
27. “dieser beiden alten Culturvölker.” Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 27. On December
24 the Vossische Zeitung published an open letter by Ad. Neubauer, assistant librarian at
Bodleian in Oxford. In the name of the English Jews he rejects Treitschke’s compliments
(quoted in Allgemeine Zeitung, January 13, 1880).
28. See chapter 10.
29. Allgemeine Zeitung, February 17, 1880, 108.
30. “Ein Drängen zum Licht ist jedem Menschen natürlich und sein Recht.” Cassel,
Wider Heinrich von Treitschke, 16; for Cassel, though, “the light” might mean not only
the better living standard but also the Christian mission of Berlin.
31. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 162. It seems that Bamberger found
the use of the imagery of the “flood” adequate for the case of the Chinese immigration
to California.
32. Graetz had already pointed out that Jews enjoyed legal equality in Galicia and are
therefore “little inclined to emigration” (Graetz, “Erwiderung an Treitschke,” 28).
33. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 163.
34. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 57–60; the section quoted here is from the “Appendix:
Statistical Data on Jewish Immigration and Emigration in Prussia,” which was added to
the printed version of Lazarus’s speech.
35. For several decades the Prussian statistical office had paid little interest to the “confes-
sional or racial make-up of immigrants and emigrants” (Hacking, The Taming of Chance,
 Notes to page 56 405

195). However, there was evidence that Jews emigrated in larger numbers than their share
in the population would warrant, which—given that overall immigration numbers were
known—allowed the conclusion that emigration most probably exceeded immigration. An
increase in the number of Jews could therefore only be explained with higher birthrates and
lower mortality rates than with immigration. Nevertheless, the Prussian statistical office
had published in 1877 an essay (“not too consistent,” as Hacking writes) arguing the case of
Jewish mass immigration. However, the statistical office of the city of Berlin strongly rejected
the immigration theory in its yearbook of 1880 and subsequently supported Neumann (see
below) against the Prussian office (Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 197).
36. Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 197; British society has of course never been as
relaxed about (Jewish) immigration as Lazarus suggests here; his reference to the laughing
Englishman must have been rhetorically powerful, though, particularly in an ideological
context that tended to idealize the political culture of Britain.
37. Graetz, “Erwiderung an Treitschke,” 26; furthermore, Graetz (“Mein letztes Wort an
Treitschke”) states that Treitschke relies on questionable source material, that the increase
of the Jewish population in Prussia is actually in keeping with that of the population in
general, that there is virtually no emigration from Poland into the Prussian provinces
bordering on Poland, and that the history of the Jews in Poland actually was less bleak
than Treitschke implied. Graetz quotes a historical source from the sixteenth century
suggesting that the Jews in Poland were engaged in agriculture as well as in trade and
the sciences. Similarly, Seligmann Meyer (Ein Wort an Treitschke, 29) writes, address-
ing Treitschke directly: “And if we have to read in foreign papers that the Germans are
narrow-minded, driven by racial hatred and trapped in prejudices, then this is your
responsibility!” Philippson also argues that the anti-Jewish campaign dishonors “the
great German nation” by depicting the nation as being overpowered by only a handful
of Jews (Allgemeine Zeitung, December 9, 1879, 787). Later (Allgemeine Zeitung, March
23, 1880, 178) he writes that German Jew-hatred must be mere pretense, because the Ger-
mans cannot seriously believe that a nation of forty-three million could be endangered
by half a million of Jews.
38. Cassel similarly remarks that many of “the German heads” have been “seduced”
and have adopted “French frivolity” which proves that they are “actually not very hard
at all” (Wider Heinrich von Treitschke, 23).
39. Treitschke, “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” 31–32; Treitschke added in the
fourth edition of the booklet version of the text (“Ein Wort über unser Judenthum”) at
this place a footnote on Salomon Neumann’s text.
40. Treitschke states that the migration from the provinces into the cities increases
Jewish influence on the nation’s commercial and social development (“Herr Graetz
und sein Judenthum,” 33). On average, greater wealth ensures better education of the
Jews, which in turn ensures greater influence in the press and the financial institutions.
Treitschke concludes that, irrespective of population statistics, “the Jews in Germany are
more powerful than in any other country in Western Europe” (34).
406 Notes to pages 57–60

41. S. Neumann, Die Fabel von der jüdischen Masseneinwanderung, 3; Neumann writes
that every year between 1822 and 1840, three hundred more Jews immigrated than emi-
grated, which is roughly equivalent to the corresponding ratio among the general popula-
tion (6). The numerical extent of net immigration is thus relatively small in this period.
From 1840 to 1871 emigration clearly exceeds immigration for all groups of the Prussian
population, while the excess is much higher for the Jews than for the overall population
(7–9). Neumann argues that large-scale immigration is generally unlikely during times
of significant emigration (15). Immigration into Prussia was generally very low in the
period, and there is no evidence to suggest that Jewish immigration was above aver-
age. Also, the statistics about residents who are born abroad confirm that there was no
significant Jewish immigration from the East (18).
42. Treitschke, “Die jüdische Einwanderung in Deutschland,” 234.
43. Treitschke, “Die jüdische Einwanderung in Deutschland,” 234–35.
44. Treitschke, “Die jüdische Einwanderung in Deutschland,” 234–35; Adolf Wagner
in his review of Neumann’s brochure (1880) wrote that for “cultural reasons,” internal
migration could also be counted as “immigration” (Regneri, “Neumann’s Statistical
Challenge,” 147), which supports Treitschke’s argument. Treitschke returned to the issue
in November 1883 (“Die jüdische Einwanderung in Preussen”). Here he reasserted his
initial position with reference to statistical material that has—he writes—been published
in the meantime.
45. Joël, “Offener Brief an Treitschke,” 18.
46. Treitschke, “Die jüdische Einwanderung in Deutschland,” 19; emphasis in the
original.
47. Graetz, “Erwiderung an Treitschke,” 27.
48. Allgemeine Zeitung, December 9, 1879, 786.
49. Die Gegenwart, January 10, 1880, 17.
50. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 58.
51. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 59–60.
52. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 60.
53. Graetz, “Erwiderung an Treitschke,” 27. Nadyr (Offener Brief, 15) also points out
that the Jews in Poland were not persecuted until 1648.
54. Graetz, “Erwiderung an Treitschke,” 28.
55. Treitschke, “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” 35.
56. Treitschke, “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” 35.
57. Treitschke, “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” 35.
58. This argument is reminiscent of the Hegelian concept of “historyless peoples.”
59. Treitschke is particularly unimpressed when Graetz defends the lack of patriotic
loyalty on the side of the Jews of the Eastern Prussian provinces in the war of 1806–7
(Treitschke, “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” 42). While Graetz suggests that they
had no incentive to be loyal to Prussia, Treitschke argues they should have been loyal
irrespective of their specific positioning and interests. Graetz in his reply (“Mein letztes
 Notes to pages 60–66 407

Wort an Treitschke”) defends his approval of the disloyalty of the Jews of Eastern Prus-
sia in the Napoleonic Wars that had particularly aroused Treitschke’s anger: “Suspicions
about my [lack of] patriotism I have to reject” (50). He points out that he had referred
to the Duchy of Warsaw only, not, as Treitschke insinuated, to the whole of Poznan and
Western Prussia: Warsaw had only briefly been a province of Prussia, which—according
to Graetz—helps to explain that both Poles and Jews welcomed Napoleon as a liberator.
The Jews also had the obvious reason that France had generally taken a more positive
attitude toward emancipation than Prussia at the time.
60. Graetz, “Mein letztes Wort an Treitschke,” 46.
61. Seligmann Meyer points out that on another occasion Treitschke had quoted
Disraeli’s boastful remarks on the superiority of the Jews, which contradicts his claim
that boastful remarks by Jews were only imaginable in Germany (Ein Wort an Treitschke,
36).
62. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 47.
63. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 48.
64. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 51–52.
65. Breßlau, “Nachwort zur zweiten Auflage,” 93–94.
66. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 168.
67. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 215.
68. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 216.

3. German-Jewish “Mixed Culture”

1. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 23.
2. Treitschke notes that more contemporary examples could be added, but he does
not do so.
3. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 23.
4. Treitschke seems to hesitate before he goes into more detail about what he has to
say about these “circles” and finds it necessary to warn preemptively: “Even conciliatory
words are easily misunderstood here.”
5. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 25.
6. For “writers,” Treitschke uses the derogatory term Poetaster.
7. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 25.
8. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 25.
9. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 25.
10. “in sich aufzunehmen und zu verarbeiten vermochte”; Bamberger, “Deutschtum
und Judentum,” 171–72.
11. Bamberger quotes from “Essay on the Origin of Language”: “wenn die Kette fremder
Cultur nicht so nah an uns gedrängt und mit der Gewalt ganzer Jahrhunderte uns genöthigt
hätte, mit einzugreifen.” The quote is from near the end of Herder’s text (Zweiter Teil,
Viertes Naturgesetz; Herder, Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, 120).
12. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 172.
408 Notes to pages 67–71

13. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 172.

14. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 61.
15. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 62.
16. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 63; the possibility of secular Jewish nationalism does
not even seem to occur to Breßlau.
17. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 63.
18. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 64.
19. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 65.
20. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 65.
21. Lazarus adds that the Jews have this in common with the Germans (Was heisst
national? 65; 44).
22. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 41; Lazarus introduces this idea with the analogy
that although “one might argue that being a mother is a woman’s essential destination
[wesentliche Bestimmung],” “a woman is also a human being in her own right” (41).
23. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 41.
24. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 42.
25. “Erhöhung und Vertiefung des Eignen”
26. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 43.
27. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 44.
28. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 36.
29. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 36–37.
30. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 36–37. Lazarus quotes from Rümelin.
31. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 38. This is also from Rümelin.
32. “Zur Nation euch zu bilden, ihr hofft es Deutsche vergebens; / bildet, ihr könnt es,
dafür freier zu Menschen euch aus” (my translation). This epigram (titled “Deutscher
Nationalcharakter”) is number 96 of a set of 414 mostly polemical distichons and other
short poems called “Xenien” that Goethe and Schiller wrote in close cooperation and
published in the Musen-Almanach für das Jahr 1797 (a literary almanac) in 1796. The title
is an allusion to the title of book 13 of the “Epigrammata” (85 ce) by the Roman poet
Valerius Martialis; a xenion is a gift to be given to a guest, which is here ironic given the
polemical character of the “Xenien.” The preceding epigram (95) is called “Das deutsche
Reich”: “Deutschland? Aber wo liegt es? Ich weiss das Land nicht zu finden; / Wo das
gelehrte beginnt, hört das politische auf ” (Germany? Where does it lie? I don’t know /
where to look for that place; where the scholarly starts, the political ends).
33. In this context, a comment on the same subject in the Catholic journal Germania
in December 1880 is interesting: “Where is the man of taste who could get angry at the
diversity of sorts of wine in color, richness, and bouquet and would advocate the pro-
duction of a wine unrelated to any particular place of origin! Go ahead and decompose
the sorts of wine, you will end up with a unified sort indeed—vinegar!” (quoted in K.
Krieger, Der “Berliner Antisemitismusstreit,” 723).
34. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 184.
 Notes to pages 71–77 409

35. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 184.

36. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 185.
37. With this claim Naudh is in agreement with many nineteenth-century historians,
as Bernal (Black Athena, 341–42) and Burkert (The Orientalizing Revolution, introduc-
tion) show.
38. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 186.
39. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 187.
40. On the petition see p. 23.
41. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 187.
42. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 188.
43. “setzen sich mit ihrem Gotte auseinander” (emphasis in the original).
44. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 188–89.
45. Naudh refers here to 5 Moses (Deuteronomy) 7:16. From the context of the for-
mulation quoted by Naudh it is clear that according to Moses, God is meant to give
Israel only those peoples “to eat” that are enemies of Israel. The presupposition of the
covenant is that Israel is the weakest and lowest of all peoples but that adherence to God
will guarantee Israel divine support against attackers and oppressors.
46. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 190.
47. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 189, 190; Naudh rejects the climate theory of skin
color, but he got his (eighteenth-century-style) geo-ethnography wrong: if one thought
of skin color as an effect of climate, then one ought to expect that the “Negroes” as well
as the “Whites” in America should have become “Reds.”
48. The concept of Arbeitsehre seems to be a mixture of “work ethics” and the pride
of doing productive and good quality work.
49. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 191.
50. Unclear reference; probably to the “Young Germany” as subsequently discussed.
51. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 54.
52. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 162.
53. “Denn mit keinem Volke haben sie sich auch nur entfernt so eng zusammengelebt,
man könnte sagen identificirt, wie mit den Deutschen”; Bamberger, “Deutschtum und
Judentum,” 162.
54. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 164–65.
55. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 165–66; Bamberger’s remark on abstract
thinking and mercantile economy as two dimensions of “speculation” (implying a com-
mon root) seems to echo a “young-Hegelian” theme that can be found in the writings of
Heine, Börne, and (the young) Marx. It also anticipates an argument of Marxist theory as
developed much later by George Thomson (First Philosophers) and Alfred Sohn-Rethel
(Intellectual and Manual Labour). In their version of the argument, however, “abstract”
and philosophical thinking are understood as effects of the specific social practices of
an emerging commodity economy—the Greeks of Miletus and Athens “invented phi-
losophy” not because they “owned” the spirit of speculation but because they were at the
410 Notes to pages 77–80

forefront of developing commodity and money economy. In the young-Hegelian version

of the idea as echoed by Bamberger, the “mystery of speculation” is simply “possessed”
by some peoples, not by others.
56. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 166.
57. “schnellblütigen, kecken, bis zur Frivolität gesteigerten Humor”; Bamberger,
“Deutschtum und Judentum,” 166.
58. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 167.
59. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 168.
60. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 32.
61. “dem Höchsten im Menschenthum zustrebende”; Lazarus, Was heisst national? 33.
62. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 32–33.
63. He adds: “And I am asking in turn, are not the same psychological laws valid for
all times, do not the same causes have the same effects?” (Lazarus, Was heisst national?
33–34).
64. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 34.
65. The Jews’ role in the Gründerkrach was a principal obsession of Otto Glagau
especially (see pp. 217–19).
66. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 50. Treitschke reproaches
Börne and Heine for slandering “the country that protects them” and adds that such
“contempt for the German Goyim” is “not the opinion of a single fanatic.” He suggests
that the role that Jews allegedly played in the Gründer-Unwesen (the deliberately risky
and sometimes fraudulent business practices in which, though, Jews were apparently less
strongly involved than their share among businesspeople would have led one to expect)
was a result of their “contempt for the German Goyim.”
67. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 24–25; in his response, Cassel remarked drily: “It
is really not fun these days to run a pawnshop” (Wider Heinrich von Treitschke, 17).
68. The most important formulation of the concept of Arbeitsfreude is by Hein-
rich Riehl (Die deutsche Arbeit) (see Campbell, Joy in Work). Dorpalen points out that
Treitschke’s reference to “gemüthliche Arbeitsfreudigkeit” relates to his concept of a
harmonic but hierarchical society: as long as the working classes will find “happiness”
in their subordinate function and do not become envious of “the few thousands” (who
do the thinking, painting, etc.), the continued existence of the social hierarchy is safe
(Heinrich von Treitschke, 242). Ludwig Philippson, who was an enthusiastic supporter
of the anti-socialist laws of 1878, promoted a similar concept of work: he also found that
“Social Democracy was a degenerate, corrupting force, preaching hatred of labor as op-
posed to the authentic Jewish (read bourgeois) love of honest work” (Penslar, Shylock’s
Children, 152). In this respect, Philippson’s liberalism seems cut from the same cloth as
Treitschke’s. At the same time he often expressed scorn for the Jewish financial elite and
tried to distinguish a heroic “banking Jew,” a beneficiary to humanity, from the unscru-
pulous “stock-market Jew,” whose showy lifestyle and shady practices aroused envy and
antisemitism and thus damaged the Jews (Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 156).
 Notes to pages 80–86 411

69. The meaning of Gemüth lies in between mind, character, nature, soul, disposition,
warmheartedness, and sentiment.
70. See Postone (Time, Labor, and Social Domination and “Rethinking Marx”) for
Marx’s take on this idea, and Campbell (Joy in Work) on Fourier’s.
71. This article, written either by Marr or, more probably, by Naudh/Nordmann (judg-
ing from comments in the journal, Marr seems to have been replaced as editor as early
as April 1880), does not directly refer to the Dispute.
72. Deutsche Wacht, 435, 437–38.
73. Deutsche Wacht, 438.
74. Deutsche Wacht, 439.
75. “Proletariat” means here simply “the poor.”
76. Deutsche Wacht, 442.
77. Deutsche Wacht, 443.
78. Joël, “Offener Brief an Treitschke,” 22–23.
79. Oppenheim, “Stöcker und Treitschke,” 20.
80. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 65.
81. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 66.
82. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 67.
83. From the Revue des deux mondes, March 1, 1880 (Allgemeine Zeitung March 23,
1880, 177–78).
84. Allgemeine Zeitung, March 23, 1880, 178.
85. The term Kathedersozialisten (socialists of the lectern) was coined in 1871 by Hein-
rich Bernhard Oppenheim as a sarcastic nickname for various proponents of state-led
social reform. Treitschke had famously taken up Oppenheim’s position and added his
own polemic against Kathedersozialismus; on Katheder socialism see the section “Liberal
State Socialism in the German Reich” in chapter 9.
86. Oppenheim, “Stöcker und Treitschke,” 20; Treitschke’s “Der Sozialismus und seine
Gönner” (Socialism and Its Patrons) took up arguments previously formulated by Op-
penheim.
87. Oppenheim, “Stöcker und Treitschke,” 20.
88. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 164.
89. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 163.
90. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 163–64.
91. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 164.
92. In a similar if curiously reversed fashion, analyses by Social Democrats in the fol-
lowing decades occasionally speculated that antisemitic agitation would indirectly (and
ironically, i.e., against itself) further socialist consciousness amongst non-working-class
poor (i.e., those whom Social Democratic teaching cannot reach) by proving itself to be
an inadequate (namely, petit bourgeois) criticism of capitalist society. Some liberals and
some socialists shared the notion that antisemitic anti-capitalism would by necessity
prepare the ground for, and perhaps turn into, a more adequate, or more dangerous,
namely, proletarian, anti-capitalism (see Wistrich, Socialism and the Jews, 99).
412 Notes to pages 86–89

93. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 185–85; emphasis in the original.

94. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 196.
95. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 196.
96. Endner, “Zur Judenfrage,” 112. Endner made these remarks in the context of his
rejection of Breßlau’s argument that apart from the Jews there existed other ethnic
minorities within Germany, too, such as the Wends in the Prussian district of Lausitz.
Endner argues that they are the remnants of an indigenous “tribe” in an area that was
conquered by “Germany” moving eastward and that continued to exist “as a solid group”
(111). By contrast, the Jews are immigrants and dispersed anywhere among the Germans
(112). Furthermore, the Wends are productive, the Jews are not.
97. Endner, “Zur Judenfrage,” 117–18; his suggestions included that the Sabbath should
be moved to Sunday and that specific Jewish holidays as well as ritual washings should
be given up, as well as any specific choice of food, circumcision, and membership in
the “Alliance Israélite Universelle,” which he holds to be a Jewish nationalist institution,
membership in which is incompatible with German nationality.
98. Endner, “Zur Judenfrage,” 118; emphasis in the original. Lazarus (Was heisst national?
27) had already taken up the issue that only few Jews went into agriculture even after the
laws that had barred Jews from doing so had been abolished. He writes that this statisti-
cal fact does not prove the alleged Jewish unwillingness to turn to “productive work.”
One should not look at the absolute numbers of Jews and Christians in agriculture but
rather at the numbers of urban residents moving to the countryside and then examine
how many of them are Jewish and how many are Christian. His argument implies that
in times of overall decreasing significance of agriculture a movement toward the coun-
tryside among any group of the urban population would be minute.
99. Endner, “Zur Judenfrage,” 110.
100. From Treitschke’s Politics, quoted in K. Krieger, Der “Berliner Antisemitismusstreit,”
611.
101. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 28–31; Oppenheim writes similarly: “How many
Humboldt, Ritter, Helmholtz, Ranke does even the ingenious [geistesgrosse] German
nation produce in a century! Since the Jews in Germany constitute just a bit more than
one percent of the population . . . it is highly honorable for them to be represented at
all” (“Stöcker und Treitschke,” 19).
102. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 68.
103. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 68–69.
104. “Never in my lifetime has any Jewish publication equaled the polemical perfidy
of the Roman Jesuit paper, which carries to the shame of the German people the name
Germania, nor the malignant slander of the Reichsglocke by Herr Gehlsen nor the ar-
rogant scorn of any national feeling in the Vaterland edited by the ur-Germanic Herr
Dr. Sigl!” (Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 68–69).
105. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 71–72.
106. Samuel von Pufendorf (1632–94) was a legal theorist and defender of absolutism;
like Treitschke, he was from Saxony.
 Notes to pages 89–94 413

107. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 72.

108. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 53. In his second reply
to Treitschke, Breßlau remarked drily: “I do not think that the Jews who are generally
held to be good in business base their decisions about the placement of advertisements
on other criteria than the highest possible circulation of their advertisements; and as
subscribers they can hardly have a significantly larger influence on the press than cor-
responds to their numerical strength in the German Reich” (“Nachwort zur zweiten
Auflage,” 94). Similarly, Philippson wrote in the Allgemeine Zeitung on February 17, 1880,
“Herr Treitschke knows little about business,” adding that advertisements obviously go
wherever they are most effective.
109. Treitschke wrote later in his response to Mommsen: “Who fights today in the
press the arrogance of the Jews does not misuse the power of the mightier but stands
one against a hundred” (“Erwiderung an Mommsen,” 229).
110. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 55.
111. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 56–57.

4. State, Nation, Race, Religion

1. Treitschke and his editor found these considerations on daily affairs important enough
to include them unabridged in the volume Deutsche Kämpfe: Neue Folge (Treitschke).
2. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 5.
3. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 1.
4. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 3.
5. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 5.
6. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 8.
7. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 8; the formulation is quite typical for Treitschke’s
habit of invoking anthropological-psychological home truths.
8. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 9.
9. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 11.
10. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 12.
11. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 13–14.
12. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 15.
13. “Schein”; this seems to be a reference to the Shylock myth. See note 4 for chapter 5.
14. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 26.
15. Seligmann Meyer argued in his response to Treitschke that the Sabbath is a bulwark
of idealism and of the idea of God, and thus against atheism and materialism. Christian
teachers who prevent children from celebrating the Sabbath promoted materialism (Ein
Wort an Treitschke, 10).
16. He claims that the emancipated Jews demand “literal parity [buchstäbliche Parität].”
The examples he gives are quite telling, too: he complains about the removal of Christian
pictures (from public buildings or state schools), a measure that seems in perfect keeping
with the concept that state and public sphere be secular.
414 Notes to pages 94–96

17. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 27.

18. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 49.
19. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 50.
20. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 50.
21. Seligmann Meyer points out that Treitschke’s complaint that since emancipation
conversions have become more rare contradicts his earlier claim that the Jews’ old religion
is respected as sacred (Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 23; Meyer, Zurückweisung des dritten
judenfeindlichen Artikels, 7). Naudh expresses in this context “the hope that his [Treitschke’s]
healthy German nature will more and more outgrow the liberal straitjacket” (“Professoren
über Israel,” 199). Naudh points to a small shift in Treitschke’s argument between the first
and second contributions, which he interprets as the foreboding of a more fundamental
shift to come: “[Treitschke] acknowledges now that the feeling of living unity that is nec-
essary for national consciousness is incompatible with a contradiction in the most holy
questions of the mind [Gemüth], and after more consideration about the issue, he will
further acknowledge that this contradiction of the mind [gemüthliche Gegensatz] is a
matter of natural disposition. Therefore it cannot be overcome by baptizing, which always
remains something external if it happens without the [natural/racial] disposition, contrary
to the opinion that Treitschke [still] seems to hold. The spiritual [gemüthliche] and even
the physical difference between Germans and Jews will always spoil the feeling of ‘living
unity’” (200). Naudh suggests that Treitschke’s insistence on a religious-spiritual difference
will inevitably lead him to acknowledge biological and racial difference.
22. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 50; Philippson comments
that Treitschke’s remark that the state had the “natural right” to decide who takes part in
its leadership is “nonsense” (Allgemeine Zeitung, February 17, 1880, 100).
23. Seligmann Meyer points out that Treitschke refers here to an incident at the Catholic
primary school in Linz on the Rhine that is also attended by Jewish children (Zurück-
weisung des dritten judenfeindlichen Artikels, 9–10). The local synagogue complained that
teachers used a book which stated that Jesus had been crucified by the Jews. (Obviously,
Jesus was crucified by the Roman administration, irrespective of whatever one might
believe was the role played by different Jewish groups and institutions. The gospels do not
claim that “the Jews” were responsible for the death of Jesus; only Paul in the first letter to
the Thessalonians introduces this notion, apparently as a reaction to his own expulsion
from Jerusalem [Thieme, “Die religiös motivierte Judenfeindschaft,” 49–50]).
24. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 51; Philippson points
out that only a few years earlier Treitschke had argued in a way completely opposed to
his current position. In the context of the Kulturkampf, Treitschke had urged the state
to break church influence on education in order to avoid a “new religious war” and to
ensure that principles of peaceful toleration are central to education. Also, in his earlier
essay on “Liberty,” Treitschke had written that the “moral content [sittliche Gehalt]” of
Christianity had less and less to do with the actual church but was being represented by
the (secular) people (Allgemeine Zeitung, March 2, 1880, 132).
 Notes to pages 96–99 415

25. Allgemeine Zeitung, April 6, 1880, 211.

26. Allgemeine Zeitung, April 6, 1880, 212. This seems to be an aside on the Kantian
concept of religion as promoted by Cohen (“Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 126–27,
146–47).
27. Allgemeine Zeitung, April 13, 1880, 225.
28. Carl Vogt (probably the famous zoologist and “physiological materialist,” former
member of the 1848 Frankfurt Parliament, who then held a professorship in Switzerland)
also reproached Treitschke in a newspaper article (reprinted in the Allgemeine Zeitung,
April 6, 1880, 212) for “excessive patriotism.” He describes him as a “Slavonic German” who
“throws their race in the faces of the Hebrew Germans [der den von Hebräern gezeugten
Deutschen ihre Race an den Kopf wirft].” Vogt points to two different motivations for
Treitschke’s anti-Judaism. First, Treitschke is the “mouthpiece of the country squires
of the Brandenburg Marches [uckermärkischen Krautjunkertums]” (Uckermark is a
landscape north of Berlin). These are people who live beyond their means and therefore
consider the “economical, industrious and business-minded [geschäftsgewandte] Jews”
their biggest enemy. Second, Treitschke is a professor: Christian scholars in Prussia lost
their monopoly on the profession just a few decades ago, and “competition from Jews
is growing because they are more versatile, faster in taking up a trend that is guaranteed
to bring fame and they possess better means to survive the hard [unpaid] times of be-
ing a Privatdozent.” He adds that the Protestants in France have exactly the same role in
academia that the Jews have in Germany.
29. Allgemeine Zeitung, April 13, 1880, 226.
30. Philippson, who defends in this text the liberal concept of the state, wrote in
another article (Allgemeine Zeitung, April 6, 1880, 210) that the “lust for conversion
[Bekehrungslust],” which can be observed in the “most recent movement” against the
Jews, is motivated not by religion but by the existence of the state. Philippson seems to
have intended to contrast the actually existing state with the concept of the liberal state.
He adds that a determined attempt at Jewish conversion first emerged when Christianity
became a state religion.
31. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 53–54.
32. Breßlau adds in a footnote that he understands those to be “Jewish” who have
both parents born as Jews (“Zur Judenfrage,” 54) and refrains from using the concept
“Semite” as popular and imprecise parlance.
33. Endner, “Zur Judenfrage,” 99.
34. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 149–50.
35. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 150; “dies Hereinragen [literally: peeping
or sticking into] eines Stückes ältester Zeit in die Gegenwart.”
36. “das vom Banne befreite Element”
37. This seems to refer both to the religious wars and to the national fragmentation
before 1871.
38. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 157.
416 Notes to pages 99–102

39. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 158.

40. Even Bamberger, though, was not free of the sentiment against “Eastern Jews”
shared by many assimilated German Jews at the time. Zucker quotes him writing that
“the entry of this ‘inexhaustible . . . oriental proletariat’ into academic studies ‘threatens
our Jewish West with embarrassment’” (“Ludwig Bamberger,” 349).
41. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 159; Joël argued similarly to Bamberger:
“All the talk about the difficulties of amalgamation is professorial doctrinairism anyway.
We Jews living here are Orientals to the same degree that today’s Germans are Asians.
We are supposed to be aliens because our fathers allegedly lived in Palestine eighteen
hundred years ago. Allegedly because it is well known that there were large Jewish com-
munities in Europe before the emergence of Christianity. Actually these made possible
the dissemination of Christianity in the first place. . . . Is Herr von Treitschke able to
tell where his fathers were eighteen hundred years ago? . . . Does a modern nationality
exclusively consist of individuals of the same descent? . . . Are the English not a great
nation because they are a mixed people, are they not perhaps a great nation for that very
reason?” (“Offener Brief an Treitschke,” 20).
42. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 159–60.
43. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 160. In his original contribution, Treitschke
had written about this congress at length and very positively (“Unsere Aussichten,” 5).
44. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 161.
45. Lazarus later claimed (in An die deutschen Juden) that his was the very first one.
46. Lazarus draws on contributions published in the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie and
Sprachwissenschaft, which he cofounded in 1859. When the discipline of Völkerpsychologie
was newly created it had to define its object of research, namely, Völker (Lazarus, Was heisst
national? 7). Lazarus draws on an article published in the fourth volume of the Zeitschrift
für Völkerpsychologie and Sprachwissenschaft by R. Boeckh, who argues that language is
the most significant category defining a nation. In the subsequent section of his lecture,
Lazarus elaborates on Boeckh’s approach using a programmatic essay by himself and the
coeditor, Steinthal, published in the first issue of the Zeitschrift from 1859.
47. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 8–9.
48. In April 1880 the Deutsche Wacht published a detailed critique of Lazarus’s “What
Does National Mean?” that is signed “N.” (probably Naudh/Nordmann; Deutsche Wa-
cht, 386). The text argues against Lazarus that every schoolboy knew “that ‘national’ is
derived from ‘nascor’ and refers to the innate [Angeborenes].” “N.” claims that Lazarus
wants to “sidestep” this obvious fact and gives the sarcastic advice that Lazarus should
better ask “What does people [Volk] mean,” because “with the concept Volk it is possible
to operate more by sleight of hand [mehr Taschenspieler-Tricks zu spielen] than with
the simple concept national.”
49. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 12.
50. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 10.
51. “mannigfachen Ausbildung des innerlich Einen”
 Notes to pages 102–106 417

52. Lazarus uses Volk synonymously with Nation.

53. “in naturgeschichtlicher Weise gemachte Eintheilung der Menschenart”
54. Varietäten; the term “variety” was then also used as a synonym of “race.”
55. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 11.
56. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 12.
57. “ist auch das Abbild der anschauenden Thätigkeit selbst” (Lazarus, Was heisst
national? 12).
58. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 12.
59. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 13; emphasis added.
60. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 13.
61. “und damit auch die Sache Volk” (Lazarus, Was heisst national? 13).
62. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 13.
63. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 14.
64. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 14–15.
65. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 15.
66. “uns in eine geschlossene Gruppe unserer Mitgeschöpfe hineinzustellen”; Lazarus
quotes from a text by Gustav Rümelin, a “longtime liberal” who embraced Malthusian
population control policy (i.e., he demanded “limitations on the poorer classes’ right to
marry”) and celebrated rural life (Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century,
197). Rümelin was the chancellor of the University of Tübingen.
67. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 16.
68. This is an allusion to the book of Ruth.
69. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 16–17.
70. “Aber unser Gemüth . . . wird stets von einer stillen Sehnsucht begleitet sein
nach einer vollen einheitlichen Lebensgemeinschaft. Es wird ihm als ein ideales Ziel
die zentrale, alle Lebensziele umschliessende Gruppe vorschweben, in welcher alle die
einzelnen Gruppirungsmotive ihren Halt-und Sammelpunkt finden, in der wir das volle
Bewusstsein haben: das sind die Unsrigen, die Angehörigen zu denen wir stehen, mit
denen wir ausharren, deren Geschick wir theilen, von denen zu scheiden ein unerträglicher
Gedanke wäre. Diess ideale Ziel der Universal-Gruppe, der vollen Lebensgemeinschaft, ist
es nun, was unser deutsches Wort Volk in seinem tiefern Sinn bezeichnen will, ohne sich
darum auch jenen unvollkommeneren Formen, die durch die einzelnen Hauptmerkmale
bestimmt werden, zu verschließen” (Lazarus, Was heisst national? 17).
71. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 17–18.
72. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 18. Lazarus’s text—be it a unique intervention or
just mirroring a general trend of thinking—shows how much the contemporary dis-
cussion of the nation in the social sciences is rooted in the nineteenth century. It would
be worthwhile exploring how this strikingly contemporary-sounding definition was
received throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century, whether it was preceded
by or paralleled by similar formulations, and especially whether or to what extent Ernest
Renan’s lecture from 1882 and Otto Bauer’s Nationalitätenfrage (1907; 2000), which seem
418 Notes to pages 106–108

to echo it, were directly influenced by it. Alfred Leicht writes in his book on Lazarus
that Renan’s lecture (1882) was consciously based on Lazarus’s lecture, a copy of which
Lazarus had sent to Renan (Leicht, Lazarus, 19–20). Renan also sent a copy of his 1882
lecture to Lazarus. Although Renan failed to mention Lazarus, the close affinity between
the texts was observed by contemporaries, who urged Lazarus to complain (which he
did not do).
73. “grobsinnlichen Materialismus der Welt-und Lebensanschauung überhaupt”
74. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 21–22.
75. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 22.
76. Lazarus suggests that it is the form common among animals, who hate each other
“for no reason but their difference.” However, “living in a peace-breathing human habitat
[friedensathmenden Menschenwohnung], dog and cat learn how to get along.” “A human
being, however, in whom the feeling of humanity has not yet arisen or is already stifled,
sees an enemy in every human being who is different.” Lazarus’s argument is based on a
dualism of a bestial-material natural substratum on which- and in opposition to which-
humans develop spirit and sociability. The power of spirit over matter is so strong that
it even extends to animals when they are being domesticated.
77. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 22.
78. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 25, 26; Lazarus anticipates and rejects the possible
counter-argument that only the Jews constitute a community of belief and tribe (“sind
Glaubens-und Stammesgenossen”) at the same time. Against this he argues that also the
Germans, the English, the Dutch and the Danes share “tribal” background as well as Prot-
estant religion (“sind germanische Stammes-und protestantische Glaubensgenossen”).
Furthermore, for the actual life of a French Jew it does not make a difference whether or
not there are Jews in Abyssinia, and neither do (Christian) Germans become less German
because Christianity might be spreading amongst the Iroquois. The relation of a group
of people to the particular state they inhabit is not necessarily affected by the existence
of another group of people of the same tribe or religion (or both) in another state.
79. This dictum by Mar Samuel, who taught in the third century ce, can be found in
the Babylonian Talmud, Baba Kamma 113b. It says that dina demalkhuta dina: “The law
of the land [lit.: kingdom] is [recognized as part of Jewish] law.” (I am grateful to Prof.
Bernard Jackson for this information.) Belke comments that Lazarus overstretches the
meaning of the sentence in a quasi-Protestant direction (“Einleitung,” lxx).
80. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 27; page 3 of the appendix of Lazarus’s text.
81. As if complementing Lazarus’s discussion, or perhaps as a discrete criticism of
it, Philippson (in a review of new pamphlets on the “Jewish question,” taking up the
formulation in the title of a pamphlet under review) suggests replacing the discussion of
“What Does National Mean?” with the more pragmatic one, “What Does Alien [fremd]
Mean?” (Allgemeine Zeitung, October 5, 1880). He argues that anyone who is born in
a country to parents “who belong to this country [die diesem Lande angehören]” and
who has been raised and educated there and in its language “is not alien.” This “high
 Notes to pages 108–112 419

and holy right” is unaffected by anyone’s definitions and discussions of the concept of
“nationality.”
82. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 57–59.
83. Treitschke’s lecture notes titled “Politics” contain a very similar passage that uses
slightly stronger language: only “Jewish presumptuousness” has “by a sleight of hand
[Taschenspielertrick] confused Religion with Konfession” (quoted in K. Krieger, Der
“Berliner Antisemitismusstreit,” 290).
84. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 57–58.
85. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 58.
86. “in dem angehobenen Gange ihrer christlichen Gesittung”; I am not clear about
the exact meaning of “angehobenen Gange.” Obviously, it expresses some kind of su-
periority; Gang could either be “pace,” “movement,” or “stance.” The imagery could
either be that Christians—further ahead in evolution—walk upright while Jews tend
to stoop, or that Christians walk “at a faster pace” than Jews. The strange formulation
“angehobenen Gange” occurs in a passage from Fichte’s Die Staatslehre, oder über das
Verhältnis des Urstaates zum Vernunftreiche (1813), which Treitschke quotes in his 1862
essay “Fichte and the National Idea” (269): “Eine Menschenmenge, durch gemeinsame,
sie entwickelnde Geschichte zu Errichtung eines Reiches vereint, nennt man ein Volk.
Dessen Selbständigkeit und Freiheit besteht darin, in dem angehobenen Gange aus sich
selber sich fortzuentwickeln zu einem Reiche”: “A multitude becomes a people through
common history; its autonomy and freedom consist in its self-guided development [in
dem angehobenen Gange], toward becoming an empire.” The closeness of the idea to
Treitschke’s thinking is evident, and it seems quite likely that he picked up the unclear
image of the “angehobenen Gange” from this passage by Fichte.
87. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 59–60.
88. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 60.
89. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 133.
90. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 130.
91. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 130–31. Cohen seems to be following
here Kant’s argument that it is essential for the state that there is religion but that the
subtleties of differing confessions (Glaubensarten) should not be the state’s concern (see
Kant, Der Streit der Fakultäten, 30–33, 44–67; this is Abschnitt 1,II).
92. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 130–31.
93. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 134; Treitschke, “Noch einige Be-
merkungen zur Judenfrage,” 57.
94. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 134.
95. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 135.
96. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 136; compare Lazarus, Was heisst
national? 36–37.
97. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 137; emphasis in the original. Cohen
refers here to Lazarus (Was heist national? 37): “Burke once said in the English parliament:
420 Notes to pages 112–115

to make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” “Country” is rendered as
“Vaterland” in the German, “lovely” as “liebenswürdig.” Lazarus uses this formulation
in the context of his argument that the German nation is more committed to humanist
ideals than is any other nation, i.e. it is—as long as it maintains this commitment—
particularly “liebenswürdig,” literally: worth loving. This formulation can be found in
Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France” (Reflections, 241; this is page 116 of
the first edition of 1790, roughly one third into the overall text). Whether there is also
a source in a speech by Burke I do not know. Burke argues here against “mechanic phi-
losophy,” “that sort of reason that banishes the affections,” and for the preservation and
cultivation of “public affections” and particular “manners.”
98. “Erster Laut den ich gelallet, süsses, erstes Mutterwort!” Cohen paraphrases the
folksong “Muttersprache” (Mother Tongue) by Max von Schenkendorf (1783–1817, born
in the Eastern Prussian town of Tilsit). The first verse of the song goes: “Muttersprache,
Mutterlaut, / wie so wonnesam, so traut! / Erstes Wort, das mir erschallet, / süßes, erstes
Liebeswort, / erster Ton, den ich gelallet, / klingest ewig in mir fort.”
99. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 137.
100. The chain of five reasons—all introduced by “because”—is largely tautological
and of a rhetorical character—quite out of the ordinary in the context of Cohen’s usually
rather sober, neo-Kantian discourse.
101. By extension, Cohen’s critique could be applied to the rhetoric that is character-
istic of the discourses of the missions and “burdens” taken on by European imperial-
ism and, more recently, of the “humanitarian” military interventions mounted by the
“international community.”
102. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 137.
103. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 138.
104. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 138.
105. “des Volkes, zu dem wir verschmelzen wollen”
106. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 139; emphasis in the original.
107. “Missgewächs.” This metaphor somewhat resonates with Mommsen’s notion
of antisemitism as the “Missgeburt” of “national feeling” (see p. 50); the almost iden-
tical image serves in the one case to denounce too much nationalism, in the other,
too little.
108. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 139.
109. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 141.
110. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 141; “Die Sittlichkeit eines Volkes ist
eine nationale Einheit, oder strebt einer solchen zu. Innerhalb einer nationalen Gemein-
samkeit kann und darf es eine individuelle Sittlicheit geben. Aber keine in besonderen
religiösen Gruppen oder Sekten substantiierte ist wünschenwert.”
111. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 142.
112. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 146–47.
113. “Seinem Staate dienen zu können, muss als heilig gelten, wie Gottesdienst.”
 Notes to pages 115–122 421

114. “zu rechter Unbefangenheit in euch lebendig werden”

115. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 147; this passage is from the concluding
section of Cohen’s text, which consists of three admonitions: two addressed to specific
groups within Jewry (Orthodox and Reform Jews), and one toward Jewry in general.
The passage quoted here is addressed to the Orthodox Jews, which helps to explain the
emphasis on the relevance of the state. The parallel sequence that is addressed to the
Reform Jews emphasizes the relevance of religion (see note 192 below).
116. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 200; emphasis in the original. Naudh is probably
quoting from Hegel’s Vorlesung über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte (127), “Das Mate-
rial seiner [des Geistes] Verwirklichung.” If this is what Naudh quotes, he is misquoting:
Hegel does not leap (like Naudh does) from “state” to “people” but explicitly talks here
about states, not peoples.
117. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 194.
118. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 194–95.
119. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 195.
120. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 193.
121. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 193, 194.
122. On the Kulturkampf see pp. 261–62.
123. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 193.
124. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 192.
125. See pp. 169–70; compare Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 56–57.
126. With “ethno-class” I mean that Naudh’s argument evokes the existence of a group
of concrete people who are at the same time an economic and an ethnic group, as in
“caste.”
127. “die Empfindung der grossen Zusammengehörigkeit”; Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort
über unser Judenthum,” 212.
128. Quatrefages’s work was based on craniological research (Mendes-Flohr and Re-
inharz, The Jew in the Modern World, 287).
129. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 213.
130. The untranslatable eben marks this as a universally accepted, indisputable state-
ment.
131. Quoted in Dreßen, Gesetz und Gewalt, 128–30; the poem was first published by
Karl Marx in Neue Rheinische Zeitung and subsequently widely disseminated as a leaflet,
despite being banned in Prussia.
132. “Und Alles feig durch euch verscherzt was trotzig wir errungen!” (Cravenly you
threw away what our defiance had gained!)
133. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 213.
134. Mommsen silently identifies here “the state in antiquity” with the Greek and
Roman examples, which have been either city-states or empires. His formulation “even
beyond the demise of their [the Jews’] state,” however, presupposes that at least the Jews
had a national state back then. Because he does not develop this, it is not clear whether
422 Notes to pages 122–127

Mommsen is aware of this inconsistency; he might have thought of the ancient Jewish
state as an exception—a national state avant la lettre.
135. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 214.
136. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 215.
137. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 216.
138. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 217.
139. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 217.
140. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 218.
141. It appears that even Bismarck shared the underlying notion of nation formation.
He is quoted with saying (in 1892): “The Jews bring into the mix of the different German
tribes a certain Mousseux that should not be underestimated” (Wawrzinek, Die Entstehung
der deutschen Antisemitenparteien, 31).
142. “allem deutschen Wesen feindlich”; Treitschke, “Erwiderung an Mommsen,”
228.
143. Treitschke, “Erwiderung an Mommsen,” 228.
144. Treitschke, “Erwiderung an Mommsen,” 228.
145. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 28; Treitschke is here not quoting Tacitus literally;
see the exact quotation in the following.
146. “odio humani generis convicti sunt”; Graetz, “Erwiderung an Treitschke,” 27;
Cassel, Wider Heinrich von Treitschke, 24.
147. The first thirteen chapters of book 5 of Historiae deal with Judaea. The thrust of
Tacitus’s attitude here is clearly that the Jews have no religiones (holy customs) but only
the superstitio that consists in the (for Tacitus) abstractly monotheistic belief (“Iudaei
mente sola unumque numen intellegunt”). Tacitus opposes the Jews’ “mos absurdus
sordidusque” (grotesque and ugly customs) to the “festos laetosque ritus” (festive and
happy rites) of a local Gentile cult. He suggests that the Jews’ purely spiritual (“mente
sola”) superstitio produces an antisocial, anti-state, and anti-patriotic mind-set: this is
the meaning of “most disgusting” (“taeterrima gens, sordidus mos”) in this context.
Tacitus interprets the Jewish religion thus as a social institution and evaluates it from
the perspective of the necessities of the imperial state. Although there is without doubt
an element of continuity in anti-Jewish sentiments and reasoning from antiquity to the
present, particularly insofar as the relation of the Jews to the state is concerned, the claim
of an uninterrupted essential continuity is untenable because there have not been two
continually existing unchanging parties—“the Jews” and “the non-Jews.”
148. “Judenhetze,” in quotes in the original; Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 181.
149. Naudh quotes Tacitus calling the Jews a “deterrima gens.” Actually, the text reads
“taeterrima gens,” a “most disgusting people” (“deterrima” is not a Latin word).
150. Treitschke, “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” 36.
151. Treitschke refers to Annales 15:44, a notoriously difficult passage; it is impossible
to assess this here as a problem in its own right. Tacitus refers to the “Chrestianos”; it is
unclear whether this means “Christians,” because there seems to have been another Jewish
 Notes to pages 127–130 423

sect with a similar-sounding name (followers of a Jew called Chrestos) at the time in Rome
(see Feldman, “Contribution of Professor Baron,” 22). My feeling is that Treitschke has a
better reading of Tacitus: whoever the “Chrestianos” were, there seems to be an anti-Jewish
sentiment involved that is shared by Tacitus. The aristocratic republican Tacitus can be
expected to dislike any religious sect that would separate itself from the official Roman
imperial doctrine, something that would have been interpreted as “odium generis huma-
nae”: a refusal to adapt to the ruling ideology—if it is “universalist” like the Pax Romana
ideology was—would have been interpreted as directed against humanity. Neither the
“ethnic” background of the adherents of such cults nor any theological subtleties would
have been relevant for Tacitus. Feldman points out that secure assessments of the extent
of dislike of Jews in the ancient world is impossible (“Contribution of Professor Baron,”
10). We cannot know how relevant and representative the anti-Jewish remarks are that
we know of, and there also seem to be many pro-Jewish statements.
152. Treitschke, “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” 37; as the alleged quintessence of
anti-Jewish attitudes “throughout all of recent history,” Treitschke quotes a line by the
Roman writer Juvenal stating that the Jews despise Roman law and “teach, follow and
fear” only Jewish law (38).
153. Treitschke, “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” 37–38.
154. This specifically nineteenth-century idea of a temporal unity of a historical entity
called “Europe” or “Occident” from the Greek city-states to the present is what Samir
Amin (Eurocentrism) calls “Eurocentrism.”
155. If the Roman imperial elite disliked the Jews, it was because of their significant
success in making proselytes, i.e., because of their not being a static, limited “ethnic
group.”
156. It is more than tempting to see in this analysis—perhaps the most sympathetic
thing Treitschke ever says about the Jews—a projection from his own account of the
history of the German people.
157. Graetz, “Mein letztes Wort an Treitschke,” 47.
158. Graetz, “Mein letztes Wort an Treitschke,” 47.
159. This formulation is borrowed sarcastically from Juvenal (Cassel, Wider Heinrich
von Treitschke, 26).
160. Cassel, Wider Heinrich von Treitschke, 26.
161. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 44.
162. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 44–45.
163. The first synod took place in 1869 in Leipzig, the second in Augsburg in 1871.
164. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 45.
165. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 46; Lazarus adds to this some quotes taken from
Goethe, the ethnologist Oskar Peschel, the philosopher Hermann Lotze, and finally
Ernest Renan, all of whom testify to the affinity of Judaism to Christianity and the
principles of the modern state.
166. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 50–51. Lazarus argues that the modernist spirit of the
424 Notes to pages 130–132

first Israelitic Synod had been shared by all participants irrespective of their allegiance
to one of the strands within Jewry, including the Orthodox Jews, who embrace and ap-
preciate “the whole of the development” of Jewish thinking, “only perhaps a bit more
than they themselves would know” (54). Lazarus quotes, among others, Ernest Renan’s
praise of the Talmud and Judaism in general for its rationalism: a religion that links its
adherents through the praxis of observing rules in everyday life rather than through
dogma is a “reasonable” religion.
167. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 40.
168. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 41.
169. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 22.
170. Lazarus emphasizes that Luther demanded that the Jews be given equal economic
rights so that they would not be driven to usury: one should allow the Jews “to participate
in trade and production so that they could gain reason and space enough to dwell with
and around us [mit lassen werben und aerbeiten, damit sie Ursach und Raum gewinnen,
bei und umb uns zu seyn]” (Was heisst national? 24).
171. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 61–62.
172. Cassel’s job, though, was to convert Jews, which prompted some Jewish commenta-
tors to reject his “support” as unwelcome. The fact that Treitschke attacks so aggressively
a converted Jew whose business is to convert more Jews to Protestantism (he accuses
Cassel of “quarrelsome offensive racial arrogance” [händelsüchtiger, beleidigender Ras-
sendünkel]” [“Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 60]) seems to be motivated
by ill-feeling toward the converted.
173. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 185–86. In an interesting twist, Naudh lauds the
Catholic Church for having withheld the Jewish Bible from believers, while the fanaticism
typical of Protestantism stems from its recourse to the Hebrew sources.
174. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 186. Although “monotheistic elements” do not
make monotheism, this observation is not wrong, but it merely illustrates the intercon-
nectedness of all ancient mediterrannean cultures irrespective of “race” (or rather, of the
grammatical structure of the “Semitic” or “Indo-European” languages people used).
175. Cohen asserts that his profession as a teacher of “German philosophy” obliges him
to “confess” (“Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 126). Since his teaching is intrinsically
related to religious issues, he feels he has to legitimate himself before the “Protestant men
who not only granted me citizenship but also the religious trust to be teaching as one
of them amongst their number.” Cohen will argue not as a representative of a “Jewish
party” but as a “representative of philosophy at a German university who confesses to
Israelitic monotheism.” Although this is “painful [peinlich]” to him, he will also have to
criticize “in some points” his coreligionists. Nevertheless, Cohen confesses to the moral
obligation to take sides with the “coreligionist who is threatened in his belief ” (145).
176. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 125.
177. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 130.
178. Seligmann Meyer stresses that the differences between Protestantism and
 Notes to pages 132–135 425

Catholicism have been no less murderous than those between Christianity and Juda-
ism (Zurückweisung des dritten judenfeindlichen Artikels, 17–18).
179. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 130.
180. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 126–27. Cohen quotes (without refer-
ence) a footnote from Kant’s “Perpetual Peace (First Supplement: On the Guarantee of a
Perpetual Peace)” (Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” 114). Reiss translates Kant’s term Glaubensarten
with “confessions.” Compare also the reference quoted in note 91 above.
181. “sittliche Ideal des Menschengeschlechts”; Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Juden-
frage,” 127.
182. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 128.
183. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 129.
184. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 131; emphasis in the original.
185. In an aside on Felix Mendelssohn, Cohen plays down the relevance of conversions.
He asserts that Mendelssohn did not care much about his Jewishness and seems not even
to have been aware of his grandfather’s (Moses Mendelssohn) relevance; however, it was
not conversion to Christianity but his (Jewish) “religious blood” turning him “toward
oratorio not opera” that enabled him to direct Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.
186. “in einem modernen Culturvolk”; Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,”
133; emphasis in the original.
187. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 144; emphasis in the original.
188. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 146.
189. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 149.
190. This argument seems to anticipate Durkheim’s chosisme.
191. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 149.
192. This argument parallels his address to the Orthodox Jews stressing the relevance
and ethical gravity of the state.
193. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 147.
194. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 148; Philippson (Allgemeine Zeitung,
March 16, 1880, 162–64) points out that Cohen is ambivalent about whether Protestantism
is already the higher form of Christianity that would allow Judaism to “dissolve into it,”
or “not yet.” Nevertheless, Philippson remarks sarcastically, Cohen seems to see himself
already there, ahead of the field. He holds against Cohen that any “higher unification”
with Judaism is not immediately imminent, because Protestantism itself is divided into
many sects and subdivisions (163). Philippson accuses Cohen of “wishful thinking” in this
context. In particular he takes issue with Cohen’s formulation that Christianity needs to
take “a purer form” (164). He suggests that Cohen uses the concept “form” to make the
necessary process appear easier and more imminent than it actually is: he argues that
form corresponds to and follows from essence (except in the case of “empty” forms that
simply collapse and disappear), and concludes that Christianity is in need of “a purer
essence” rather than just “a purer form.”
195. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 174.
426 Notes to pages 135–138

196. “sich selbst vergötternde Menschen.” Joël names Feuerbach, Moleschott, and
Vogt, none of whom were Jewish.
197. Joël, “Offener Brief an Treitschke,” 17.
198. Joël, “Offener Brief an Treitschke,” 24–25; Treitschke (“Unsere Aussichten,” 25) finds
any critique of Christian religious affairs on the part of Jews particularly inappropriate
and a “busybody” intervention in what should be none of their business. Against this
claim, Seligmann Meyer points out that even the ultramontanist press has acknowl-
edged that Jews in official positions—Lasker is being mentioned as an example—have
always remained neutral in Christian religious affairs, such as in the consultations on
the legislation concerning Catholic cult (Zurückweisung des dritten judenfeindlichen
Artikels, 8–9).
199. Joël, “Offener Brief an Treitschke,” 13.
200. Joël, “Offener Brief an Treitschke,” 15.
201. Treitschke, “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” 30.
202. The phrase “cultural insiderism” is used by Werner Sollors in Beyond Ethnicity;
quoted by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic (3).
203. Treitschke backhandedly excuses Graetz’s anti-German approach with his Jew-
ishness: “a historian who looks at German things from a specifically Jewish perspective
must inevitably perceive some things oddly and one-sidedly”; “Herr Graetz und sein
Judenthum,” 39.
204. Treitschke, “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” 39.
205. Treitschke, “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” 41. Treitschke takes particular
offense at Graetz’s (actually quite perceptive) comment that Friedrich Schlegel’s novel
Lucinde is a sibling (Zwillingsschrift) of Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion (both
1799). While the Protestant Treitschke unsurprisingly holds Schleiermacher’s theology
in highest esteem (in contrast to Graetz, who is conservative in religious affairs), both
authors agree on condemning Lucinde: Lucinde challenged traditional morality and
gender conceptions as much as Schleiermacher’s Speeches revolutionized the Protestant
discourse on religion.
206. “in seinem zufälligen Geburtslande vollständig aufging”; Treitschke, Herr Graetz
und sein Judenthum,” 41–42.
207. Treitschke, “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” 43.
208. Graetz replied that his remark that “Börne was more than Lessing” had meant
that Börne contributed more to (national) liberation; Graetz, “Mein letztes Wort an
Treitschke,” 51.
209. Treitschke, “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” 43.
210. Treitschke, “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” 44; this is the last sentence of the
last chapter in volume 11 (Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, 582). Graetz discusses here the
popular movements in February and March 1848 that, as he writes, regularly demanded
the emancipation of the Jews. The last two sentences are: “Die Freiheit ist für sie [die
Juden] errungen, sie selbst scheinen als Wächter derselben eingesetzt; die Erringung
 Notes to pages 138–141 427

der Gleichheit und Brüderlichkeit steht noch bevor. Die Anerkennung der Juden als
vollberechtigte Glieder ist bereits so ziemlich durchgedrungen; die Anerkennung des
Judenthums aber unterliegt noch schweren Kämpfen.”
211. Graetz rejects Treitschke’s interpretation of his claim and asserts that what he
meant was that “Jewish religion or doctrine is not yet recognized, that Judaism is not
recognized as a religion or confession, that Jewish clergymen here and there are not on
an equal footing with Christian ones. You however insinuate that I was talking about
Jewish nationality, as if I wanted Jewish nationality to be recognized. But is Jewry/Judaism
(Judenthum) identical with [Jewish] nationality?” (“Mein letztes Wort an Treitschke,”
51; emphasis in the original). Graetz denies the ambivalence that might be found in his
formulation “recognition of Judaism” and claims that Treitschke’s interpretation is “ma-
licious.” Treitschke’s interpretation of the particular quote is indeed at least one-sided.
Seligmann Meyer points out—against Treitschke’s interpretation of Graetz’s remark that
“Judenthum” still remained officially to be recognized—that Judaism as a religious cult was
at the time formally recognized only in Alsace-Lorraine, Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg,
Hessen, and Nassau but not in Prussia. In Prussia only the local communities (Syna-
gogengemeinden) but not the religious community as a whole (Religionsgenossenschaft)
are recognized—to the effect that Jewish priests, teachers, and so forth did not share the
privileges in taxation and public protocol that their Christian colleagues enjoyed. Meyer
argues that this is what Graetz was referring to (Ein Wort an Treitschke, 32–33).
212. Treitschke, “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” 44–45; emphasis in the original.
213. Treitschke, “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” 45.
214. Treitschke, “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” 46.
215. Treitschke, “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” 43–44.
216. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 24.
217. Graetz, “Mein letztes Wort an Treitschke,” 48.
218. Graetz, “Mein letztes Wort an Treitschke,” 49.
219. Graetz, “Mein letztes Wort an Treitschke,” 49.
220. Graetz, “Mein letztes Wort an Treitschke,” 50.
221. Graetz, “Mein letztes Wort an Treitschke,” 28.
222. Allgemeine Zeitung, January 13, 1880.
223. Allgemeine Zeitung, January 13, 1880, 21.
224. “als Geschichtsforscher Parteigänger und Romantiker”
225. In a supplement to the Allgemeine Zeitung dated February 10, 1880, a very angry
letter by Graetz can be found followed by a response stating that Graetz is “unable to
understand the modern times.” The author of the response indicates that the conflict
with Graetz is about the “unification of Judaism [Judenthum] with the life of nation
and state, [which means] the sincere entry [of the Jews] into the life of culture” (page
2 of the supplement).
226. Graetz as quoted by Nadyr (Offener Brief), 19). The reference is to Graetz, Ge-
schichte der Juden, 369.
428 Notes to pages 141–147

227. Joël, “Offener Brief an Treitschke,” 24.

228. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 18.
229. S. Meyer, Ein Wort an Treitschke, 10.
230. Oppenheim, “Stöcker und Treitschke,” 18.
231. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 153.
232. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 5. As Lazarus mentions at the beginning, the lecture
was “by invitation only.” Because Lazarus intended to contribute to self-clarification
among the Jews “with the calm of scientific contemplation” instead of “entering the field
of struggle,” “only Jews were invited.” Lazarus uses Volk and Nation as synomyms.
233. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 6.
234. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 19.
235. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 21.
236. Lazarus, Was heisst national? 57–58.
237. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 124. He writes that he feels obliged
on two levels: on a general (patriotic) and a personal (professional, academic) level.
238. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 124.
239. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 125.
240. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 140.
241. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 139; this seems to be a reference to
what would now be called proto-Zionists.
242. Allgemeine Zeitung, March 9, 1880, 148–49.
243. Very similar arguments can be found in Philippson’s immediate response to
Treitschke’s first article (Allgemeine Zeitung, December 9, 1879).
244. Oppenheim, “Stöcker und Treitschke,” 18; compare Treitschke, “Unsere Aussi-
chten,” 27.

5. Emancipation, Assimilation, and the Concept of Rights

1. Treitschke, “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” 38.
2. It is in this context that Treitschke attacks Graetz as a representative of those who
maintain an anachronistic claim to separate Jewish nationhood. Treitschke restates this
point later on in the same text: “Our state . . . has granted them [the Jews] civil equality
only in the expectation that they will make an effort to assimilate to their fellow citizens
[dass sie sich bestreben würden, ihren Mitbürgern gleich zu sein]” (“Herr Graetz und
sein Judenthum,” 44–45). Also, on two later occasions in the Dispute Treitschke rearticu-
lates his understanding of the issue of emancipation in similar terms. In a “response to
a students’ solidarity address” (from November 19, 1880) he states that for him Jewish
emancipation “was indeed grounded in the nature of the modern state. But the difficult
process does not end with formal emancipation: the point is that the Jews become Ger-
mans inwardly, too [dass die Juden auch innerlich Deutsche werden]” (“Antwort auf eine
studentische Huldigung,” 120). In a response to Mommsen (“Eine Erwiderung,” 123–25;
dated November 19, 1880, the same day that Mommsen’s letter in the Nationalzeitung
 Notes to pages 148–151 429

appeared, but published on the 21), Treitschke stated: “The core of my considerations on
the Jewish question consisted in the sentence: ‘what we have to expect from our Jewish
fellow citizens is simply: they should become Germans and feel simply and straightfor-
wardly German.’ I do not share the pessimistic opinion of my colleague Mommsen that
everywhere in the world ‘Jewry constitutes an effective ferment of cosmopolitanism and
national decomposition.’ . . . Rather, I hope that in the course of the years, emancipation
will be followed by inner amalgamation and reconciliation.” In this letter Treitschke
presents himself as standing firmly in the liberal tradition of emancipation.
3. Joël, “Offener Brief an Treitschke,” 23; Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 26.
4. The exchange character of emancipation is implied in the notion that one receives
a Schein on whose cashing in one has to insist. Nadyr (Offener Brief, 26) points out that
Treitschke alludes in this formulation to Shakespeare’s character Shylock. He writes that
in The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare turned Paulo Maria Secchi (the merchant in one
of the sources used by Shakespeare) into the Jew Shylock in order to demonstrate the
effects of denying the nobility of human beings. He emphasizes that Shakespeare had
no anti-Jewish intention (a typical liberal nineteenth-century reading of the play). In
another pamphlet Graetz points out that the original theme of the Shylock myth did not
contain any opposition of Jewish and Christian ethics. Its early literary manifestations
seem to be based on opposing the strictness of Roman law to the notion of mercy that
is Mosaic as well as Christian (Graetz, Shylock).
5. “der Jude ist sozusagen auch ein Mensch”; Joël, “Offener Brief an Treitschke,” 25.
6. Allgemeine Zeitung, October 12, 1880, 641.
7. Allgemeine Zeitung, October 12, 1880, 641.
8. Allgemeine Zeitung, October 12, 1880, 643.
9. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 143.
10. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 143.
11. Cohen, “Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage,” 144; Cohen adds that Treitschke’s
conception that excludes the Jewish Glaubensart is basically unreligious in the Kantian
sense of Religion. This is also why Cohen does not want to appeal to Treitschke (whom
he never actually names but refers to as “the editor of the Preussische Jahrbücher”): “from
the point of view of general religiosity no words can be found to express adequately the
disgust at such an attitude” (142–43).
12. Ludwig Börne was born Löb Baruch in 1786 and died in 1837. For the full text, see
appendix 3.
13. Baruch, Börne und Treitschke, 6.
14. “Börne’s” sarcastic remark can also be applied to the rhetoric of present-day anti-
racism, which often exhorts us to “like” and be “friends with” or even “love” foreigners—
evidence of a post-liberal lack of trust in the persuasive power of the discourse of human
rights or legal equality and in stark contrast to Kantian ethics, whose specific achievement
it had been to search for ethical categories that are not dependent on the vagaries and
precariousness of liking, loving, and befriending (while ipso facto liberating love and
430 Notes to pages 151–154

friendship from the burden of having to be ethical). Unfortunately, the ersatz-rhetoric

of post-liberal anti-racism never works: one can not be friends or in love with whole
groups of the population (such as “foreigners”). Liberal Enlightenment universalism
that has not been transcended and critically preserved in an emancipatory direction
regresses into naive pre-political phraseology.
15. Baruch, Börne und Treitschke, 10. This passage, like most of the text, is taken from
(the real) Börne’s brilliant text “Der ewige Jude” (the title means literally “The Eternal
Jew,” which in Börne’s detournement means “And on and on they go about the Jews,” a
somewhat tongue-in-cheek moan) of 1821. Börne reviewed in this text a 459-page-strong
antisemitic volume by Ludolf Holst, Judenthum in allen dessen Theilen, aus einem staatswis-
senschaftlichen Standpunkte betrachtet (Jewry/Judaism in All Its Parts, Examined from a
Political Science Perspective). Judging from Börne’s polemic, Holst anticipated many of
Treitschke’s positions; this allows the anonymous pamphletist of 1880 to exploit Börne’s
text. The simile is introduced in Börne’s original text as a children’s morality tale (“Der
ewige Jude,” 35–36). The last sentence of the passage quoted from the 1880 pamphlet is
different in Börne’s original of 1821: “but the sun has started to shine” has been changed
from “and the sun—is now forced to shine in America” (36).
16. Baruch, Börne und Treitschke, 10. This is taken from Börne, “Der ewige Jude,” 41.
17. Baruch, Börne und Treitschke, 10.
18. Baruch, Börne und Treitschke, 13–14; emphasis in the original. This is taken from
Börne, “Der ewige Jude,” 51.
19. Baruch, Börne und Treitschke, 13–14. This is taken from Börne, “Der ewige Jude,” 51.
20. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. John Stuart Mill writes in the introductory
chapter of On Liberty that “this doctrine” (his) is “meant to apply only to human beings
in the maturity of their faculties,” i.e. not to children or “those backward states of society
in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. The early difficulties in the
way of spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for
overcoming them; and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use
of any expedients that will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable. Despotism is
a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians” provided it serves their
“improvement” (Mill, On Liberty, 52).
21. I understand that “Börne” argues that one’s attaining civil rights (on reaching
maturity) is one’s moment of “birth” as a citizen, i.e., as a Man. His equating of human
rights and civil rights leaves him with the contradiction that before actually attaining
civil rights, human beings are “Men” in only an incomplete sense.
22. Baruch, Börne und Treitschke, 14.
23. “Das Leichentuch ist eure Toga, erst im Grabe bekommt ihr Gemeinwesen!”; Ba-
ruch, Börne und Treitschke, 14.
24. Nadyr similarly sees the anti-Jewish campaign as scapegoating the Jews for the
faults of a political system that produces in Germany economic downturn despite the
monetary benefits from the military victory of 1871 (Offener Brief, 11).
 Notes to pages 155–161 431

6. The Riddle of Treitschke’s Intentions

1. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 27.
2. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 61–62. This is a polemic
against interdenominational schools (Simultanschulen).
3. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 62; Treitschke refrains from
publicly endorsing the measures demanded by the antisemitic agitators of the Antisemi-
tenpetition that was widely circulated in the second half of 1880.
4. Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” 62–63. On this subject,
Cassel makes the reverse claim that “the Jews have lost their pious Semitic spirit among
the Germanic heathens” and that after emancipation, many Jews “have been infected by
the frivolous spirit of our century” (Wider Heinrich von Treitschke, 22–23).
5. Treitschke, “Zur inneren Lage am Jahresschlusse,” 226.
6. Treitschke, “Zur inneren Lage am Jahresschlusse,” 226–27. After Mommsen explicitly
appealed to Treitschke to distance himself publicly from the antisemitic petition, hoping
Treitschke could be cleared of the generally held belief that he supported it “because we
are proud of having such a teacher and such a man among us” (“Auch ein Wort über
unser Judenthum,” 223), Treitschke lauded the “moderate parties” and the government for
keeping silent on the issue of the Antisemitenpetition, and dismissed the more straight-
forwardly antisemitic contributions in the journal Grenzboten (generally a publication
closely mirroring Bismarck’s policies) as “aberrations” for which Bismarck was, Treitschke
thought, not responsible (“Zur inneren Lage am Jahresschlusse,” 225).
7. Treitschke, “Zur inneren Lage am Jahresschlusse,” 227.
8. Treitschke, “Erwiderung an Mommsen,” 229.
9. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 151.
10. “für alte unreflectierte Misgefühle nach neuen Rechtsgründen zu suchen”; Bam-
berger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 152.
11. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 153.
12. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 154.
13. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 155.
14. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 155.
15. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 156.
16. indicative (realis): “ist”
17. subjunctive (irrealis): “hätten recht”
18. “der grossen socialistischen Vermögenstheilung”
19. Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 174–75.
20. Bamberger, too, had just published an anti–Social Democratic pamphlet, “Ger-
many and Socialism” (1878).
21. His ambiguity manifests itself in the flawed grammar of his formulation that
mixes a realis “if ” clause and an irrealis main clause: “Wenn es ausführbar ist, Religion
wiederherzustellen, hätten sie jedenfalls insoweit recht.”
432 Notes to pages 162–167

22. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 218.

23. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 219.
24. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 219.
25. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 220.
26. “die wesentlichere Toleranz gegen die jüdische von ihren Trägern nicht verschul-
dete, ihnen als Schicksal auf die Welt mitgegebene Eigenartigkeit”; Mommsen, “Auch
ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 221.
27. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 219.
28. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 224.
29. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 224.
30. Mommsen was born in the northwestern German state of Holstein, whose annexa-
tion by Prussia in 1866 marked one of the major steps toward German unification.
31. Compare Ghassan Hage’s (White Nation) concept of the liberal “white worrier”
in the context of Australian “multiculturalism.”
32. In its most basic structure, both forms of this argument are a continuation of the
line of thought begun by Hobbes: the warlike society of competing individual producers
needs either a Leviathan to keep it from destroying itself or a more sublime alternative
that prevents a full-blown Leviathan from becoming unavoidable. The better disciplined
and regulated “civil society” is—i.e., the more “civilized”—the less ruthless the Levia-
than needs to be (see Dreßen, Gesetz und Gewalt). Spinoza, e.g., knew from the Dutch
experience that circumstances permitting, the Leviathan can stay in the cupboard (see
S. B. Smith, Jewish Identity).
33. Although Mommsen avoids using the actual term, his allusions are clear enough;
he ridicules Graetz’s historiography as “talmudistic scribbling of history [talmudistische
Geschichtsschreiberei]” (“Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 214).
34. Joël, “Offener Brief an Treitschke,” 25.
35. Allgemeine Zeitung, March 23, 1880, 178.
36. He refers to speeches given by Napoleon on April 30 and May 7, 1806; Naudh
quotes from the journal Reichsbote.
37. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 196–97.
38. Popular bird mythology seems to differ in English and German vernacular. Ger-
man ravens are held to be thieves (like the magpie in both German and English), but
they act in swarms, not alone (like the magpie).
39. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 197.
40. Naudh, “Professoren über Israel,” 198. All Jews were made liable to obtain annually
a license for doing business, and their freedom of movement was restricted. Napoleon’s
deliberate destruction of the economic existence of the Jews of Alsace, five-sixths of the
French Jews, was, whether intentionally or not, a cover-up of his failure to solve the problem
of peasant indebtedness by a programme of agrarian credit (J. Cohen, “Review”).
41. In the context of his rejection of a “mixed culture,” Endner actually suggests the
“elimination [Ausmerzung]” of the “Jewish element” from the “German body” (“Zur
Judenfrage,” 114). What precisely he meant by this is not clear, however.
 Notes to pages 168–191 433

42. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 53.

43. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 73.
44. He denies, however, that anti-Jewish agitation is generally shared throughout
Germany.
45. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 75.
46. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 75–76; Breßlau tells about his experience with a man
who was “highly educated and very favorably minded” toward himself who still made
him the “questionable compliment” that he was “not really a Jew.”
47. Breßlau, “Zur Judenfrage,” 76.
48. Wasserman, “Jews and Judaism in the Gartenlaube.”
49. Breßlau, “Nachwort zur zweiten Auflage,” 95.
50. Breßlau, “Nachwort zur zweiten Auflage,” 95–96; emphasis in the original.
51. Breßlau, “Nachwort zur zweiten Auflage,” 96.

8. Antisemitism
1. Quoted in Cahnmann, “Grundlagen,” 677.
2. Bernal, Black Athena, 344; the term was taken from the catalog of peoples in Genesis
1:10, whose author seems to divide all peoples known (or relevant) to him into three
groups named after the three sons of Noah, one of whom is called Shem (Nipperdey
and Rürup, “Antisemitismus,” 130). For the historical linguists of the eighteenth century,
taking up this reference must have been an obvious choice, because in Genesis 1:10
language is one of the main determinants of “a people.” The speakers of languages that
modern scholarship refers to as “Semitic” are, however, not identical with the peoples
listed there as the descendants of Shem.
3. Sterling, Judenhass, 126. An important proponent of the concept of a “Semitic race”
(modeled on the linguistic account) was Ernest Renan. Renan supported Jewish emanci-
pation and was not “consciously antisemitic” (Almog, “Racial Motif,” 257). Nevertheless,
he gave academic credibility to notions typically held by antisemites, such as that “the
Jewish nation” was collectively responsible for the death of Jesus (263) and that Jesus
might not have been Jewish after all, given that Galilee was a “racially mixed” province
(270). He asserted that language is founded in insurmountable racial difference and
hierarchy (266). However, he was prepared to allow some leeway for cultural dynamics
and historical change: the Israelite “who has become French, or even better, European”
has thereby culturally transcended his lowly racial background (267); in his celebrated
speech on the concept of the nation (1882) Renan emphasized that politics ought not to
be based on racial categories. Almog suggests that Renan’s professing of individualist-
liberal values were part of his public-political agenda but did not “penetrate into [the]
deeper levels” of his scholarly thinking (268), nor did it keep him from sharing antisemitic
notions of the (modern) Jewish character (271–72).
4. However, Marr had announced an “Anti-Jewish journal” and started using the
word “antisemitic” in publications only from the spring of 1880. The journalist of the
434 Notes to pages 192–194

Allgemeine Zeitung seems to have learned the word from another source and used it
for his reporting on Marr’s publication (Nipperdey and Rürup, “Antisemitismus,” 138).
Zimmermann, Wilhelm Marr, chapter 7, discusses the specific context.
5. Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code,” 39. Zimmermann suggests that the word
“antisemitism” may initially simply have been a device for “evading the accusation of
engaging in something improper” (Wilhelm Marr, 94).
6. Halevi, History of the Jews, 132.
7. I follow Blaschke’s suggestion (Katholizismus und Antisemitismus, 269) that the
term “anti-Judaism” be reserved exclusively to the medieval attitude that treats the Jews
as objects of (princely or patrician) patronage and Christian mission, not in any way as
“an active factor in politics, economy and culture.”
8. Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites, 75–76.
9. Quoted in Bieberstein, Die These von der Verschwörung, 113, and in Arendt, The
Origins of Totalitarianism, 31.
10. They were also anti-Hegelian: they considered Hegel’s philosophy an instance of
“French-Jewish foreign domination” (Claussen, Grenzen der Aufklärung, 127).
11. From a counterrevolutionary publication of 1795 (quoted in Bieberstein, Die These
von der Verschwörung, 107). Those who accepted this theory could point to Napoleon’s
efforts to instrumentalize Masonic infrastructure for his own purposes while at the same
time promoting Jewish emancipation in the occupied territories. In German anti-French
literature of the same period the coincidence of both—despite the fact that most lodges
did not admit Jews—was transformed into the notion that Masons and Jews together
were instances of the French occupation (108). Not unlike “Jew,” the concepts “Free-
masons” and “Illuminati” were often used at the time in a loose and metaphorical sense
(115). Christian clerics interpreted Napoleon’s initiative for a “Big Sanhedrin” in 1806
as further evidence of this conspiracy, identifying the Napoleonic Sanhedrin with the
Jewish institution of the same name in Jerusalem that in their view had been responsible
for the crucifixion of Jesus.
12. Bieberstein, Die These von der Verschwörung, 110.
13. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 20. Furthermore, there have been specific
periods in history (e.g., in Poland before 1795) when such an alliance actually existed.
14. Sterling, Judenhass, 115.
15. Sterling, Judenhass, 117; there seems to be some congruence, and possibly historical
relationship, between this ambivalence of pre–1848 German liberalism (mostly a small-
town phenomenon anyway) and traditional petit bourgeois resistance to modernizing
changes (such as the introduction of new working practices) that in turn seems to have
been implicated as early as in the heretical movements of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries that were predominantly supported by artisans (Kofler, Zur Geschichte der
bürgerlichen Gesellschaft).
16. “die Juden mit den eingebornen, nationalen Menschen nie innigst verschmelzen,
und ein Theil jenes harmonischen Ganzen werden [können], den wir einen bürgerlichen
 Notes to pages 194–196 435

Verein nennen”; quoted in Rohrbacher, “Deutsche Revolution und antijüdische Gewalt,”

38.
17. Rohrbacher, “Deutsche Revolution und antijüdische Gewalt,” 39.
18. The expression “Hep-Hep” might refer to the slogan “Hierosolyma est perdita”
(Jerusalem is doomed) from the Crusades against the Jews in the Rhineland in 1097.
Claussen (Grenzen der Aufklärung, 159) suggests that the perpetrators of the pogroms
more likely thought of the sounds with which people call animals.
19. Claussen, Vom Judenhass zum Antisemitismus, 73.
20. Rohrbacher, “Deutsche Revolution und antijüdische Gewalt,” 35.
21. Rohrbacher, “Deutsche Revolution und antijüdische Gewalt,” 43.
22. It is also noteworthy that the anti-Jewish riots of 1848–49 happened in places that
were not main places of the revolution (Rohrbacher, “Deutsche Revolution und anti-
jüdische Gewalt,” 31, 36). James Harris demonstrated in The People Speak! the existence
of a “broad-based, popular and remarkably well- organized” political movement that
prevented Jewish emancipation in Bavaria in 1849 and that was not directly related to any
form of economic crisis (Rahden, “Ideologie und Gewalt,” 17–18). Richard S. Levy (“Con-
tinuities and Discontinuities”) discusses the controversy between those who emphasize
socioeconomic context over ideology and those who argue the other way around. As so
often, which aspect weighs heavier depends on the specific case in question.
23. Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus, 90.
24. Sterling, Judenhass, 135, 136.
25. H. Rosenberg, Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit, 91.
26. Pulzer, Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, xxi.
27. Jochmann, Gesellschaftskrise und Judenfeindschaft in Deutschland, 52. As an example
of late-nineteenth-century conservative antisemitism, Smith and Clark describe an in-
fluential populist writer in Baden in the 1890s who presented rural Jews as “exemplary
for their devotion, for their work, and for their abstinence from drink” while he directed
his “antisemitic diatribes” against city Jews as well as “other city people: Old Catholics,
Freemasons, Protestant professors” (“The Fate of Nathan,” 12).
28. Claussen, Grenzen der Aufklärung, 144.
29. Pulzer, Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 33.
30. Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus, 115.
31. Rürup writes that antisemitism as a worldview had the function “to allow for a
criticism of the existing conditions without questioning their real foundations” (Eman-
zipation und Antisemitismus, 116). “Post-liberal mass-based” antisemitism rejected using
antisemitism for merely tactical purposes and made it “the goal and content of its struggle”
(116), having accepted “the positivist attitudes to law and religion and the notion of mass
participation in politics” and also being “more violent, more prophetic, more apocalyptic,”
no more respectful of Junkers and cardinals than it is of Jews and Liberals,” being “atheist
without being rationalist” (Pulzer, Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 55).
32. It became fatally influential, of course, after World War I.
436 Notes to pages 197–199

33. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 75.

34. White, The Splintered Party, 137–38.
35. White, The Splintered Party, 138.
36. On the urban middle class, Massing writes: “The interests of petty bourgeois high
school and university graduates, who coveted jobs and positions as teachers, judges, law-
yers, journalists, physicians, engineers, administrators and politicians, were at variance
with the old-fashioned notion that religious conversion and political reliability, honesty,
and public-mindedness established civil equality” (Rehearsal for Destruction, 76).
37. H. Rosenberg, Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit, 97.
38. Wallerstein, After Liberalism.
39. Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites, 75–76.
40. Blaschke suggests (in Katholizismus und Antisemitismus) distinguishing between
“openly confessing” racial antisemitism (Bekenntnisantisemitismus) and consensual,
habitual antisemitism (gebundener Antisemitismus). The latter does not typically adopt
the rhetoric of “race” but is more fundamental: insofar as it is the “deep structure” (Tie-
fenschicht) of antisemitism (71), it deserves more attention than the former, not less.
41. Blaschke, Katholizismus und Antisemitismus, 76; whenever the concept was avail-
able at all, there has been a range of views within the framework of Christian theology
on whether religious difference is a symptom of racial difference, or race a product of
religion (or of a divine master plan) (76). Either way, both religion and race mattered
and were seen as interrelated.
42. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 17.
43. “Intrigues, cabals, the perfidy of one man, the courage and virtue of another—
that is what determines the course of their business, that is what determines [in their
thinking] the course of the world” (Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 37). Conspiracy theories
come from people who find it plausible that society as a whole is run by intrigues because
they understand correctly that their own section of society—the bourgeois spheres of
family, business, and political racket—is structured by betrayal, lies, and conspiracy. The
extrapolation of this experience to the course of society as a whole, though, is a fetishistic
delusion. Sartre’s argument implies that the very concepts of “race” and “racial essence”
are intrisically conspiratorial.
44. This was before it was discovered that electricity is not matter but merely differ-
ence of charge, or a relation between antagonistic poles. The analogy is striking. Sartre
alludes here to Marx’s concept of “commodity fetishism”; he writes that the bourgeois
“behave toward social facts” like followers of fetishistic religions “who endow the wind
and the sun with little souls” (Anti-Semite and Jew, 37).
45. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 38; the etymology of “race” is unclear; on the various
theories see Sommer (“Rasse,” 137–38). Apart from occasional use of the word “razza”
etc. from the thirteenth century (in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French), “race”
is increasingly used only from the sixteenth century (from then also in English) in the
meaning of (royal or aristocratic) family or lineage (137–38). The aspect of superior
 Notes to pages 199–202 437

quality is central to the concept: it could also refer to groups of the same (high) social
status that were not related by kinship. The use of the word for human beings and for
animals (especially horses) seems to have developed in parallel (141). It has not, how-
ever, been used in an anthropological sense (i.e., today’s sense) before the end of the
eighteenth century.
46. Nipperdey and Rürup, “Antisemitismus,” 131.
47. The only probable exception is Spain, where a specific historical constellation
created the conditions for a specific and, as it were, more modern—i.e., more explicitly
racial—discourse.
48. Nipperdey and Rürup, “Antisemitismus,” 131.
49. Perhaps the most influential in a series of endeavors to “Aryanize” Christianity
included Hegel’s essay “Athens and Judea—Should Judea be the Teuton’s Fatherland?”
(1795), his later identification of Jesus with Socrates, and subsequent comments by Goethe,
Dühring, and Chamberlain (Schwarzschild, “Theologico-Political Basis,” 77).
50. For example, the liberal Gutzkow wrote in a novel from 1835 that “character” is
based on “tribal psychology [Stammespsychologie] and probably has a corporeal basis.”
He also argued for “racial purity [Racenreinheit]” (Sterling, Judenhass, 100–101).
51. Reemtsma, “Die Falle des Antirassimus,” 303; see also Graetz, “Mein letztes Wort
an Treitschke,” 47; Bamberger, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 161–62.
52. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002), 172. This is from the
final paragraph of “Elements of Antisemitism.”
53. The Spanish case, in which the wider populace was not sufficiently mobilized in
religious frenzy in order to build mass allegiance to the emerging modern state, was the
model from which Spain’s more successful competitors England and France learned
how to do it better, namely, with more grassroots fanaticism and mass slaughter (Marx,
Faith in Nation).
54. Reemtsma, “Die Falle des Antirassimus,” 305. The same seems to be true of the
(formerly Muslim) moriscos.
55. “Limpieza de sangre” (purity of blood), seems to have been first demanded already
in 1414 by the University of Salamanca from its students. The concept developed in the
context of and in interrelation with those of the purity of religious doctrine—a specific
understanding of “pure” Catholicism—and the identification of the Spanish nation as its
defender (Schilling, “Nationale Identität und Konfession,” 212). Post-reconquista Spanish
theologians did not challenge the Catholic doctrine that all human beings descended
from Adam but argued that having fallen from the belief in Christ has irredeemably
corrupted the blood of those who only recently (re)converted to Christianity (Poliakov,
The Aryan Myth, 12–13).
56. It is important to note that the exclusion and persecution of conversos and moris-
cos was in the first place a struggle over the composition of the ruling elite. Although
“Jewish race” clearly implied inferiority (at least that of holding the wrong belief), this
“race” was still construed as a faction within the elite, i.e., was connected to how the
438 Notes to pages 202–203

word was generally used before the late eighteenth century (Reemtsma, “Die Falle des
Antirassimus,” 314).
57. Reemtsma, “Die Falle des Antirassimus,” 315.
58. Langmuir, “Toward a Definition of Antisemitism,” 88.
59. Reemtsma, “Die Falle des Antirassimus,” 320; Reemtsma at this point suggests that
the concept of “fighting racism” may better be given up, since it leads to lumping together
very different histories of persecution. “Fighting racism” is at best a very imprecise way
of putting what needs to be done: taken literally, “fighting racism” means fighting the
ways the perpetrators explain their practices to themselves. What need to be fought,
however, are specific practices of persecution, exclusion, and exploitation and their
specific causes in specific contexts.
60. Smaje, Natural Hierarchies, 140–48. Different demographic and socioeconomic
relations in different colonies produced different concepts of “race” that cannot be mapped
out here. In this section I refer only to the case of the Anglo-American colonies. On the
connections between the emergence of the concept of “race,” early colonialism, and the
transformations in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe—particularly Spain and
England—see Wood, “‘If Toads Could Speak’”; Lewis, “Spanish Ideology and the Practice
of Inequality”; Goldner, “Race and the Enlightenment: From Anti-Semitism to White
Supremacy” and “Race and the Enlightenment: The Anglo-French Enlightenment and
Beyond”; and Smaje, Natural Hierarchies.
61. Scheit, Verborgener Staat, 559; in the beginnings of this specific discourse in the
sixteenth century, the different “races” of slaves were shorthand for differential market
price: the main racial characteristics that Europeans bothered to record were related to a
prospective slave’s usefulness for specific labors. Although being of “black” (or otherwise
“colored”) “race” implied primarily being “predetermined” to be a slave, the concept is
not implied in the institution of slavery as such: no slave economy before the American
plantation system seems to have developed a “racialized” concept of the people who
would be slaves simply, because there was de facto no such predetermination: who would
become a slave depended on fortune de guerre (Scheit, Verborgener Staat, 562–63). Skin
color and similar (otherwise irrelevant) features were in the first place mere (“arbitrary”
in the linguistic sense) signifiers (Scheit, Verborgener Staat, 566). The speculative rever-
sal that changed skin color from a signifier to the supposed cause of someone’s “racial
make-up” occurred later. On the shift from the “legal” to a “biological” concept of race
see especially Guillaumin (Racism, Sexism, Power, and Ideology, 37–49).
62. Allen, The Invention of the White Race.
63. The “socioeconomic” argument that the concept of the “black race” originated from
plantation slavery (Williams, Capitalism and Slavery) does not rule out there having been
some kind of “anti-black prejudice” beforehand that went into the making of the modern
concept of “race.” However, the former needs to be distinguished from the latter.
64. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 3; the system of indentured servitude in
the colonies “was taken from the cities of Europe, where apprentices agreed to work for
 Notes to pages 203–205 439

their master for seven years before being admitted to the master’s trade” (Tompsett,
“1606 and All That,” 32). The system “deteriorated” in the colonial setting, where “none
of the social forces which kept abuse of the system in check” existed and “paved the way
for slavery.” In the 1620s, about fifty thousand indentured servants were shipped to the
American colonies (38).
65. Skin color came to be significant as a mark denoting, first, “a slave from Africa”
as opposed to a slave from Europe, and then, when slaves stopped being recruited in
Europe, just “slave” (Guillaumin, Racism, Sexism, Power, and Ideology, 138). Subsequently,
what had been simply a mark of a social relation—slavery—came to be seen as the
origin and legitimization, or even the cause, of that social relation (142). Allen (looking
at the different development of racialization in the English colonies on the Caribbean
islands and on the American continent) argues that in both cases, the slaveholders were
far outnumbered by their slaves and needed a middle stratum to keep the considerable
potential for resistance in check. In the case of the islands, this function was taken by a
“mulatto” stratum, and on the mainland it was taken by what came to be construed as
a “white” propertyless class (The Invention of the White Race).
66. Tompsett, “1606 and All That,” 28; first all non-Christians were turned into lifelong
slaves, then all servants who were not born as Christians (39). After the slave trade (and
then also slavery) had been abolished, the concept of the “white race” in the American
context became more complex, especially due to large-scale immigration of Europeans
in the nineteenth century.
67. Conze, “Rasse,” 157; Poliakov, The Aryan Myth.
68. Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 13. The crucial difference is that in the French case a
much wider section of the population was actively involved.
69. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 162–63.
70. Sieyes in “What Is the Third Estate,” quoted in Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 28. Sieyes
is of course being polemical. It cannot be inferred that he took the myth of the Frankish
origin of the high aristocracy at face value, although others might have. On Sieyes see
Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution.
71. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 166; Arendt suggests that nationalism re-
inforced by race-thinking developed due to the protracted period during which the
formation of a unified German nation-state failed to occur: it is a form of “frustrated
nationalism” (166).
72. Sokel, “Dualistic Thinking.”
73. “Ontological antisemitism” is perhaps no more than a more precise term for what
above has been called “weltanschaulicher Antisemitismus.”
74. Hage develops in White Nation the argument that the concept of “race” does not
in itself imply an imperative for action.
75. This distinction is crucial but cannot be fully developed here. The idea of communism
as articulated by Marx—aiming at the creation of the “social individual”—is modernist,
as it aims at the Aufhebung (sublation, supersession, preservation) of liberalism rather
440 Notes to pages 205–206

than its suppression. “Primitive” notions of communism that have existed throughout
the history of Christianity on the fringes of, or outside, the church as an organization but
within the framework of Christian theology (see Kofler, Zur Geschichte der bürgerlichen
Gesellschaft) have since the nineteenth century been absorbed by anti-individualist, anti-
liberal reaction. Primitive communism refers to the Christian notions of (cosmological
and metaphysical) “natural right” and universal human equality. Their absorption by
reactionary anti-emancipatory movements since the nineteenth century arguably was
helped by their theological roots: the ideal of universal equality was contradicted by the
fetishism and obscurantism characteristic of religious thinking tout court, as well as the
more or less authoritarian character of religion’s specific organizational forms.
76. Blaschke, “Antikapitalismus und Antisemitismus,” 116; this idea had two elements that
would typically but not necessarily appear together: the Jews are historically responsible
for having caused, and they are of the same essence (wesensgleich) with liberalism, indi-
vidualism, and capitalism. It seems difficult to establish whether Christian conservatives
on the whole have been (or are) more prone to endorsing antisemitism (on grounds of
reinforcing Christianity) or opposing it (on grounds of defending religion).
77. This was not the case, incidentally, within the (comparatively marginal) bour-
geois strand of nineteenth-century Catholicism. As the parallel existence of bourgeois
Catholicism proves, nineteenth-century Catholicism did not have to be “anti-capitalist”
as far as the theology as such is concerned. The economic elements of antisemitism also
existed in the Protestant context, especially in Lutheranism, although apparently less
pervasively.
78. Blaschke, “Antikapitalismus und Antisemitismus,” 122.
79. Blaschke, “Antikapitalismus und Antisemitismus,” 124.
80. Quoted in Blaschke, “Antikapitalismus und Antisemitismus,” 142. The Catholic
version of anti-capitalist antisemitism was not so much traditional but rather a product
of Traditionalisierung, i.e. the “inventing” of tradition, a conscious nineteenth-century
tendency to reappropriate elements of medieval thinking (also as part of a revival of
Scholastic and Thomistic philosophy) (135).
81. The classic contribution to the analysis of “anti-capitalist” antisemitism is Massing
(Rehearsal for Destruction), formulated in parallel and in dialogue with Horkheimer
and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which also touches on the subject repeatedly,
especially in the chapter “Elements of Antisemitism.” The most compelling theoretical
account based in the same tradition is Postone (“Anti-Semitism and National Socialism”
and “The Holocaust and the Trajectory of the Twentieth Century”); see also Bonefeld
(“Notes on Anti-Semitism” and “Nationalism and Anti-Semitism”). The most impor-
tant historical accounts are Leuschen-Seppel (Sozialdemokratie und Antisemitismus) and
Wistrich (Socialism and the Jews).
82. The Catholic doctrine itself has roots in classical Greek thinking, in particular
Platonic conservatism, which expressed hostility to certain forms of (classical, i.e., not
capitalist) commodity production. Nineteenth-century Catholicism could mobilize such
 Notes to pages 206–208 441

elements from the legacy of the thinking of classical Mediterranean civilization (which
it inherited via Aristotle via late-medieval Islam and Judaism) that had been preserved
within the body of Christian thought (for a similar argument see Blaschke, Katholizismus
und Antisemitismus, 84–91). However, such ideas could only become relevant because
of a specific receptivity to them in the mind-set characteristic of members of modern
bourgeois society.
83. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 213.
84. Toussenel, from “Les Juifs, rois de l’épogue,” quoted in Wistrich, “Radical Anti-
semitism,” 112, 114.
85. In a polemical remark about the commercially minded bourgeoisie of the wealthy
trading place Hamburg, Heinrich Heine (in a letter from 1816) adopted the traditional
imagery in a playful and sarcastic way that can stand for countless similar (although
less witty) remarks by others: “I call all Hamburgers Jews, and those whom I call bap-
tized Jews—in order to distinguish them from the circumcised ones—are vulgo called
Christians” (quoted in Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe, 48).
86. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 213.
87. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 13; e.g., the antisemite Otto Glagau, who attacked
“predatory capital,” presented himself as a spokesman of the petit bourgeoisie (12).
88. Achinger, Gespaltene Moderne, 339.
89. Achinger, Gespaltene Moderne, 341–43.
90. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 37; in contrast to Germany, a significant por-
tion of the (very few) French Jews were members of the upper bourgeoisie. An explosive
social development during and after Napoleon’s “continental system” of blockading trade
with Britain (from 1806), accompanied by huge demand for money capital, warranted
their economic success, which—due to census-vote—translated into what came to be
seen as political privilege, too. This is the background for nineteenth-century France’s
“becoming the breeding ground of new anti-Jewish moods, tendencies and ideologies”
(Schenck, “Nationalismus und Antisemitismus,” 710). Similarly, von der Dunk points
out that France, where modern, “ideological” antisemitism originated (with Proudhon,
Fourier, Blanqui, Toussenel, Tridon and others), was the only place where consistently
realized emancipation actually created the conditions for the full integration of wealthy
Jews into the upper bourgeoisie (“Antisemitismus zur Zeit der Reichsgründung,” 81–82).
In Germany, by comparison, similar arguments anticipated the effects of Jewish emanci-
pation before it had a chance of becoming a reality. Arendt writes that only the necessity
to take sides against clerical, reactionary, anti-republican antisemitism in the context of
the Dreyfus affair ended the long tradition of antisemitic republican-socialist thought
in France (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 47), more or less.
91. Documented in Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 277. This formulation betrays
in particular clarity how the antisemitic argument is indebted to Aristotle’s discussion
in the first book of Politics, chapter 3, of the distinction between the two forms of acqui-
sition of property, one natural, limited, and necessary, the other artificial and infinite
442 Notes to pages 209–211

(39). Aristotle develops here the distinction between the use of a thing as what it was
intended to be used for (as a shoe is being used as a shoe when it is being worn) and the
use of the same thing for exchange. Exchange that goes beyond the bartering of surplus
in order to acquire something that is needed for subsistence leads to the development
of money and trade and becomes (unnatural, unnecessary, and unethical) “wealth-
getting.” Its most abominable and unnatural form is “usury,” the earning of interest,
which is “money born of money” (51; 1258b). Aquinas restated Aristotle’s argument in the
thirteenth century and made it part of modern Catholic doctrine, although the extent
to which he followed Aristotle’s prescriptions seems a matter of contention (see Neves,
“Aquinas and Aristotle’s Distinction on Wealth”; Kirschenbaum, “Jewish and Christian
Theories of Usury”).
92. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 103.
93. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 102.
94. Pulzer, Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 43; Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction,
102.
95. Stöcker quoted in Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 12.
96. In Marx’s dialectical view (such as in the Communist Manifesto), the “real” social
movement of communism is in its essence the dynamism of capital—namely, the an-
tagonistic relation of capital and labor.
97. Talmon, “Mission and Testimony,” 154.
98. Pulzer refers here to the conservative antisemite Constantin Frantz (Rise of Politi-
cal Anti-Semitism, 256).
99. For a number of reasons, the process of developing industrial capitalism in the
nineteenth century did (then) not lead to significant antisemitism in the Netherlands,
where the Jews constituted up to 3 percent of the population (three times the ratio of
Germany, and a multiple of the French figure), with Jews constituting up to 13 percent
of Amsterdam’s population (and continuing to speak Spanish and Portuguese apart
from Yiddish) (von der Dunk, “Antisemitismus zur Zeit der Reichsgründung,” 86–87).
Among the various reasons for this might have been a centuries-long non-agrarian and
non-aristocratic history that did not stigmatize money and moneymaking (helped by
the bourgeois-Calvinist ethos that went with it). It is an interesting facet of Treitschke’s
ambivalence that he celebrated the Dutch bourgeoisie for exactly the reasons that seem
to have made them immune to overt antisemitism. Anti-aristocratism immunized the
Dutch (like the revolutionary, postcolonial Americans) only temporarily, though: re-
curring cycles of capitalist crisis force all modern societies into the same boat, however
heroic and revolutionary their individual pasts may have been.
100. On the concepts of value and productivity see Postone, Time, Labor, and Social
Domination and “Rethinking Marx”; and Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value.
101. Bermann (Produktivierungsmythen und Antisemitismus, 19) writes that the rab-
binical ethics of classical Judaism can best be understood as the “corporate ideology of
artisans,” as it emphasizes more than most other religious traditions the value of work,
 Notes to pages 211–213 443

and there are many rabbinical injunctions against the money trade (18). Differing from
the Christian interpretation, the rabbinical tradition asserts that Adam was working
even in Paradise (Genesis 2:15). Maimonides in the twelfth century praised physical labor
even, and perhaps especially, for intellectuals and the wealthy (20).
102. Leon, The Jewish Question, 123.
103. Berman, Produktivierungsmythen und Antisemitismus, 25; see also Leon, The Jew-
ish Question, 123.
104. Initially the church had only banned clerics from taking interest (Cahnmann,
“Grundlagen,” 640). For the late Middle Ages the rule was: “When the Christian took
interest it was a sin and could be repented. When the Jew did the same it seemed natural;
from him nothing good was expected” (643). However, the ban on interest was sidestepped
in many ways whenever moneylending was an attractive option.
105. Lazare, Antisemitism, 60.
106. Such conditions could be the occurrence of intense pressure from the value-
producing classes combined with a very high rate of profit. It is significant in this context
that in the post-Fordist/postmodern period the chatter about “ethical” trade, prices,
wages, etc., has increased and has established a moral discourse on the economy that
occasionally serves as a gateway into renewed forms of “anti-capitalist” antisemitism.
107. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the guilds managed to have the Jews driven
out of most German towns onto the countryside (Bermann, Produktivierungsmythen
und Antisemitismus, 30). The word “usury” (the German Wucher literally means “growth,
increment”) did only successively adopt the moral meaning of “excessive” interest. Draw-
ing on sixteenth-century cases, Po-Chia Hsia asserts that the agitation against Jewish
usury did not primarily come from the lower classes that were directly engaged with
Jewish moneylenders but from parts of the clergy and the guilds who feared the Jewish
competition in selling small consumer goods (former pawns) cheap (“The Usurious
Jew,” 165). Many of the sixteenth-century texts quoted by Po-Chia Hsia jump without
much mediation from a religious anti-Jewish to an anti-usury discussion that is explicitly
directed at Christian as well as Jewish usurers, both called “Jews.” To say that only Jews
tended to be usurers in certain rural areas is to say nothing other than that only Jews
were giving credit when others saw no creditworthiness. Precarious small-scale credit
always carries a higher interest rate than more secure forms of credit. Sterling mentions
that in 1836, large-scale landowners in the Prussian Rhineland managed to persuade the
state to ban Jewish usury, referring to the misery it allegedly brought on the peasants,
to the effect that the latter had to sell off their land to the same landowners because of
a lack of cash flow (Judenhass, 33). On the migrations of the Jews in general see Halevi,
History of the Jews.
108. Leon, The Jewish Question, 137.
109. Leon, The Jewish Question, 153.
110. Schenck, “Nationalismus und Antisemitismus,” 698–99; Cahnmann, “Grund-
lagen,” 649.
444 Notes to pages 213–216

111. Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 19–20.

112. Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 21.
113. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 104.
114. On the petition see pp. 000–000.
115. Hamburger, Juden im öffentlichen Leben Deutschlands, 37; in practical terms and
despite legal emancipation, only converted Jews tended to be admitted to state office
in the German Reich. Conversion was seen in this context as proof of an individual’s
readyness to function as a loyal and disinterested bureaucrat (Hamburger, Juden im
öffentlichen Leben Deutschlands, 98)—for the Jews, of course, it was an additional and
particularly painful test of commitment.
116. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 14.
117. On the Kreuzzeitung, actually called Neue Preussische Zeitung, see note 27 for
chapter 1.
118. In the elections to the Prussian Diet (1873) and those to the Reichstag (1874),
Conservative seats were slashed by roughly two-thirds (Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschafts-
geschichte, 918).
119. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 17. The relevant editions of Germania are 174,
185, 189, 190, 201, 203, and 228, all in August–October 1875.
120. Kreuzzeitung 148 (1875), quoted in Bernhardt, “‘Die Juden sind unser Unglück!’”
36.
121. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 14–15.
122. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 15; see also Zumbini, Die Wurzeln des Bösen,
142–50.
123. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 18.
124. Pulzer, Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 76. Pulzer writes that Mehring, Engels, and
Bebel thought highly of this book when it first came out.
125. Rudolf Meyer had previously (1874–75) published a pioneering and sympathetic
work on the labor movement in Europe and the United States, Der Emanzipationskampf
des vierten Standes (The Fourth Estate’s Struggle for Emancipation) (Pulzer, Rise of
Political Anti-Semitism, 75). After the publication of his book on the Gründer period he
was forced into exile.
126. Pulzer, Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 78. Meyer was a disciple of Rodbertus and
became in the 1890s a contributor to the Social Democratic Neue Zeit. Mehring reported
that Meyer had influenced Stöcker but did not support him (Massing, Rehearsal for
Destruction, 215).
127. Retallack, “Anti-Semitism, Conservative Propaganda, and Regional Politics.”
128. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 22. On Katheder socialism see the section
“Liberal State Socialism in the German Reich” in chapter 9.
129. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 23.
130. Wistrich, Socialism and the Jews, 90; the word “Workers” was dropped from the
party’s name in 1881 after workers failed to turn up.
 Notes to pages 216–218 445

131. Wistrich, Socialism and the Jews, 93. Stöcker understood that the “enemies of
democratic rule now had to make use of the democratic process to maintain the old
structure of power” (Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 27). However, antisemitism was
not in the foreground of his rhetoric as long as he tried to target workers.
132. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 29–30; see 278–87 for a translation of the
speech.
133. In a letter written in September 1880 (but published only in 1895), Stöcker said
that he wanted to attack “only frivolous, godless, usurious, fraudulent Jewry which,
indeed, is the misfortune of our people” (Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 30). (He
seems to allude here to Treitschke’s formulation.) Stöcker later claimed that Bismarck’s
social welfare policy was his political victory (44). The apogee of Stöcker’s movement
was in 1881; it was already in marked decline by 1884.
134. Quotes taken from Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 279–87.
135. Volkov, Rise of Popular Antimodernism, 222.
136. Katz, Emancipation and Assimilation, 281.
137. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 10; Claussen, Vom Judenhass zum Antisemitis-
mus, 105. Gartenlaube means “summer house” or “bower,” implying that this publication
is meant to be read in leisurely and recreational surroundings.
138. Wasserman, “Jews and Judaism in the Gartenlaube,” 48.
139. Wasserman, “Jews and Judaism in the Gartenlaube,” 52; it presupposed that its
readers were used to an undemanding, light version of religion that was more or less
indifferent to any specific religious content—a petit bourgeois clientele who would not
have the stomach for either actually believing or not believing in a religion. Like the
Grenzboten in the same period, it shifted from liberal to conservative in the course of
the 1880s (Wasserman, “Jews and Judaism in the Gartenlaube,” 55). On the Grenzboten
see note 150 below.
140. Katz, Emancipation and Assimilation, 285.
141. Wistrich, Socialism and the Jews, 53.
142. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 212. As Katz writes, Glagau’s often-quoted
formulation, “The social question is nothing but the Jewish question,” was made not in
the Gartenlaube but in the book only (Emancipation and Assimilation, 285). While in the
form that Glagau’s articles appeared in the Gartenlaube (edited by its liberal editor) they
were not anti-liberal and not aggressively antisemitic (285; see also Wasserman, “Jews and
Judaism in the Gartenlaube,” 60), Glagau seems to have developed a straightforwardly
antisemitic discourse only when he experienced that his audience responded positively
to anti-Jewish formulations.
143. Quoted in Claussen, Vom Judenhass zum Antisemitismus, 94; Claussen and Mass-
ing seem to be quoting from the book version of Glagau’s articles.
144. Quoted in Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 11.
145. From “The Stock Exchange and Speculation Fraud in Berlin,” quoted in Claussen,
Vom Judenhass zum Antisemitismus, 97.
446 Notes to pages 218–219

146. “aber ich will sie revidiren, und zwar funditus revidiren”; Claussen, Vom Judenhass
zum Antisemitismus, 103–4.
147. This example shows how the antisemitic discourse connects the notion of
Jewish inferiority with that of Jewish superiority: the Jews are (effectively) superior
through being (morally) inferior. This stands against the often-repeated suggestion
that the concept of antisemitism ought to be strictly demarcated from that of racism
because racists see their objects as inferior, whereas antisemites see their objects as
superior. This paradox has been most clearly pronounced by Nietzsche: “The Jews are
beyond any doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe. They
understand how to persevere under the worst conditions, because of certain virtues
which one should like to call vices” (in “Der Antichrist,” quoted in Baron, “Changing
Patterns of Antisemitism,” 20).
148. From 1880 to 1889 Glagau edited an antisemitic middle-class magazine called
Der Kulturkämpfer (The Culture-Struggler) (Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 212).
On this, see also Weiland’s Otto Glagau und “Der Kulturkämpfer,” which contains several
of Glagau’s texts as documents.
149. Weiland, Otto Glagau und “Der Kulturkämpfer,” 66. The title Der Kulturkämpfer
implies that antisemitism was an extension of the (anti-Catholic) Kulturkampf. Wei-
land’s Otto Glagau und “Der Kulturkämpfer” offers the currently most useful general
presentation. She points out that the opposition of a “good German liberalism” to a
“bad Jewish liberalism” especially in Glagau’s brand of antisemitism helped liberals to
embrace antisemitism without having to deny their past (143).
150. Beginning in 1848 the Grenzboten was edited by Gustav Freytag and Julian Schmidt
and targeted a bourgeois readership that the editors aimed to educate toward national
self-consciousness and the trust in Prussian liberalism (Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschafts-
geschichte, 242). Grenzbote means “messenger from the border.”
151. Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century, 195.
152. They were first published anonymously, but in subsequent book publications they
appeared under Busch’s name (Pulzer, Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 96).
153. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 84. This seems to mean that the Bismarck
camp at this point took steps to recuperate antisemitism from the right-wing Con-
servatives.
154. Pulzer, Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 47; Pulzer and Massing, as well as most other
scholars, seem to quote from a twelfth edition of 1879. Pulzer and Massing suggest that
there was a first edition in 1873, while most others suggest that all twelve editions are from
1879 (Nipperdey and Rürup, “Antisemitismus,” 138; Zimmermann, “Two Generations,” 91;
Katz, Emancipation and Assimilation, 281; Bernhardt, “‘Die Juden sind unser Unglück!’”
37). In his own “testament” of 1891, Marr states that it was first published in 1879 and went
through eleven editions selling less than twenty thousand in all (Zimmermann, Wilhelm
Marr, 133, 166). A facsimile of the eighth edition (1879) is downloadable from www.gehove.
de/antisem/. More important than whether or not there was an edition of 1873 is that the
 Notes to pages 219–220 447

text went through a large number of editions in 1879, the year it gained a mass audience.
155. Wistrich, Socialism and the Jews, 53.
156. “Marr’s extreme hatred of Catholicism was no less virulent than his attacks on
Judaism.” In his youth he had been “preaching a confused atheistic utopia to German
artisans in Switzerland” (Wistrich, Socialism and the Jews, 533).
157. I quote from the bound edition of the first year’s issues (Berlin, 1880).
158. The article is not signed, but most probably written by the editor.
159. Deutsche Wacht, 3.
160. Deutsche Wacht, 4. The word Verjudung was coined by Richard Wagner already
in the original version of “Das Judentum in der Musik” (1850), but it became common
currency only in the 1870s (Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe, 46).
161. On Nordmann see note 90 for the introduction.
162. It first appeared anonymously, and the fifth edition is from 1862. Naudh claims its
authorship in his Israel im Heere (1879). In a pamphlet from August 1879, an opponent
of antisemitism (Scholl, Das Judenthum und die Religion der Humanität) claims that
Marr’s text merely emulates Naudh’s publications. Naudh’s argument is indeed more
sophisticated than Marr’s.
163. The same is true of Richard Wagner. Wagner had published in 1850 (under a
pseudonym) the essay “Das Judentum in der Musik” (Judaism in Music) (in the special-
ist publication Neue Zeitschrift für Musik), which had a small circulation and provoked
few responses. It was mostly a polemic against “Hebrew taste” and attacked the works
of Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Heine, and Börne. In 1869 Wagner
published (under his real name) a largely rewritten and longer version of the virtually
forgotten text as a pamphlet, and this received many more—mostly negative—responses.
This revised version was much more straightforwardly racist (although the word “race”
does not occur) and became a point of reference for the emerging antisemitic movement.
Because of its style and musical references, it hardly met a mass audience. (The edition
by Fischer documents, annotates, and contextualizes the two versions of the text.) The
“ne plus ultra of antisemitic extremism” (Pulzer, Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 50) of
the time was, however, the philosopher Eugen Dühring’s atheist work, Die Judenfrage als
Racen-, Sitten-und Kulturfrage (The Jewish Question as a Question of Race, Morality,
and Culture [1881]; compare Claussen, Was heisst Rassismus? 64). Dühring proposed a
“sort of ‘national’ Socialism” based on national self-sufficiency in a controlled economy
(Pulzer, Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 50) that differed from that of the Kathedersoz-
ialisten through a stronger affirmation of populism. He stressed that it is “precisely the
baptized Jews who infiltrate furthest,” which was why he saw need for a strictly racial
form of antisemitism (quoted in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern
World, 273). Against Conservatives, and also against Treitschke, whom he did not regard
as a serious fellow antisemite, Dühring insisted that antisemitism should be more than
a tactical instrument of anti-liberalism.
448 Notes to pages 221–225

9. Liberalism and National Liberalism

1. Quoted in Winkler, “Vom linken zum rechten Nationalismus,” 19.
2. On “anti-capitalism,” compare Postone, “History and Helplessness”; Bonefeld,
“Nationalism and Anti-Semitism.”
3. Quoted in Seeber, Zwischen Bebel und Bismarck, 33; in particular, Hermann Schulze-
Delitzsch was known as a follower of Bastiat, but it seems Bastiat was generally more
popular in Germany than in any other country at the time.
4. Seeber, Zwischen Bebel und Bismarck, 34.
5. Seeber, Zwischen Bebel und Bismarck, 35.
6. Bastiat’s concept of “economic harmony” is closely related to his rejection of classical
political economy’s labor theory of value (Smith, Ricardo), since the concept of surplus
value (and its appropriation) inevitably implies the concept of class antagonism. In a
form of liberalism based on Bastiat’s theory, separate working-class organization will
appear as unnatural disturbance of a presupposed natural harmony (while politics based
on classical political economy tend to be more prepared to defuse separate class interests
by recognizing them, and accept independent social and political organizations of the
working class as partners in the process of creating “economic harmony” through nego-
tiation and bargaining). Zucker’s (Ludwig Bamberger) detailed charting of Bamberger’s
journeys among Smith, Proudhon, and Bastiat is particularly interesting to read, keeping
these basic contradictions within liberal political economy in mind.
7. Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 13.
8. Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 20.
9. Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 21.
10. Bramsted, “General Introduction,” 37.
11. A detailed historical comparison would be needed to decide to what extent the
developments described here and the brand of National Liberalism they produced are
“German peculiarities.” My contention is that all the elements that made liberalism illiberal
in Germany seem to have been, and indeed seem to be, present in similar form in other
national contexts. Modern society is a global phenomenon as much as it is a national
one; some of the implications of this suggestion will be discussed in the conclusion.
12. Berger, The Search for Normality, 28–29. On the contradictions of the 1848–49
revolution see Siemann (Die deutsche Revolution von 1848/49) and Dreßen (1848–1849).
On the “Prussian school of history” see Ping (Gustav Freytag and the Prussian Gospel).
13. Quoted in Berger, The Search for Normality, 29.
14. Before 1848 the liberals who subsequently formed National Liberalism rather
optimistically expected “Prussia to be absorbed in Germany,” being “rejuvenated” by the
breath of liberal, “free German life” and even being “dissolved into its various provinces
which would become in their own right part of the united Germany” (Kohn, The Mind
of Germany, 139–40).
15. Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 28–33.
 Notes to pages 225–229 449

16. Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 37.

17. Dreßen, Gesetz und Gewalt, 74.
18. Dreßen, Gesetz und Gewalt, 113; literally, they “throttle liberty.”
19. Thompson, Customs in Common.
20. Dreßen, 1848–1849, 159.
21. Dreßen, Gesetz und Gewalt, 128.
22. Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 46.
23. Kohn, The Mind of Germany, 137.
24. Engels, “Die deutsche Reichsverfassungskampagne.”
25. Kohn, The Mind of Germany, 138.
26. Hughes, Nationalism and Society, 131.
27. Quoted in Hughes, Nationalism and Society, 131.
28. Kohn, The Mind of Germany, 141; Kohn argues that the discussion concerning
Poland in July 1848 was “one of the most important turning points” in which the sea
change became apparent. The province of Poznan had been given to Prussia in 1815
by the Vienna Congress “as an autonomous province, preserving its Polish character.”
The older liberal position that a Polish nation-state should be restored was only main-
tained by a minority in July 1848, while a majority appealed to “the right of conquest
by plough and sword” (142–43) and voted for annexation. This decision anticipated the
other two territorial questions that would become decisive issues over the following
decades, Schleswig and Alsace-Lorraine.
29. Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 55. Riesser had been the vice-president of
the National Assembly.
30. The 1850 version of the text reads “luxuriöses Geistesspiel”; in the revised 1869
version (which became much more influential than the original text) “luxuriöses” is
replaced by “nicht sehr hellsehendes [not so far-sighted].” The passage is from the second
paragraph of the original text.
31. 1850: “disputierten”; 1869: “wir . . . uns ergingen [we enthused ourselves]”
32. 1850: “blossen Gedankens”; 1869: “allgemeinen Gedankens [a general idea]”
33. Wagner, “Das Judentum in der Musik,” 144–45.
34. Quoted in Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 59.
35. Winkler, “Vom linken zum rechten Nationalismus,” 10.
36. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 31.
37. Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism; twentieth-century “third-worldist” theo-
ries of intensive state-led “development” did indeed refer back to List and the exemplary
ascendancy of Germany as industrial world power; see, e.g., Chirot and Hall, “World-
System Theory.”
38. Winkler, “Vom linken zum rechten Nationalismus,” 8–9, 12.
39. Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 61. As a student, von Rochau participated in
the storming of the Frankfurt Hauptwache in 1833; he became a member of the Reichstag
in 1871 (Dreßen, Gesetz und Gewalt, 200–201).
450 Notes to pages 230–231

40. To be sure, this is not to be confused with “might is right” or with the Nietzschean
perspective that right originates in material power relations (which is a sort of criticism
of idealism). Rochau says that right (still conceived of in a bourgeois-idealist fashion)
minus might equals empty talk. His claim is that the idealism of bourgeois right also
needs guns.
41. This is obviously an instance of the kind of “historical irony” favored by Hegel.
The double irony is that in the very long run the kleindeutsche National Liberal trajec-
tory came true: Germany is now undeniably a hegemonic modern liberal power, but its
journey in the twentieth century included historical experiences of the most illiberal
kind in dimensions that no one—neither the most ruthlessly Machiavellian National
Liberal nor the most sensitive critic—could have anticipated.
42. Baumgarten wrote in 1870: “Unity, power of the state, national independence are
the highest of all political goods” (Kohn, The Mind of Germany, 182). During the 1870s
he had second thoughts, and by 1882 he had become a fierce critic of Treitschke’s second
volume of Deutsche Geschichte (German History) (183). Baumgarten’s development is
in this similar to Mommsen’s.
43. In 1859 the Nationalverein (National Association) was founded as a “one-point”
coalition uniting liberals and democrats “by avoiding a programme of domestic policy”
(Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 83). The Fortschrittspartei (Progress Party) was
formed in 1861 by left-wing members of the older “Liberal Party” and some moder-
ate democrats. It gained considerable popularity by opposing the increase of military
spending, but lost much prestige when it gave in to Bismarck (who became minister
president in 1862) in the “constitutional conflict” (1862–66). After the war against Austria
(1866) the right wing split off and founded a “National Party” that subsequently fed into
the “National Liberal Party” in the Reichstag of the Federation (Massing, Rehearsal for
Destruction, 210).
44. The strength of liberal pro-Prussianism is most impressively illustrated by the fact
that almost without exception Jewish deputies of all German states—even in countries that
were predominantly anti-Prussian, such as Bavaria, Württemberg, and Hessen—fought
for a kleindeutsches Reich under Prussian leadership (Hamburger, Juden im öffentlichen
Leben Deutschlands, 249). Gabriel Riesser said in the speech that was instrumental in
convincing the National Assembly to vote for hereditary monarchy and against the secret
and equal ballot in 1849 that German unification was a priority from the achievement of
which Jewish emancipation will follow by necessity (Hamburger, Juden im öffentlichen
Leben Deutschlands, 182).
45. Vierhaus, “Liberalismus,” 743.
46. Vierhaus, “Liberalismus,” 745; the Latin word liberalis had the two meanings “to do
with liberty” and “generous; as is proper for a free born man.” Liberalitas was “noble, liberal-
minded and generous attitude” (745), a characteristic of an individual and referring to the
public sphere, not the political sphere. It was connected to prestige and public standing. Under
Julius Caesar it became also a political term denoting “Caesarian” spending politics.
 Notes to pages 231–235 451

47. Vierhaus, “Liberalismus,” 742.

48. This has led Janik to suggest that “liberalism” is a concept of the type of “essen-
tially contested concepts” that merely constitute a specific discussion and a range of
disagreements that are considered legitimate within the framework of that discussion
(“Liberalismus und Aufklärungswelt,” 67). Janik writes that liberalism is best understood
as a relational element within a dynamic range of concepts from “reactionary” through
“conservative” and from “liberal” to “radical.” At any given moment, the precise mean-
ing of any of these concepts depends on how all of them are related to each other by
discursive practice.
49. Mosse, “German Jews and Liberalism in Retrospect,” xiv. On the concept of Bildung
see Sorkin, “Wilhelm von Humboldt.”
50. Jarausch and Jones, “German Liberalism Reconsidered,” 13.
51. Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, xiii.
52. Arblaster, Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, 11–14.
53. Janik, “Liberalismus und Aufklärungswelt,” 70–77.
54. Wallerstein, After Liberalism, 1.
55. Vierhaus, “Liberalismus,” 749.
56. Quoted in Vierhaus, “Liberalismus,” 747.
57. Quoted in Vierhaus, “Liberalismus,” 747.
58. “der einzelne Bürger sich doch überreden kann, dass er nach seinem eigenen Sinne
lebe und bloss seiner Neigung gehorche”; Vierhaus, “Liberalismus,” 747.
59. Quoted in Vierhaus, “Liberalismus,” 747.
60. “erweitert sich mit dem Geschäft auch der Gesichtskreis”; quoted in Vierhaus,
“Liberalismus,” 748.
61. Vierhaus, “Liberalismus,” 751.
62. Vierhaus, “Liberalismus,” 751. In England, a journal called The Liberal first ap-
peared in 1822. The Whig Party was officially referred to as “the liberals” for the first
time in 1847.
63. Hamerow, Social Foundations of German Unification, 152.
64. Hamerow, Social Foundations of German Unification, 158.
65. Hamerow, Social Foundations of German Unification, 162.
66. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 60, 61.
67. Quoted in Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 61.
68. It was only later referred to as the “Manchester School.” It is probable that this
concept was brought into the German discussion by Ferdinand Lassalle, who first learned
it from Karl Marx (Vierhaus, “Liberalismus,” 806). Also, the term “liberal economics” was
first used by Lassalle in 1864 as a near synonym for free-trade politics. Lassalle also used
the term “the political and the economic bourgeois doctrine.” In the 1870s there are more
references for this use of the term “liberal.” A systematic use of the concept of liberalism
“as economic doctrine, party and epoch concept” can be found in the Social Democratic
press, e.g., in Bebel’s writings. Bamberger, in Deutschland und der Socialismus, was the first
452 Notes to pages 235–240

writer in Germany who tried to use the term “Manchester liberalism” in an affirmative,
positive sense, without much resonance. The first textbook of economics that referred
(in Germany) to “economic liberalism” was published in 1895 (Walter, Exkurs, 810).
69. Quoted in Vierhaus, “Liberalismus,” 755–56.
70. Vierhaus, “Liberalismus,” 757.
71. Vierhaus, “Liberalismus,” 758.
72. The concept “bourgeois society” is itself ambivalent, as it denotes on the one hand
a generic category (the community of family fathers, owners of property, as opposed to
“the state,” whatever the specific historical form and content of either may be) and on
the other hand the specific form that bourgeois society (in the generic sense) has in the
bourgeois period, i.e. (much more specifically), the society of right-bearing, commodity-
owning, and commodity-selling individuals facing the modern state. I usually mean
modern bourgeois society when I write “bourgeois society”; when I want to emphasize
the modern in distinction from other (“pre-modern”) forms of bourgeois society, I use
“modern” or “liberal” bourgeois society.
73. Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 4.
74. Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 6.
75. Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 12.
76. Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century, 46; see also Volkov, Rise of
Popular Antimodernism, on the “ambivalent” liberalism of master artisans.
77. Wallerstein, After Liberalism, 97.
78. Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 107.
79. Hamerow, Social Foundations of German Unification, 178.
80. Quoted in Hamerow, Social Foundations of German Unification, 165.
81. Quoted in Kohn, The Mind of Germany, 187.
82. Quoted in Seeber, Zwischen Bebel und Bismarck, 42.
83. Seeber, Zwischen Bebel und Bismarck, 43.
84. Winkler, “Vom linken zum rechten Nationalismus,” 18.
85. Seeber, Zwischen Bebel und Bismarck, 46.
86. The Rechtsstaat already had repeatedly been violated by the majority faction of
both liberal parties in the contexts of the Kulturkampf as well as the regulations con-
cerning the civil rights of the inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine. Lasker (and Richter and
Hänel from the Progress Party) managed to get a majority against the Sozialistengesetz
only in the first instance. Only in 1886 did Liberals vote against the law at a point when
it had become obvious that it did not work against Social Democracy anyway but did
good service against liberalism.
87. Sell, Die Tragödie des deutschen Liberalismus, 265. Only Treitschke and Rudolf
Gneist voted for the first version of the Sozialistengesetz (Langewiesche, Liberalism in
Germany, 209).
88. The liberal opposition to Social Democracy actually decreased to the same extent
that the party embraced—against Marx’s admonitions to the contrary and increasingly
after his death—state socialist reformism.
 Notes to pages 240–243 453

89. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 21.

90. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 21.
91. Oppenheim’s attack was directed at Gustav Schönberg, who was one of the bour-
geois proponents of social reform and a critic of Manchester liberalism. The institutional
base of Katheder socialism, the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Association for Social Policy),
was founded in 1873. It emphasized in its beginnings rural problems and tended to stress
the role of Jews in rural small-scale credit as a particular problem (Massing, Rehearsal
for Destruction, 218). Massing holds however that the Verein was not straightforwardly
antisemitic.
92. Sell, Die Tragödie des deutschen Liberalismus, 256.
93. Pulzer, Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 44.
94. Sell, Die Tragödie des deutschen Liberalismus, 258–59.
95. Sell, Die Tragödie des deutschen Liberalismus, 259. F. Neumann (Behemoth, 90–91)
also counts Friedrich List as a Kathedersozialist. Because List combined racialism, impe-
rialism, and state socialism, Neumann calls him “the first articulate National Socialist.”
The connection is warranted by the fact that Adolf Wagner, the most influential of the
Kathedersozialisten and cofounder of Stöcker’s Christlich Soziale Arbeiterpartei, was
influenced by List. Zucker (Ludwig Bamberger) is most informative on Bamberger’s role
in the debate about Katheder socialism. The Marxist critique of state socialism can be
traced back to an article by Marx and Engels from September 12, 1847 (Deutsche Brüs-
seler Zeitung no. 73), in which they argue that “the rule of the bourgeoisie” is preferable
to “the present . . . rule of bureaucracy” because it puts the proletariat in a better posi-
tion to fight the bourgeoisie as a “recognized party.” They referred to this article in 1865
when they refused to cooperate with the Lassalleans. They criticized the Lassalleans for
failing to attack the Conservatives as strongly as the Liberals (Massing, Rehearsal for
Destruction, 251).
96. Quoted in Sell, Die Tragödie des deutschen Liberalismus, 261, and in Hamburger,
Juden im öffentlichen Leben Deutschlands, 290.
97. Quoted in K. Krieger, Der “Berliner Antisemitismusstreit,” 603. Thomas B. Macaulay
(1800–1859), a Whig politician and historian, opposed working-class suffrage but was
in favor of Jewish emancipation.
98. Quoted in Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 101. Treitschke reproduces here an
argument classically formulated by Heinrich Riehl (Die deutsche Arbeit) (see Campbell,
Joy in Work); see note 68 in chapter 3.
99. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 102.
100. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 205.
101. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 208.
102. Iggers, “Heinrich von Treitschke,” 71.
103. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 211.
104. In his five-part essay on “Bonapartism” (published between 1865 and 1868) (Langer,
Heinrich von Treitschke, 212–13).
454 Notes to pages 243–247

105. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 213.

106. Quoted in Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 223.
107. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 239, 240.
108. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 275; Langer argues this with reference to a letter
by Treitschke to Gustav von Schmoller.
109. Both Schmoller’s speech and Treitschke’s polemic were first published in Preus-
sische Jahrbücher.
110. “Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts,” a formulation Schmoller had used in 1872
(quoted in Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 277).
111. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 279.
112. Megay, “Treitschke Reconsidered,” 310–11.
113. Quoted in Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 69. Turgot was a major
influence on Adam Smith and classical political economy.
114. Quoted in Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 283.
115. Perhaps as a specific bildungsbürgerliche facet of his liberalism, Treitschke saw the
aristocracy—within the context of established bourgeois society, i.e., under the condi-
tions of a society that was not aristocratic—as allies in the effort to counterbalance the
mind-set and the social dynamism that a booming capitalist economy brought: the
“excesses” of capitalism, such as “speculation” or “usury.”
116. “die Freiheit des Menschen im freien Staate” (Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke,
183).
117. Megay, “Treitschke Reconsidered,” 305. “Börne” made the same point. The point
is indeed central to the liberal tradition as a whole; for a contemporary articulation, see
Saunders, “What Does Liberalism Inherit,” which argues that law and state formation
on which it depends were preconditions for creating autonomous individuals in the
first place.
118. Megay, “Treitschke Reconsidered,” 308–9.
119. Megay, “Treitschke Reconsidered,” 309.
120. Megay, “Treitschke Reconsidered,” 310.
121. Iggers, “Heinrich von Treitschke,” 67.
122. Iggers, “Heinrich von Treitschke,” 78.
123. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 106; from Die Freiheit (1861), which is an extended
review of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859). Treitschke rejects Mill’s utilitarianism but
acknowledges Mill’s indebtedness to German idealism and presents large parts of Mill’s
argument as support for his own. In the revised version of the text from 1864 there are
some shifts of emphasis. In the first version, Treitschke had written (in a Kantian vein)
that “the citizen must never be used by the state as a mere means to an end” and “the
personal well-being of the citizen is the touchstone for the dignity of the state”; the second
version contained neither statement (Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 106).
124. Quoted in Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke; the last quote is from the revised
version of 1864.
 Notes to pages 247–249 455

125. This is from a chapter on Hegel in the third volume of Deutsche Geschichte (1885).
Treitschke’s defense in 1885 of individualism against Hegel is a piece of evidence against the
suggestion of some that Treitschke had been a liberal earlier on and abandoned liberalism
sometime in the 1870s. It is also interesting to note that Treitschke credits Christianity
with having introduced individualism, a claim typical of (Christian) liberalism with roots
in the Enlightenment. To the extent that liberals believed this genealogy to be true, it is
hardly surprising that they would be less than enthusiastic about Judaism.
126. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 257.
127. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 155; this is contained in his Die Gesellschaftswis-
senschaft: Ein kritischer Versuch (Social Science: A Critical Essay) of 1858.
128. “sittliche Bewusstsein des Volkes” (Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 179).
129. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 107.
130. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, 68; Treitschke accepted Mill’s
statement that “mankind” is only “warranted . . . in interfering with the liberty of ac-
tion of any of their number” for the sole purpose of “self-protection” (Considerations
on Representative Government, 72–73) but found it too unspecific, because Mill failed
to provide the criteria by which to judge when a case for self-protection could be made.
He concluded that “there is no absolute limit to state power” but only relative—i.e.,
historically specific—limits. The limit of state power was the acceptance on the side of
the citizens that they felt their own agency to be respected by the state’s and that they
were not being used in a merely instrumental way.
131. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 181.
132. From a text of 1854 (quoted in L. Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom, 366). In
a lecture on Fichte given in 1862 (published in Die Grenzboten), Treitschke quotes ap-
provingly Fichte’s statement that “in Germany there will arise a true Empire of Right
[Reich des Rechts] and of personal freedom, based on the equality of all human beings”
(Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 91).
133. Quoted from a letter from Treitschke’s student days in Langer, Heinrich von Tre-
itschke, 78.
134. Treitschke came from a patriotic Saxonian (and rather anti-Prussian) family. He
did not act out of a received Prussian patriotism or chauvinism.
135. Quoted in Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 84.
136. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 85.
137. “Mit dem Begriffe des Staats ist der Begriff des Krieges schon gegeben, denn das
Wesen des Staats liegt in der Macht”; quoted in Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 139.
138. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 123.
139. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 122.
140. “die weiche Masse der Kleinstaaten”; “mit all’ seiner rauhen Grösse, seiner Härte
und Schroffheit als einen festen Kern” (Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 120). This antici-
pates the brutal, masculinist language that Theweleit (Male Fantasies) describes.
141. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 124, 125.
456 Notes to pages 249–251

142. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 123. When some critics of the annexation of
Schleswig-Holstein argued it should be up to the population whether they wanted to be
a Prussian province, Treitschke stated that the right to self-determination should not be
overemphasized: asking the population for its opinion leads to “anarchy,” and liberals
who abhor universal suffrage as an “instrument of Caesarism” (Langer, Heinrich von
Treitschke, 112) should not at the same time call for referendums.
143. Occasionally, Treitschke would criticize more cautious fellow liberals (such as
Haym, then editor of the Preussische Jahrbücher) for not opposing a censorship law such
as the one imposed by the Prussian king in 1863 (Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 98). At
the congress at Gotha in June 1848 the majority of moderate liberals, including Hein-
rich von Gagern, Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, and Karl Mathy, decided to pursue
small-German, Prussian-led unification (Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 214). Ludwig
Bamberger analyzed the “Gotha” tendency in his 1866 pamphlet Über Rom und Paris
nach Gotha; oder, die Wege des Herrn von Treitschke.
144. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 136.
145. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 71.
146. Iggers, “Heinrich von Treitschke,” 69.
147. Quoted in Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 71.
148. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 369; for Treitschke, the most abominable char-
acter traits of the English tradition are hypocrisy and trade-mindedness. Treitschke
labels England (in the fifth volume of Deutsche Geschichte [1894]) the “new Carthage”
(Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 371). For the antisemitic overtones of this notion see
Bernal (Black Athena, 341–42): Phoenician is a Semitic language. An affinity between
Carthage and England was seen by many in the nineteenth century on both sides of the
Channel. Likewise, Bernal describes what could be called nineteenth-century British
philo-Phoenicianism, as follows: “Many Victorians had a positive feeling towards the
Phoenicians as sober cloth merchants who did a little bit of slaving on the side and spread
civilization while making a tidy profit” (Black Athena, 350).
149. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 140, 141.
150. Dorpalen, Heinrich von Treitschke, 251.
151. Wallerstein stresses that all over Europe after 1848, Liberals and Conservatives
came to a form of “reconciliation” based on the recognition by Liberals of the centrality
of protecting property and by Conservatives of the utility of liberal reform for Conser-
vative purposes (After Liberalism, 87). The more liberalism succeeded in becoming “the
dominant ideology of the world-system,” the more party-political liberalism disinte-
grated. It is crucial that this process “was in fact put into effect by the combined effort
of conservatives and socialists,” including “enlightened Conservatives” like Disraeli and
Bismarck (101). Especially the transformation of existing states into modern nation-states
could only be completed by socialist and conservative movements in the last decades of
the nineteenth century: only they could effectively integrate “the “outlying” zones (in
a geographical as well as social sense) of what were to become national societies. The
 Notes to pages 251–254 457

irony of this process is that “liberalism” could only succeed by destroying the hegemony
of “Liberalism.” This more general observation also throws a distinct light on the Berlin
Antisemitism Dispute.
152. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 377.
153. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 380, 382, 384.
154. Quoted in Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 5.

10. Nationalism and the Reich of 1871

1. Of course, civic nationalism was formulated in the context of the French Revolu-
tion in the consciousness that it constituted a conception that was closely intertwined
with the discourse of “popular sovereignty.” For example, in the debate on the future
of Avignon in 1791 the “wish of the inhabitants of the city of Avignon to become part
of France was held to override international law, in this case the Pope’s ownership of
Avignon” (Hughes, Nationalism and Society, 12). In this context it was argued that the
will of “the nation” is superior to all other (“legitimist,” traditional, historical) rights.
Brubaker adds that the principle of self-determination was “invoked to justify the ter-
ritorial gains of 1791–1793” as well as the acquisition of Alsace in the seventeenth century
(Citizenship and Nationhood, 7). The common element of all these discourses is the
revolutionary consciousness that tradition can be undone and replaced by something
new that is based on the willing and aspirations of people in the present (whatever that
may mean in particular).
2. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 146. Ludwig Philippson argued in an article in the
Allgemeine Zeitung (March 1871) not only that Alsace-Lorraine was German due to lin-
guistic, cultural, and historical ties but also that the Jews of Alsace-Lorraine were resident
in that area only because it had been under German rather than French rule at the time
when France was expelling the Jews (Cresti, “Kultur and Civilization,” 103).
3. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 147–47.
4. Finkielkraut, The Undoing of Thought, 31.
5. Almog, “Racial Motif,” 256.
6. Renan saw his own book La vie de Jésus (1863) as an extension and complement of
Das Leben Jesu: Kritisch bearbeitet (1835–36) by David Friedrich Strauss, whom he admired
until the Franco-Prussian war changed his attitude to the German intellectual world.
7. Finkielkraut, The Undoing of Thought, 31.
8. Finkielkraut, The Undoing of Thought, 31.
9. Finkielkraut, The Undoing of Thought, 33.
10. Finkielkraut, The Undoing of Thought, 34.
11. Etienne Balibar argues in a comment on Finkielkraut that the liberal-idealist con-
ception of the nation as immortalized by Renan—nation building as the progressive
overcoming of the ethnic notion of man as “a captive of history”—is based on a misun-
derstanding of the “ethnic” mode of nationalism: “ethnic nationalism” does not simply
lock human beings into their being-so. Rather, it accommodates a vision of transcendence,
458 Notes to pages 254–257

too: racist nationalism defends the transcendence of the state of “animality” that humanity
has already achieved against elements that threaten it with a regression into animality
(both from within the particular people that the racist-nationalist is concerned about,
and from without). Furthermore, racist nationalism often invokes a human ideal that it
hopes to realize in the future, although inspiration for this may come from the (imagi-
nary) past. These characteristics make “ethnic nationalism” perfectly compatible with
both liberalism and socialism (Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism,” 57).
12. Finkielkraut, The Undoing of Thought, 45–46.
13. On Renan see Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction, 133–38. Renan’s antisemitism
was religious as well as racial: in his 1863 book, Vie de Jésus, he wrote that “intolerance is
essentially not a Christian fact. It is a Jewish fact”—Jewish obstinacy and intolerance were
responsible for the death of Jesus (quoted in Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction, 135).
14. In the Anglo-Saxon world, the image of Germany as an anti-liberal power tradi-
tionally obsessed with race and ethnicity seems to have been solidified in the context of
World War I. This was also when the thinking of Hegel, Nietzsche, and indeed Treitschke
(“Nitch and Tritch”) came to be seen as straightforwardly reactionary (Moore, “The
Super-Hun and the Super-State”).
15. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 10.
16. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 10.
17. Breuilly, “The National Idea,” 23; similarly Gall: the “reactive nationalisation” in
Spain, Italy, and Germany followed “the same pattern as the nationalisation of France
under the banner of the French Revolution” (“Liberalismus und Nationalstaat,” 212).
18. See Anthias and Yuval-Davis, Racialized Boundaries.
19. As Anthony D. Smith (Theories of Nationalism) does, following Max Weber.
20. After all, natio is just Latin for the Greek word ethnos. Both words meant in
antiquity a community of descent (nasci: to be born) and of culture/custom (ethos) or
living together (ethein) when probably for most people culture—i.e., the ways of liv-
ing together—was as much a given as other inherited aspects of their lives. Likewise, it
makes sense that both nationality and ethnicity refer in the modern context to cultural
community, which is less based on descent; this simply reflects the reality of sociality
in the modern period.
21. Brubaker, “The Manichean Myth,” 61.
22. Quoted in Brubaker, “The Manichean Myth,” 61.
23. Brubaker, “The Manichean Myth”; see also Yack, “The Myth of the Civic Nation,”
198, 208. When in the French Revolution Abbé Grégoire reported on “the necessity and
means of abolishing the patois and universalizing the use of the French language,” he
was addressing—in the name of civic equality—a crucial aspect of culture.
24. A. D. Smith (The Ethnic Origins of Nations) proposed such a typology.
25. Marx, Faith in Nation, 7.
26. Norbert Elias had stressed already in 1936 the forgotten presence of nationalism in
contemporary sociological theory: “Many twentieth century sociologists, when speaking
 Notes to pages 257–261 459

of ‘society,’ no longer have in mind (as did their predecessors) a ‘bourgeois society’ or a
‘human society’ beyond the state, but increasingly the . . . nation-state” (quoted in Billig,
Banal Nationalism, 53).
27. Marx, Faith in Nation, 6, 7.
28. Marx, Faith in Nation, 16.
29. F. Neumann, Behemoth, 87.
30. F. Neumann, Behemoth, 87.
31. Larner quoted in Sayer, Capitalism and Modernity, 128.
32. Schilling, “Nationale Identität und Konfession,” 237.
33. Schilling, “Nationale Identität und Konfession,” 240.
34. Schilling, “Nationale Identität und Konfession,” 197.
35. Schilling, “Nationale Identität und Konfession,” 241.
36. Hölscher, “The Religious Divide,” 42.
37. Hölscher, “The Religious Divide,” 43.
38. Hölscher, “The Religious Divide,” 43.
39. M. L. Anderson, “Living Apart and Together in Germany,” 320.
40. H. W. Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 234.
41. Hölscher, “The Religious Divide,” 44–45.
42. Arndt in 1814, quoted in Altgeld, “Religion, Denomination, and Nationalism,” 52.
43. Altgeld, “Religion, Denomination, and Nationalism,” 55.
44. Altgeld, “Religion, Denomination, and Nationalism,” 59.
45. Hölscher, “The Religious Divide,” 45. The German Reich that ended in 1806 was
inhabited by 60 percent Catholics, the German Bund of 1815 by roughly 50 percent, and
the Reich of 1871 by one-third (Altgeld, “Religion, Denomination, and Nationalism,” 51).
However, they constituted much less than a third of the educated bourgeoisie (Becker,
“Konfessionelle Nationsbilder,” 391).
46. Hölscher, “The Religious Divide,” 45.
47. Hölscher, “The Religious Divide,” 36.
48. The German word Frömmigkeit initially had the meaning of “hardworking good-
ness and honesty” (Hölscher, “The Religious Divide,” 36). The centrality of individuality,
personality, dignity, and the urge to find individual expressions of belief (36–37) was in
itself rather typical of the Protestant confession. It was in this context that family and
educational institutions gained more influence on an individual’s religiosity, while the
relevance of the church as such correspondingly decreased (39–40). Religious orthodoxy
(Jewish as well as Christian), on the other hand, tried to defend whatever had survived
from pre-modern religion as an aspect of everyday life that is formal-objective and
spiritual-subjective at the same time.
49. Altgeld, “Religion, Denomination, and Nationalism,” 49.
50. Walkenhorst, “Nationalismus als ‘politische Religion?’” 524.
51. Walkenhorst, “Nationalismus als ‘politische Religion?’” 517.
52. Blaschke, Katholizismus und Antisemitismus, 31–41.
460 Notes to page 262

53. Altgeld, “Religion, Denomination, and Nationalism,” 49–50.

54. H. W. Smith and Clark, “The Fate of Nathan,” 13.
55. H. W. Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 238.
56. Blaschke, Katholizismus und Antisemitismus, 31.
57. Blaschke, Katholizismus und Antisemitismus, 40.
58. Gross, “The Catholics’ Missionary Crusade,” 245. These movements were largely
connected with the name of Pope Pius IX. The landmarks of ultramontanism were the
endorsement of the doctrine of Immaculate Conception (1854), the anti-liberal Syl-
labus Errorum (1864), and the declaration of papal infallibility (1870). The ideological
struggle between liberalism and anti-liberal Catholicism constituted a “pan-European”
phenomenon (Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 200). The death of Pope Pius IX
in February 1878 gave Bismarck a good opportunity to phase out the anti-Catholic
Kulturkampf (Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 195).
59. They benefited from the Prussian constitution of 1850, which ended state interven-
tion in ecclesiastical affairs.
60. Rudolf Virchow, one of the founders of the Progress Party, who seems to have
coined the term Kulturkampf, defined its aims in a speech of 1873 as “(1) to liberate religion
from the domination of the church and secular life from the domination of religion; and
(2) to urge the national state to recognize its duty to bring about such a liberation and
to impose it on the nation as a whole.” This “struggle in behalf of secular culture” might
even necessitate a “dictatorship of ministers” (Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany, 82;
Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 214). Blackbourn translates Kulturkampf as “struggle
of civilizations.” Against the conventional view, which is derived from the liberals’ own
perspective, he holds that “the piety of German Catholics during the Kulturkampf was
not traditional” (“Progress and Piety,” 144) and that therefore this was not the struggle of
modernity against tradition but between antagonistic aspects of modernity itself. Modern
piety as invented in the second third of the nineteenth century (147) was itself part of
a general modern process of disciplination. “Spontaneous” elements of popular piety
“cut across the lines of clerical authority” (154); see also Gross, “The Catholics’ Mission-
ary Crusade” and The War against Catholicism. As Penslar points out, the Kulturkampf
had a prehistory in internal Catholic attempts at reform in the late eighteenth century.
Penslar quotes a text from 1783 by Peter Adolph Winkopp, a former Benedictine monk,
aiming at the amelioration of monks. According to Winkopp, monks constitute a state
within the state, are incapable of being citizens of the states in which they live, are both
immensely wealthy monastic orders being capital-owning institutions and impoverished
as mendicant monks who are possessed of an “unquenchable thirst for money.” They are
unproductive, immoral, given to laziness, avarice and “onanism, that is, the spending of
seed, the most egregious and shocking form of waste” (something of which Jews were also
sometimes accused) (Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 30–31). While all this closely resembles
the discourse on the amelioration of the Jews, Winkopp was rather unique at the time
in pointing to the Jews as a positive example that the monks should emulate.
 Notes to pages 263–266 461

61. Quoted in Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 200.

62. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 16.
63. Eley, “State Formation,” 69.
64. Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 202.
65. Hobbes defined (in Behemoth) religion that did not serve the rational purposes of
the state as “superstition” (Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science, 355).
66. Clark, “The ‘Christian’ State,” 72.
67. Clark, “The ‘Christian’ State,” 74; this constituted an “unprecedented confessional
interventionism” on the part of the Prussian king, as Clark writes (74).
68. Clark, “The ‘Christian’ State,” 75.
69. Clark, “The ‘Christian’ State,” 77. See also Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction,
chap. 15.
70. Clark, “The ‘Christian’ State,” 79. This notion anticipates, for example, the kind of
“liberation theology” formulated a century later by Khomeini for the Iranian revolution;
compare Abrahamian, Khomeinism, and Retort, Afflicted Powers. Khomeini’s doctrine
is better described as a form of “Third World” populism than as “fundamentalism,” and
on this level its antisemitic elements become explicable: they fit into a general pattern
of populist doctrines that aim at the mobilization of mass opposition to the established
sociopolitical order on the basis of the preservation of middle-class property and anti-
Marxism and characterized by political pragmatism and opportunism (Abrahamian,
Khomeinism, 17).
71. Stahl applauded the emancipation edict of 1812 for exemplifying the generosity of
the Protestant spirit but still safeguarding the state’s Christian character. His concept of
the “Christian state” was reflected in article 14 of the Prussian constitution of 1850 (which
remained valid after 1871), which stated: “The Christian religion is taken to be the basis of
those institutions of the state that are connected with the practice of religion, regardless
of the freedom of religion guaranteed in article 12” (Clark, “The ‘Christian’ State,” 83).
72. Becker, “Konfessionelle Nationsbilder,” 394, 395.
73. Becker, “Konfessionelle Nationsbilder,” 396.
74. H. W. Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 402.
75. H. W. Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 238.
76. Becker, “Konfessionelle Nationsbilder,” 404.
77. H. W. Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict 235.
78. Bonifatius was an English monk, missionary, and reformer who contributed in the
first half of the eighth century to the popularization of Christianity in only superficially
Christianized areas of the Germanic parts of the Frankish Empire. Catholics see him
as the “Apostle of Germany.” His work helped establish the foundations on which the
Carolingian Holy Roman Empire was founded. Using vernacular language for sermons,
he seems to have played a role somewhat similar to Luther’s but in the name of a rising,
not against a decadent, Roman church.
79. H. W. Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 239.
462 Notes to pages 266–268

80. On the question of the extent to which these features are “peculiarities” of the
German case or can also be found in other national contexts, see Plessner, Die verspätete
Nation; Faulenbach, Ideologie des deutschen Weges; Ruggiero, History of European Liberal-
ism; Eley, “What Produces Fascism?”; Eley, “The British Model”; Eley, From Unification
to Nazism; Eley, “Rosenberg and the Great Depression”; Eley, “Is There a History of the
Kaiserreich?”; Eley, “German History”; Blackbourn, “Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoi-
sie”; Breuilly, Labour and Liberalism; Berger, The Search for Normality; Evans, “Whatever
Became of the Sonderweg?”
81. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 12.
82. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 940.
83. As Hughes argues, the idea that nationalism caused—or at least was one of the
causes behind—the unification of Germany is a myth: “at least until the last quarter of the
[nineteenth] century, nationalism was a minority movement, deeply divided and with only
a marginal impact on German political life” (Nationalism and Society, 2). Breuilly suggests
that the emergence of German patriotism had been prevented earlier in the nineteenth
century by “loyalties to confession, region, narrow self-interest, and traditional rulers”
(“The National Idea,” 8). At the time of the foundation of the Reich, not even the middle
classes were completely supportive of German nationalism: still in the 1870s Bavarian
deputies in the Reichstag would refer to Bavaria as their “nation”; only in the 1890s was
the concept of Germany as “the nation” completely hegemonic (Wehler, Deutsche Gesell-
schaftsgeschichte, 952). The German Reich also lacked at the time a national anthem and
a national flag (Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 957). Furthermore, the concept
of the Reich implied not so much national unity (Volksgemeinschaft) as a federation of
peoples (Völkergemeinschaft) (Buschmann, “Auferstehung der Nation?” 357).
84. Hughes, Nationalism and Society, 131, 135. Gramsci famously described the strategy
involved in this process as “passive revolution.” See note 125 below.
85. Hughes, Nationalism and Society, 3.
86. Carr, “The Unification of Germany,” 84–85.
87. Carr, “The Unification of Germany,” 94.
88. Carr, “The Unification of Germany,” 96.
89. Carr, “The Unification of Germany,” 94–95.
90. Winkler, “Vom linken zum rechten Nationalismus,” 8.
91. Quoted in Hamerow, Social Foundations of German Unification, 163.
92. Hamerow, Social Foundations of German Unification, 144.
93. Georg Gottfried Gervinus’s “Memorandum on Peace” (1871) is an example of a
minority view within liberalism that did not welcome German unification in the form
of the Reich (Kohn, Prophets and Peoples, 109–10). Gervinus argued that centralization
should be avoided and federalism strengthened—with not Berlin but “a city which
would symbolise a policy of peaceful civilization” being the capital: an anticipation of
Weimar and Bonn, as it were—in order to prevent a vicious circle of militarization of
European politics.
 Notes to pages 268–270 463

94. Breuilly, Labour and Liberalism, 289.

95. Hardtwig, “Der deutsche Weg,” 12.
96. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 942. For some specific groups of the popula-
tion, “Germany” became much earlier an “experiential space” because they were traveling
a lot across state borders: in the course of university education, scholarly contacts, as part
of an administrative career, or through exile (Echternkamp, Der Aufstieg des deutschen
Nationalismus, 504). This was the case for most 1848 deputies. Trade obviously needs
to be added to the list.
97. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 946.
98. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 948.
99. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 958, 949.
100. Eley, “State Formation,” 79.
101. Hardtwig, “Der deutsche Weg,” 27.
102. Hughes, Nationalism and Society, 156.
103. Deuerlein, “Die Konfrontation,” 255.
104. Their basically conservative anti-nationalism could position itself alongside or
against antisemitism. This old-fashioned intellectual tradition found a last apogee in
Hannah Arendt.
105. Of course the two concepts coincide to the extent that the specific content of the
normative concept of culture is formulated in a particular national context, and the
latter is construed as normative by those who inhabit it.
106. Pulzer translates Gründer, literally “founder,” as “promoter,” which seems to be
the correct technical term denoting a person who participates in the foundation of a
company and for that purpose “promotes” this company for fund-raising (Rise of Politi-
cal Anti-Semitism, 19).
107. Pulzer, Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 18.
108. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 5. Between 1850 and 1875 “the value of bank
notes in circulation in Prussia increased from 18 million to 290 million Taler” (Black-
bourn, “Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” 181). Before 1871 there were eight different
silver-based currencies in the German League. In the 1860s the relative values of silver
and gold were quite unpredictable (one factor was the gold rush, another the flow of
silver to Asia); the transition to a unified gold currency seemed a way of handling this.
Furthermore, the smaller German states endangered currency stability by being able
to print paper money at will (R. Weber, “Ludwig Bamberger”). Zucker describes the
struggles over the reform of the currency in the context of his biography of Ludwig
Bamberger, its main architect.
109. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 32.
110. Blackbourn, “Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” 182.
111. Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 190.
112. There has been a long scholarly controversy whether there was a “Great Depres-
sion” from 1873 to 1896 (H. Rosenberg, Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit; Wehler,
464 Notes to pages 270–272

Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte) or whether this is a myth (Saul according to Wolfgang

Mommsen, Imperial Germany, 105; see also Eley, “Rosenberg and the Great Depression”).
Mommsen in his summary assessment states that most scholars tend to reject the notion.
He emphasizes that there have been repeated ups and downs in the period and that the
development of different sections of production was extremely uneven due to the growing
integration of the German economy into the world market. Even within the most dynamic
areas, such as metal industry, only a small number of companies ever did extremely well.
Even if aggregate data suggest an economic boom during most of any given period, this
does not at all mean that most companies, let alone most people, did (or thought they
did) well. It seems safe to say, though, that there was a period of stagnation between
1873 and 1878 and that 1879—the year of the Dispute—was the year of a weak economic
recovery. The agricultural crisis began in the 1870s (W. Mommsen, Imperial Germany,
107) and peaked in 1894. Nevertheless, in the whole period agricultural productivity rose
significantly. The absolute number of people employed in agriculture increased slightly.
“Generally speaking, the agricultural sector remained comparatively strong up to 1914”
in Germany, contrasting sharply with the development in Britain, for example: “until
1914 the German Empire was both an agrarian and an industrial state” (108).
113. The introduction of protective tariffs in July 1879 “represented the first modern
piece of legislation in Germany to bear the stamp of a top-level business organization
all over it” (Wehler, The German Empire, 86).
114. The social powers behind the turn toward protectionism were mining and textile
industry and to a lesser degree industrial agrarians (Winkler, “Vom linken zum rech-
ten Nationalismus,” 14). The petition was based on a compromise: tariffs on foodstuff
(that increase the costs of livelihood and thus wages) were meant to be balanced out by
tariffs on finished products, allowing industry to offset the increased wage costs. Two
weeks later, a conference of the German Chambers of Commerce in Berlin also departed
from free-trade policies. The free traders’ counterattack “reached a high point” in May
1879 when representatives of seventy-two German cities—the grass roots of German
liberalism—met in Berlin and “voted overwhelmingly to oppose any tariff on foodstuffs”
(Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century, 187).
115. Sell, Die Tragödie des deutschen Liberalismus, 271.
116. See Winkler, “Vom linken zum rechten Nationalismus,” 16.
117. Quoted in Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century, 195.
118. Kocka suggests “Sanderweg” should best be rendered as “the German divergence
from the West” (“German History before Hitler,” 11).
119. Hardtwig, “Der deutsche Weg,” 11; “Prussia [at the time of German unification]
was not associated only with the barracks and the spiked helmet; it was broadly identified
with the cause of modernity in fields ranging from education and communications to
the scientific management of forests” (Blackbourn, “The German Bourgeoisie,” 19).
120. Blackbourn, “The German Bourgeoisie,” 22.
121. Breuilly, Labour and Liberalism, 293; see also Kocka, “The European Pattern,” 27.
 Notes to pages 272–279 465

122. Breuilly, Labour and Liberalism, 287.

123. Evans, “Whatever Became of the Sonderweg?” 17.
124. Eley, “German History,” 93.
125. Eley, “Modernity at the Limit,” 45; emphasis in the original. Compare as well: “the
appropriate comparative context for considering German liberalism should be . . . the
trans-European conjuncture of constitutional change, nation forming, and state mak-
ing in the 1860s, powerfully overdetermined by the global process of capitalist boom,
spatial expansion, and social penetration, articulated through the patterns of uneven
and combined development. This context, rather than the binary contrast with some
misleading and idealized construct of liberalism in the English-speaking world, will allow
the specific characteristics . . . of German liberalism between 1860 and 1914 to come into
view” (Eley, “German History,” 6–7). Eley hints that the critique of the Sonderweg thesis
may have been inspired by the debate on Gramsci’s comments on Bismarck’s politics as
“passive revolution” (i.e., reformist state-led modernization in the interest of a ruling,
but not socially and culturally hegemonic, old elite) (Eley, “The British Model,” 88). See
also Buci-Glucksmann, “State, Transition, and Passive Revolution” and “Passive Revolu-
tion and the Politics of Reform”; Davis, “Introduction”; Ginsborg, “Gramsci”; Sassoon,
Gramsci’s Politics; Rehmann, Max Weber.
126. Evans, “Whatever Became of the Sonderweg?” 18.
127. The fact that the nation-state left “millions of ethnic Germans outside its bound-
aries,” providing extreme nationalists with an idealist-sounding and superbly tempting
excuse for conquest and expansion, was a further “peculiarity.”
128. I refer here specifically to nineteenth-century history as opposed to the history
after World War I.

Conclusion
1. The notion that Treitschke is a “liberal Tory” stems from Petersdorff ’s entry on
Treitschke in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (General German Biography) of 1910
and has been adopted by Hans Herzfeld; quoted in Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 5.
2. “Die Harmonie der Gesellschaft, zu der die liberalen Juden sich bekannten, muss-
ten sie zuletzt als die der Volksgemeinschaft an sich selbst erfahren”; Horkheimer and
Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1997), 169–70; Dialektik der Aufklärung, 152; transla-
tion amended.
3. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 280–81.
4. Adorno, Minima Moralia (1978), 103.
5. From The Earliest Programme for a System of German Idealism. Apparently written
by Schelling, perhaps together with Hölderlin, it survived in Hegel’s handwriting; quoted
in S. B. Smith, Jewish Identity, 187.
6. Hegel quotes in this essay Tacitus’s formulation “odium generis humani” (“hate
of the human species,” allegedly the “soul of Judaism”; on Tacitus, see pp. 126–29). Fur-
thermore, Hegel identifies Kant’s ethics with Judaism’s view of the law originating from
466 Notes to pages 279–284

a source wholly outside mankind. When Kant thought he had replaced the despotism
of external law with the obedience to an inner law, Hegel now argued that Kant had not
eliminated but merely internalized the formerly external despot (S. B. Smith, Jewish
Identity, 189). In this early essay Hegel attacks any form of legalism as so many denials
of “individuality” and “life as it is” of particular persons; he suggests that Christianity’s
doctrine of love constituted a crucial departure from the (Jewish) “spirit of legalism.” It
seems plausible that many nineteenth-century antisemites took the reference to Taci-
tus, and parts of Hegel’s argument, from this essay. Even in his later writings, in which
Hegel recognizes the Jewish contribution to the evolution of humanity’s consciousness
of freedom, Judaism is presented as a form of consciousness that has had its day: the
Protestant articulation of the idea of “inner freedom” has rendered all other religions
so many stepping stones from the past to the present.
7. Quoted in Altgeld, “Religion, Denomination, and Nationalism,” 54.
8. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, 158; Dialectic of Enlightenment
(1997), 176, (2002), 144.
9. H. W. Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 8.
10. S. B. Smith, Jewish Identity, 4, 3.
11. S. B. Smith, Jewish Identity, 4.
12. S. B. Smith, Jewish Identity, 172.
13. S. B. Smith, Jewish Identity, 175; Mendelssohn also makes the case for pluralism and
diversity which are “evidently the plan and purpose of Providence” (177). Apparently
reflecting on the North American experience, he writes that the demand for religious
uniformity was at odds with human nature.
14. S. B. Smith, Jewish Identity, 195.
15. Dohm quoted in Rürup, “Jewish Emancipation and Bourgeois Society,” 72; trans-
lation amended.
16. Möller, “Aufklärung, Judenemanzipation und Staat,” 134.
17. See Salecker, Erfahrung der Differenz, 73–74.
18. Rürup, “Jewish Emancipation and Bourgeois Society,” 79–80.
19. Jersch-Wenzel, “Die Lage von Minderheiten,” 365.
20. Dahlmann quoted in Sterling, Judenhass, 88.
21. Birnbaum and Katznelson assert against a “nationalist current in Jewish histori-
ography,” which tends to equate emancipation with the “end of the Jewish people,” that
“there was no near-complete eradication of Jewish culture in the societies in which the
Enlightenment and emancipation left their most striking marks,” namely, North America
and France. “Modernization” as such changed the meaning of, but did not extinguish,
Jewishness (“Emancipation and the Liberal Offer,” 18).
22. Leuschen-Seppel, Sozialdemokratie und Antisemitismus, 26.
23. Quoted in Sterling, Judenhass, 81.
24. Sterling, Judenhass, 85.
25. Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus, 77.
 Notes to pages 284–295 467

26. Pulzer, Emancipation and Its Discontents, 5.

27. Quoted in Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus, 80; also in Herzog, Intimacy
and Exclusion, 58.
28. Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus, 89.
29. Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion, 53, 81.
30. Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion, 60.
31. Quoted in Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion, 75.
32. Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion, 79.
33. Levene, “Limits of Tolerance,” 40.
34. In his comment on the draft of the “Prussian Edict of Emancipation” (1809),
Humboldt suggested three means for resolving “the Jewish condition”: “amalgamation
[Verschmelzung], “destruction of their ecclesiastical organization [Zertrümmerung ihrer
kirchlichen Form],” and “re-colonisation [Ansiedelung]” (Humboldt, “Ueber den Ent-
wurf,” 96).
35. The article appeared first in the February 2004 edition of Prospect and was reprinted
with the different title, “Discomfort of Strangers,” in the Guardian on February 24.
36. The debate in the United Kingdom on “community cohesion,” “cohesive citi-
zenship,” and so forth was intensified by the uprisings in northern English towns in
the summer of 2001. Mainstream media subsequently used as a focal point for this
discourse the more spectacular issues of “9/11” and “terrorism,” arguably because the
social complexity of the northern uprisings is more obvious and thus more difficult to
translate into stereotypes.
37. Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft.
38. Arguably this has been a concern crucial (not exclusively) to the discipline of so-
ciology since it first emerged; see Therborn, Science, Class, and Society, and Hawthorn,
Enlightenment and Despair.
39. Blunkett, “Integration with Diversity.”
40. Eagleton, “Those in Power.”
41. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1997), 200.
42. It goes without saying that the presence or absence of further conditions deter-
mined whether or not this potential was realized in one country but not in another. The
present discussion abstracts from this particular problem.
43. Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake, 23–24.
44. Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State, 1.
45. Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State, 3.
46. Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State, 5.
47. Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State, 14. Lloyd and Thomas see this conception
best expressed in Matthew Arnold’s synthesis of Hobbes’s concept of civil society as the
“war of all against all” with Friedrich Schiller’s idea (from the fourth “Letter on the Aesthetic
Education of Man”) that the state represents the “ideal man” whom every individual carries
within him- or herself but is unable to realize except as a member of a state (47, 117).
468 Notes to pages 296–300

48. Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State, 146.

49. Aronowitz, Roll over Beethoven, 7.
50. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1997), 169–70; Dialektik der
Aufklärung, 152.
51. See Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution.
52. Similar arguments apply to the “red republicanism” of classical Marxism; see
Stoetzler, “Review,” and Tamás, “Telling the Truth.”
53. Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake, 25.
54. Hall, “Conclusion,” 228–29.
55. Parekh, “Integrating Minorities,” 6. Parekh rejects both the “proceduralist” view of
the state as “culturally neutral” (2) and the “bifurcationist” notion (3) that citizens should
merely share a common political culture “whereas diversity belongs to the private realm.”
Parekh suggests that a “pluralist mode of integration” (3) may be able to reconcile the
state’s need for cohesion and the minority communities’ legitimate demand to “preserve
their culture”: it should effect a revision of the prevailing political culture and its values,
suggesting that “we” must be “loosened up” while also concerning the private realm,
the state should not be indifferent to the minority cultures but must offer them “public
recognition, encouragement and material support” in order to allow their members “to
make uncoerced choices’ whether or not to maintain particular cultural practices.
56. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 280–81.
57. Jacoby, End of Utopia, 39–40.
58. Jacoby, End of Utopia, 55.
59. Kallen seems to have formulated his position in opposition to the more violent
metaphor of the melting pot, which was the title of a play by Israel Zangwill of 1908.
Zangwill, too, was the son of an orthodox rabbi, and both Kallen and Zangwill were
members of different strands of the Zionist movement (Niethammer and Dossmann,
Kollektive Identität, 253).
60. Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake, 25.
61. Kant, “Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte,” 31.
62. When Adorno and Horkheimer write that “culture developed in the sign of the
hangman” but insist that it can violate and transcend its own violent logic (Dialektik der
Aufklärung, 227), they merely reformulate a conclusion drawn by Marx in an article on
British rule in India of 1853: “Has the bourgeoisie ever . . . effected a progress without drag-
ging individuals and peoples through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation?
. . . When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch,
the market of the world and the modern powers of production, . . . then only will human
progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but
from the skulls of the slain” (quoted in McCarthy, “Liberal Imperialism,” 20–21).
63. Eley, “What Produces Fascism?” 82.
64. “In the period of industrialization itself the implied ideal of a ‘pure’ capitalism
without precapitalist admixtures (the ‘modern bourgeois or civil society’ that Germany
 Notes to pages 300–306 469

is supposed not to have been and against which German history is measured) never
existed” (Eley, “What Produces Fascism?” 63).
65. Habermas quoted in Eley, “German History,” 71.
66. Eley, “German History,” 71.
67. More recently, Habermas seems to have found that the Germans can now afford
to cool down their enthusiasm for the liberal West and help strengthen emerging Euro-
pean identity under the sign of the social state, in opposition to what used to be called
“English conditions” and “Manchesterism” now represented by “Washington”; see D.
Levy, Pensky, and Torpey, Old Europe.
68. Emphasis in the original; Eley, “Contexts for German Antisemitism,” 118.
69. Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion, 82.
70. White, The Splintered Party, 200.
71. White, The Splintered Party, 211.
72. White, The Splintered Party, 220, 221. Fritz K. Ringer argued similarly in 1969:
“The peculiarity of the German social situation . . . was only a matter of degree, and
so was the consequent difference in intellectual orientations” (Decline of the German
Mandarins, 84).
73. Horkheimer and Adorno, “Vorwort,” vi–vii.
74. Horkheimer and Adorno, “Vorwort,” vi–vii.
75. Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites, 67.
76. Eley, “Contexts for German Antisemitism,” 122. Pulzer endorses this view: “In
German-speaking central Europe, a ‘modern antisemitism’ has existed only since the
emergence of ‘modern’ politics—that is, since about 1870, with a qualitative intensification
in the second half of the first World War and a transformation into genocide after 1939”
(“Third Thoughts,” 166–67). Oded Heilbronner points to another aspect of historical
discontinuity: nineteenth-century antisemitism in Germany was mainly an “antisemitism
of the provinces”; a nationwide form of antisemitism did not exist because there was
not even “an all-embracing German culture” or “a German national character” (“From
Antisemitic Peripheries,” 560–61).
77. Eley, “Contexts for German Antisemitism,” 119, 121, 124.
78. Eley, “Contexts for German Antisemitism,” 122.
79. Hage, White Nation.
80. Habermas, “Historical Consciousness and Post-Traditional Identity.”
81. Bauer, Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie.
82. Die Deutsche Wacht: Monatsschrift für nationale Kulturinteressen—Organ der an-
tijüdischen Vereinigung, July 1880, 629. The quote is taken from an article on Stöcker’s
Christlich-Soziale Arbeiterpartei.
83. Hage, White Nation.
84. Preston King quoted in Hage, White Nation, 85.
85. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 57.
86. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 58; emphasis in the original.
470 Notes to pages 306–353

87. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 56–57.

88. Postone, “The Holocaust and the Trajectory of the Twentieth Century,” 94.
89. Poole, Morality and Modernity, 94.
90. This concept is from Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism, quoted in Yuval-
Davis, Gender and Nation, 56.
91. I use here the words “concrete” and “abstract” in analogy to their use in Marx’s
concepts of concrete and abstract labor (see Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination):
“concrete” as in “in itself, in its specificity”; “abstract” as in “irrespective of its specificity,
with regard only to its function within a societal structure of domination.”
92. Adorno, Minima Moralia (1978), 103.

Appendix 1
1. This is where the text published in Boehlich’s Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit begins.
2. This is where the version of the text as published in 1880 as a brochure (“A Word
about Our Jewry”) and also Lederer’s translation begin.

Appendix 2
1. As it has not been possible to determine any regularity in Lazarus’s use of Volk and
Nation, which seem to be synonymous (see, e.g., top of page |7| in the original pagination),
in the English text “nation” and “people” have been used likewise. Stamm is sometimes given
as “race” and sometimes as “tribe,” depending on what seems more adequate to context:
Stamm can refer to the smaller units that constitute, or dissolve into, the nation (such as
the people of Holstein), but with reference to the Jews it has a peculiar double meaning:
Lazarus makes on the one hand the suggestion that the Jews are just one of the tribes that
constitute the German nation, like the people of Holstein, but unlike the latter of course
they are also a much larger entity with a much longer and more impressive history, culture,
religion, etc., present all over the world. The only alternative to translating this as “race”
would be “people,” but Lazarus quite explicitly does not refer to a Jewish Volk or nation.
Geist and geistig are most often given as “spirit” and “spiritual,” only sometimes when these
would make very odd English, as “intellect” or “mind,” respectively. The English word mind
usually stands for Gemüth. Judenthum is given as “Judaism” when it clearly refers to Judaism
as a religion or body of thought only, otherwise, i.e., in all ambiguous cases, as “Jewry.”
2. This opening quotation mark is missing in the original text.
3. These quotes, and also the following one further down, are from Luther’s 1523 essay
“That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew.”
4. Johann Melchior Goeze, 1717–86, an orthodox Lutheran theologian, was the object
of a famous polemic by Lessing (1778).
5. On the reference to Burke see note 97 for chapter 4.
6. Georg Heinrich August von Ewald (1803–75) was a leading orientalist and theologian.
An anti-Prussian Protestant liberal, he had been one of the Göttingen Seven and later
was a member of the Reichstag.
7. Passages from Lazarus’s speech as president of the synod.
 Notes to pages 361–381 471

Appendix 3
1. Treitschke had been a professor at Heidelberg University from 1867 to 1874, when
he moved to Berlin. Dorpalen, Heinrich von Treitschke, 24.
2. Aloys Blumauer (1755–98) was an Austrian dramatist, poet, and writer of the En-
lightenment. The reference here seems to be to the more burlesque side of his work on
explicitly mundane subjects, such as digestion and fleas. A famous poem celebrates the
stomach as the god that is loved by all peoples.
3. Zabulon is the sixth son of Jacob and Leah. Ahasver, the wandering Jew, is supposed
to be a descendant of Zabulon. The legend of the wandering Jew seems to have taken its
definite, modern form in the thirteenth century, a period when the church made strong
efforts to reinforce beliefs that supported the unity and singularity of the faith, while
the name “Ahasverus” seems to have been associated with this figure since it was used
in a publication of 1602 (G. K. Anderson, Wandering Jew, 42).

Appendix 4
1. Freytag, Über den Antisemitismus, 12.
2. Having been a Lassallean, Mehring did not join the Social Democratic Party in
1875 because of its predominantly Marxist orientation. He kept aloof from it until the
mid–1880s (Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 185–86), after which he became one of
the party’s most influential intellectuals.
3. Quoted from the translation in Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 313–16.
4. Bab, Leben und Tod des deutschen Judentums, 71.
5. Bab, Leben und Tod des deutschen Judentums, 72; Bab adds that he was for many
years a friend of Treitschke’s daughter, who was “an equally passionate patriot as her
father.” He relates that she let a part of Treitschke’s private library pass into his “Jewish
hands” as evidence for the complete lack of an antisemitic spirit “in today’s meaning of
the word” in Treitschke’s household.
6. Wolff, Die Juden, 119.
7. A. Rosenberg, “Treitschke und die Juden,” 78, 80.
8. A. Rosenberg, “Treitschke und die Juden,” 80. Rosenberg distinguishes academic
antisemitism from the economic antisemitism of the lower middle classes. Unlike the
latter, academics were not threatened economically due to the restrictive and conserva-
tive routes of access to academic positions. Rosenberg also points out that antisemitism
had not been a defining characteristic of Bismarck’s outlook nor that of the aristocracy
in general—dislike of Jews (but also of Gentile bourgeois homines novi) notwithstand-
ing.
9. A. Rosenberg, “Treitschke und die Juden,” 82–83.
10. Jensen, Gebildete Doppelgänger, 38.
11. Claussen, Vom Judenhass zum Antisemitismus, 130.
12. Claussen, Vom Judenhass zum Antisemitismus, 132.
13. Claussen, Vom Judenhass zum Antisemitismus, 134.
472 Notes to pages 381–385

14. Reemtsma, “Die Falle des Antirassimus,” 307.

15. Reemtsma, “Die Falle des Antirassimus,” 308–9.
16. Abraham, Weber and the Jewish Question, 93, 94.
17. Abraham, Weber and the Jewish Question, 97.
18. Salecker, Erfahrung der Differenz, 395.
19. Ragins, Jewish Responses, 15, 14–15; emphasis in the original
20. Ragins, Jewish Responses, 16; emphasis in the original.
21. Ragins, Jewish Responses, 16–17.
22. Niewyk, “Solving the ‘Jewish Problem,’” 338.
23. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, 133.
24. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, 132.
25. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, 138.
6. Holz, Nationaler Antisemitismus, 12.
27. Holz, Nationaler Antisemitismus, 171, 172.
28. Kampe, “Jews and Antisemites.”
29. Nipperdey and Rürup, “Antisemitismus.”
30. The strongest is perhaps Boehlich’s statement that Treitschke’s views were not
essentially different from those of clerical and racial antisemites. Boehlich writes that
although Treitschke did not think of himself as an antisemite, “his opponents as well as
his supporters did” (Nachwort, 240). Berding argues that Treitschke rejected racial and
clerical antisemitism only verbally and that although he rejected the more explicitly racist
articulations of antisemitism, “he used the same phrases to the same effects” (Moderner
Antisemitismus in Deutschland, 114–15).
31. M. Meyer, “Great Debate on Antisemitism,” 144–45.
32. Liebeschütz, “Treitschke and Mommsen,” 172, 173.
33. Liebeschütz, “Treitschke and Mommsen,” 156.
34. Zucker, “Theodor Mommsen and Antisemitism,” 237.
35. Pulzer, Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 243.
36. Discussions of the Dispute that include a larger number of contributors are few
(Michael, “Graetz contra Treitschke”; Boehlich, Nachwort; Meyer, “Great Debate on An-
tisemitism”; Claussen, Vom Judenhass zum Antisemitismus; Lenk, “Antisemitismusstreit”;
Abraham, Weber and the Jewish Question; Hoffmann, “Geschichte und Ideologie”; Langer,
Heinrich von Treitschke; Salecker, Erfahrung der Differenz; Zumbini, Die Wurzeln des
Bösen; Jensen, Gebildete Doppelgänger). A detailed textual analysis has only been done
for Treitschke’s first contribution (Holz, Nationaler Antisemitismus).
37. Bab, Leben und Tod des deutschen Judentums, 74; Wolff, Die Juden, 117–20; Bab quotes
Mommsen’s assertion that the German Jews are indeed Germans and concludes that
“these magnificent words that betrayed once more in Germany the ideas of a free mind
of genuine historical awe are today [i.e. 1938] more than worth listening to (diese pracht-
vollen Worte, in denen die Anschauung eines freien Geistes von echter geschichtlicher
Ehrfurcht sich noch einmal in Deutschland kundtat, sind heut mehr als je hörenswert”
(Leben und Tod des deutschen Judentums, 74).
 Notes to pages 385–388 473

38. Kampe, “Jews and Antisemites,” 47.

39. Mosse, Crisis of German Ideology, 202; Dorpalen, Heinrich von Treitschke, 244.
40. “Kompromisslos zog er gegen den ‘Wahn’ zu Felde” (Wehler, Deutsche Gesell-
schaftsgeschichte, 928).
41. Jensen, Gebildete Doppelgänger, 308.
42. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 320–21, 322.
43. Breßlau’s statement, Michael Meyer writes, “sympathizes with Treitschke’s desire
that the Jews hasten the process of their own amalgamation into the German nation”
(“Great Debate on Antisemitism,” 149). Meyer states that Cohen’s “conception of German
culture was much closer to Treitschke’s own than was that of Lazarus or even Breßlau”
(151). Meyer points out that Treitschke “was well pleased with Cohen’s position” while
the Jewish press regarded it “more as a betrayal than a defence” (151)
44. M. Meyer, “Great Debate on Antisemitism,” 168.
45. Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany, 48–78.
46. Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany, 53.
47. Abraham, Weber and the Jewish Question, 104; Abraham emphasizes that “Mommsen’s
statement is important because it shows the limits of German liberalism at the time on
the question of so-called national minorities” (101). In Mommsen’s use of the Mischvolk
concept, “ethnic pluralism seems to be a transitional phase in the development of modern
nations.” In a similar vein, Alfred D. Low writes that Treitschke and Mommsen engaged
“in ideological combat with each other” merely about “tact and tactics.” He asserts that
“the nineteenth-century German demand . . . for the assimilation and ultimate merger
of the Jews with the Germans sprang also from the seemingly progressive, liberal, and
national programme for a strong, unitary, homogeneous nation. It aimed at the demise
of all territorial, cultural, national, and religious peculiarities and differences” (Jews in
the Eyes of the Germans, 411). Low argues that most Germans, including many Jews, “held
that any alien nationality on German soil had the duty to work towards its own cultural
and national extinction” (412).
48. Pickus, “Jewish University Students in Germany,” 68.
49. Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites, 163; Schoeps, “Das ‘Evangelium der In-
toleranz,’” 293.
50. Mommsen, “Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,” 223; Geismann, “Der Berliner
Antisemitismusstreit,” 379.
51. Geismann, “Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit,” 372, 373.
52. Geismann, “Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit,” 380.
53. Sieg, “Bekenntnis zu nationalen und universalen Werten,” 637.
54. Hoffmann, “Geschichte und Ideologie,” 249.
55. Ragins, Jewish Responses, 30.
56. M. Meyer, “Great Debate on Antisemitism,” 147.
57. Rahden, “Germans of the Jewish Stamm,” 28.
58. Bacharach points out that Lazarus’s demand that the Jews should cultivate “a feeling
474 Notes to page 388

of belonging to the German people” logically presupposes that “belonging” is to a high

degree subject to choice (“Jews in Confrontation,” 199). On the other hand, he raised an
argument that “did not differ much from ‘spiritual racism’” (199; Bacharach translates
Lazarus’s Stamm [tribe] as “race”) and displayed “a form of spiritual chauvinism” of a
Herderian kind (200). Bacharach points out that Cohen in his response to Lazarus even
went beyond the form of “chauvinism” displayed by Lazarus; he “yearned for national
unity within which ‘racial unity’ [Raceneinheit] would prevail” (200). Cohen, as Bacha-
rach underlines, stressed “physical singularity” as part of a “more sublime inner unity”
promoting the development of “the racial type.” Bacharach concludes: “Naturally we
must not attribute to Hermann Cohen racist trends of thought such as those spread
by racial antisemitism. But we cannot ignore his use of this dangerous form of argu-
ment. The vagueness and the undefined quality of these phrases led to an ambivalent
understanding of Cohen’s words, and it is this very ambiguous, mystical quality which
comprises the theory of national racism” (200–201).
59. Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke, 308–9.
60. Hamburger, Juden im öffentlichen Leben Deutschlands, 219; Roemer discusses the
debate on Graetz (Jewish Scholarship and Culture, 84–88).
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 Index

Aarau, 353 15, 393n52; “Declaration of the Notables”

Abraham, 369 in, 402n5; Graetz’s letter in, 427n225; and
Abraham, Gary A., 381–82, 386, 390n10, 473n47 mixed culture, 83; and origins of antisemi-
Abrahamian, Ervand, 461n70 tism, 191, 434n4; Philippson in, 96, 401n54,
absolutism, 236, 249 413n108, 457n2; Rülf ’s letter in, 22
abstract vs. concrete difference, 307 Alliance Israélite Universelle, 369, 412n97
Achinger, Christine, 207 Alsace-Lorraine, 19, 58, 61, 252–53, 288, 427n211,
Adorno, Theodor, 7, 390n12; and capitalism, 432n40, 449n28, 452n86, 457nn1–2
440n81; in Dispute literature, 383, 384; on amalgamation: and Christianity-Judaism
relationship, 132; and development of anti-
essay, 392n35; and failure of liberalism, 302;
semitism, 194; Dispute consensus on, 186;
on political culture, 12; and social harmony,
in Dispute literature, 382, 473n43; and eter-
278–80, 468n62
nal hatred, 126–27; Humboldt on, 467n34;
advertising, 22, 89, 167, 413n108
and mixed culture, 68–76, 174–75; and
“Against Heinrich von Treitschke” (Cassel), 17
modernity, 284; and nationalism, 95, 118,
“Against Prison Sentences” (Mittelstädt), 311
119, 177–78, 181, 306, 416n40; and race, 200;
agriculture: and capitalism, 211; and concept
and social harmony, 295; Treitschke on, 1,
of liberalism, 236; crisis, 289; in France, 290; and Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemi-
432n40; and history of German Reich, 268, tismus, 27. See also assimilation
270–71, 464n112, 464n114; Jewish involve- Amin, Samir, 423n154
ment in, 412n98; Lazarus on, 334–35 Amsterdam, 442n99
Ahasverus, 374, 375, 471n3 An die deutschen Juden (Lazarus), 392n44
Akademie der Wissenschaften, 336 “angehobenen Gange,” 419n86
Aktiennovelle, 270 Annales, 126, 422n151
Albo, Josef, 354–56 Anthias, Floya, 458n18
Alexander (“the Great”), 26 anthropology, 15, 199, 276, 277
Allah, 293 anti-capitalism, 86, 176, 186, 191, 194, 206, 222,
Allemannia, 235 411n92, 440n77, 440n81
Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, 465n1 Anti-Chancellor League, 215. See also Anti-
Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums: content, kanzlerliga
506 Index

Antichrist (Rohling), 340 Ashkenazim, 404n24

anti-Christianism, 127 assimilation: ambivalence about, 9, 174–75,
Anti-Corn-Law-League, 235 181–85; Breßlau on, 17; and civil rights, 147,
anti-globalization, 222 182–83, 428n2; in Dispute literature, 381–84,
anti-Hegelian, 434n10 473n47; Endner on, 87, 412n97; of German
Antikanzerliga, 215 Jews, 139, 140, 143, 144; and intermarriage,
anti-Manchesterism, 221, 222 178; and liberalism, 6–7; and modernity,
antisemite, 2, 3 283–84; Mommsen on, 24, 27; and nation-
Antisemite and Jew (Sartre), 306 alism, 48–54, 58–62, 96, 114, 115, 179–80, 307;
Antisemitenpetition, 23, 72–73, 214, 396n98, and origins and effects of antisemitism, 4,
396n100, 400n38, 431n3, 431n6 275–76; and race, 200–201; and social har-
antisemitism: ambivalence about, 6–10, 13, mony, 286, 289, 298; Treitschke on, 11–12,
390n12, 390n16; and concept of liberalism, 159. See also amalgamation
222, 226, 228–29, 245, 302; development atheism, 135, 136, 236, 281, 413n15
of, 191–98, 260–62, 273, 293–94, 299–300, Athenaeumsfragment 441 (Schlegel), 233
467n42; and educated community, 38–46, “Athens and Judea” (Hegel), 437n49
390nn17–18; interpretations of, 3–5, 172–73, “Auch ein Word über unser Judenthum”
263, 266, 275, 389n5, 446n147; Momm- (Mommsen), 24
sen on, 22–23, 25, 27; ontological, 204–5, Auerbach, Jacob, 348
439n73; pamphlets, 17, 21–22, 197–98, 311, Aufhebung, 103, 439n75
366; purpose of, 286; self-defense against, Augsburg, 260, 348, 392n43, 423n163
15–22; and society, 32–35, 40–45, 172, 193, Auschwitz, 12, 301, 303
275, 289–91, 293–94, 399n21; and state Austria, 92, 93, 208, 229, 248, 249, 267, 327,
socialism, 240; as “symptom” of change, 397n1, 450n43
171–72; term, 433n4, 434n5, 434n7 Austria-Hungary, 31, 93, 94
“antisemitism of reason,” 37 Avignon, 61, 457n1
“Antisemitismus und Antifeminismus”
(Volkov), 389n8 Baader, Franz von, 236
Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 442n91 Bab, Julius, 379, 385, 471n5, 472n37
Arabs, 212 Bach, Johann S., 134, 425n185
Arbeiterbildungsverein, 18 Bacharach, Walter Zwi, 387, 473n58
Arbeiterverbrüderung, 23 Bachia (Ben Joseph ibn Pakuda), 354
Arbeitsehre, 74, 409n48 Baden, 20, 195, 226, 262, 267, 284, 285, 427n211,
Arbeitsfreudigkeit, 80, 410n68 435n27
Arblaster, Anthony, 231, 232, 451n52 Balibar, Etienne, 457n11
Arendt, Hannah, 153, 194, 207, 430n20, 439n71, Balkan crisis, 91–94
441n90, 463n104 Bamberger, Ludwig: background, 2; and
Aristotle, 441n82, 441n91 Christianity-Judaism relationship, 135, 175,
Arminius (“the Cheruscan”), 136 176; and currency, 463n108; and develop-
Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 193, 260 ment of liberalism, 228, 287, 451n68; in Dis-
Arnold, Matthew, 233, 295, 296, 467n47 pute literature, 381, 386; and failure of lib-
Aronowitz, Stanley, 296 eralism, 300; on “Gotha” tendency, 456n143;
Aryan, 74, 118, 131, 181, 191, 202, 204, 209, 254, at Heidelberg, 20; and history of German
437n49 Reich, 271; and history of nationalism, 252;
 Index 507

on mixed culture, 66–67, 76–78, 84–86, 90, Berlin movement (Berliner Bewegung), 20,
174; on nationalism, 55, 61, 98–101, 173, 177, 390n16
179, 404n31, 416n40; on nationality of Ger- Berlin University, 2, 8, 13, 14, 216
man Jews, 141, 184–85; nature of analyses, Bermann, Tamar, 442n101
91; on origins and effects of antisemitism, Bernal, Martin, 409n37, 456n148
43, 172, 218, 401n41; response to Treitschke, Beyond Ethnicity (Sollors), 426n202
17–19, 159–61, 176; on state socialism, 239, Biarritz (Goedsche), 399n27
241, 453n95 Bildung. See education
baptism, 64, 98, 167, 195, 312, 339, 363, 414n21, bird mythology, 167, 432n38
441n85, 447n163 Birnbaum, Pierre, 466n21
Baruch, Löb, 17, 22, 360–77, 394n62. See also Bismarck, Otto von: and Balkan crisis, 91–92;
Börne, Ludwig and Bamberger, 2, 19; and bourgeoisie, 380,
Bastiat, Frédéric, 223, 278, 448n6 471n8; and development of liberalism, 287,
Bauer, Bruno, 196, 221 456n151; and German-Jewish spirit, 78; in
Bauer, Otto, 304, 417n72, 469n81 Grenzboten, 431n6; and history of German
Baumgarten, Hermann, 229, 230, 450n42 Reich, 266, 270–72, 465n125; and history of
Bavaria, 194, 259, 262, 267, 269, 427n211, 435n22, nationalism, 253; and Kulturkampf, 460n58;
450n44, 462n83 and Lasker, 401n44; and Mommsen, 25,
Beamtenliberalismus, 249, 250 27; on nation building, 422n141; and Op-
Bebel, August, 444n124, 451n68 penheim, 20; and origins and effects of
Belgium, 225, 259, 327 antisemitism, 5, 42, 44, 45, 172, 214–20, 275,
belonging, 9, 65, 103, 104, 115, 474n58 446n153; period, 8; and Progress Party,
Berding, Helmut, 472n30 450n43; on protective tariffs, 229; social
Berlin: antisemitism disputes in, 390n16; Co- welfare policy, 251, 445n133
hen in, 21; “Declaration of the Notables” in, Blackbourn, David, 460n60
24; development of liberalism in, 225, 226, blacks, 74, 202–4, 409n45, 438n61, 438n63,
229; and Dispute literature, 379; economy, 439n65
464n114; foundation of Hochschule für die Blanqui, Louis A., 441n90
Wissenschaft des Judenthums in, 392n43; Blaschke, Olaf, 434n7, 436n40, 440n76,
French colony in, 120; and immigration, 440nn78-79, 440n90
57, 177, 329, 405n35; Jewish history in, 123; Bleichröder, Gerson, 44, 401n48
mixed culture in, 86–87; and national Bloch, Samuel, 352
unity, 462n93; Neumann in, 23; New Syna- blood, 16, 52, 71, 75, 78, 95, 106, 114, 209, 220,
gogue in, 23; and origins and effects of 241, 242, 253, 312, 328, 329, 330, 331, 341, 343,
antisemitism, 40, 193; religion in, 263, 264; 425n185, 437n55. See also race
responses to Treitschke in, 14–15; Treitschke Blumauer, Aloys, 369, 471n2
in, 471n1 Blunkett, David, 292, 299
Berlin Antisemitism Dispute: ambivalence Boeckh, Richard, 319–21, 324, 328, 334, 335,
in, 5–10, 12–13; concepts of, 32, 91, 177, 293, 416n46
304–5; consensus, 185–87; in literature, Boehlich, Walter, 8, 390nn15–16, 472n30
378–88; origin and character of, 2–5, 10–12; Bohatta, Hanns, 395n90
responses to, 14–28; views of social founda- “Bonapartism” (Treitschke), 453n104
tion of anti-Jewish campaign in, 39–40 Bonefeld, Werner, 440n81
Berlin Congress (1878), 91–94, 99 bones, 32, 73. See also race
508 Index

Bonifatius, 265, 461n78 of analyses, 91; on origins and effects of an-

Bonn, 15, 462n93 tisemitism, 40–42, 172, 400n28, 400n30; on
Book of Memories (Philippson), 334 race, 97–98, 415n32; response to Treitschke,
Borchardt, Carl W., 336 17–18, 167–70, 184; on scapegoating of Jews,
Börne, Ludwig: background, 394n62, 429n12; 168–69, 433n44; Treitschke’s response to,
and development of liberalism, 454n117; 156
and economy, 409n55; on emancipation, Breuilly, John, 462n83
150–54, 429n14, 430n15; Graetz on, 138, Brockhaus encyclopedia, 404n24
140, 141, 426n208; and nationalism, 265; Brubaker, Rogers, 254
on rights, 182, 430n21; Treitschke on, 11, Bucher, Lothar, 395n90
65, 88–89, 313, 314, 410n66; Wagner on, Bundestag, 225, 361
447n163. See also Baruch, Löb bürgerliche Gesellschaft, 246, 282
“Börne and Treitschke: Open Letter on the Burke, Edmund, 117, 233, 342, 419n97
Jews” (Baruch/Börne), 17, 360–77 Burkert, Hans Michael, 409n37
Bosnia, 93 Bürgerliche Gleichberechtigung, 146, 228
Boulainvilliers, Henri de, 203 Busch, Moritz, 219, 446n151
Bourdeau, J., 47–48, 402n4
bourgeois revolution, 8, 192, 213, 266 Cabriol (Salomo ibn Gabirol), 354
bourgeois society capitalism, 207, 211, 213, Caesar, Julius, 2, 25–26, 28, 396n113, 450n46
441n85, 441n87, 441n90; and concept of “Calendar and Yearbook for the Jewish com-
liberalism, 222–24, 226, 229–34, 236, 242–43, munities of Prussia” (Wertheim), 358
245, 287, 450n40, 451n68, 452n72, 454n115; Calvinism, 263–64, 332
definition, 452n72; in Dispute literature, Campbell, Joan, 410n68, 411n70, 453n98
380, 381; German Jews in, 168–69, 184; and Camphausen, Otto von, 270
history of German Reich, 266, 267, 270–72; capitalism: and development of antisemitism,
mistrust of, 12–13; and modernity, 282–83; 191, 194–96; and development of liberalism,
and Mommsen, 2, 28, 121; in Netherlands, 221–24, 226, 230, 243–45, 287, 300, 454n115,
442n99; and origins and effects of anti- 468n64; and history of German Reich, 266,
semitism, 172, 192, 194–98, 220, 434n15, 270–72, 465n125; and mixed culture, 81–86;
436n36, 446n150; and race, 200–201; and opposition to, 176, 186, 205–14, 440n76; and
religion, 262; and rights, 153, 182; and social religion, 265; and social harmony, 290–91,
harmony, 282, 294, 295, 297, 468n62; and 299; and state socialism, 237. See also econ-
state socialism, 237–38, 239, 240; Treitschke omy; Manchesterism
on, 315. See also social class; society Caprivi, Chancellor, 214
Brake, pamphletist, 148–49 Carolingian, 211, 461n78
Bramsted, E. K., 224 Carr, William, 267
Brentano, Lujo, 241 “Cartel of the Productive Estates,” 303
Breslau, 14–16, 21, 35–37, 311, 392n43 Carthage, 456n148
Breßlau, Harry: on assimilation, 286; in Cassel, Paulus: and Christianity-Judaism re-
Dispute literature, 381, 386, 473n43; on eco- lationship, 131; on converted Jews, 399n17,
nomics, 176; Endner’s response to, 21; Jew- 424n172; in Dispute literature, 388; on
ish identity, 168, 433n46; and mixed culture, emancipation, 187, 431n4; and eternal
67–68, 71, 74–76, 83, 87–90, 174, 175, 412n96, hatred, 126, 128–29; and nationalism, 47,
413n108; on nationalism, 58–61, 119; nature 55, 404n30, 405n38; on origins and effects
 Index 509

of antisemitism, 46, 172–73; response to state socialism, 240; Treitschke on, 163–66,
Treitschke, 17, 180, 410n67; Treitschke’s 180, 185, 314, 315. See also religion
response to, 156 Christians and Jews in Germany (Tal), 390n10
categorical imperative, 24, 27, 398n10 Christian-Socialist, 38, 314
Catholic Center Party, 214, 270, 400n27 The Christian State (Stahl), 264
Catholicism: Baruch on, 372; and capitalism, Christlich-Soziale Arbeiterpartei, 216,
205–6, 440n77, 440n80, 440n82; and civil 444n130, 453n95
rights, 153; Dispute consensus on, 186; Christuskirche in Berlin, 17
education, 414nn23–24; in German Reich, citizenship, 162–66, 320. See also nationality
459n45; and Jewish assimilation, 59–61; civic nationalism, 252–56
Lazarus on, 340, 345, 355, 393n50; Marr civil rights: Baruch on, 370–72; and concept
on, 447n156; Meyer on, 425n178, 426n196; of liberalism, 234; in Dispute literature,
and mixed culture, 67–69, 88, 175, 412n104; 382, 387; and emancipation, 146–54, 182–83,
and modernity, 285; and nationalism, 428n2; and social harmony, 281; as theme
139, 260–66, 460n58, 461n78; Naudh on, of Dispute, 187, 278. See also society
424n173; and origins and effects of anti- civil war, 20, 162–65, 184, 280–81. See also war
semitism, 40, 193, 214–15, 275, 300, 435n27, Clark, Chris, 435n27
437n55; and Protestantism, 180; and race, Claussen, Detlev, 381, 383, 384, 390n10
201; and social harmony, 280, 290; and clericalization, 258, 261, 289
usury, 442n91. See also Kulturkampf Cobden, Richard, 272
Cavour, Camillo B. di, 19, 272 Cohen, Hermann: background, 2, 395n89;
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 437n49 on Christianity-Judaism relationship,
Cherbuliez, Charles V. (Valbert), 83 129, 131–35, 180–81, 424n175; on concept
Chinese, 55, 66, 204, 404n31 of nation, 110–16, 177, 178, 419n91, 419n97,
Chrestianos, 422n151 420n98, 421n115; in Dispute literature, 382,
Christianity: and Balkan crisis, 92–92; 383, 386–88, 473n43, 474n58; on emancipa-
Baruch on, 363, 365–73, 376; and com- tion, 149–50, 154, 183, 429n11; on Lazarus,
munism, 440n75; conversions to, 36, 149, 394n87; on nationality of German Jews,
178, 201, 264, 332, 399n17, 424n172, 425n185, 142–43, 179, 182, 428n237; nature of analy-
437nn55–56; and development of antisemi- ses, 91; and race, 187; response to
tism, 219–20, 277, 440n76; and develop- Treitschke, 17, 21; on social harmony, 286
ment of liberalism, 247, 455n125; in Dispute colonialism, 201–3, 438n60
literature, 380, 382, 385, 387; and eternal ha- commerce, 61, 65, 77, 81, 88, 93, 151, 156, 176,
tred, 126–29; and German-Jewish spirit, 79, 207, 211, 233, 235, 244, 249, 315, 334, 367,
177; Graetz on, 140; Hegel on, 466n6; La- 441n85
zarus on, 329–30, 332, 338–40, 344, 347–56; commodity fetishism, 198–99, 436n44
and mixed culture, 67, 75, 76, 86; and communism, 18, 209, 439n75, 442n96
modernity, 283–85; and nationalism, 94–97, Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 208
108–11, 113, 115, 116, 138–39, 179–81, 259–61, community cohesion, 291, 300, 467n35
264, 416n40, 458n13, 461n71, 461n78; and competition, 49, 69, 118, 121, 154, 157, 209, 282,
race, 199, 437n49; relationship to Judaism, 345, 403n12 415n28
129–36, 175, 179, 191, 276–77, 293, 330–33, Comte, Auguste, 393n50
339–40, 344, 348–56, 441n82; and slavery, confessions: Cohen on, 132–34, 150, 180–81,
439n66; and social harmony, 279, 306; and 425n180, 429n11; diversity of, 110–11, 180–81,
510 Index

confessions (cont.) Jewish contributions to German, 88–90,

280–81, 419n91; equality of, 99; Lazarus on, 276–77, 335–37; Lazarus on, 15, 393n49; and
341, 348, 353; and nationalism, 258–62, 266; modernity, 283–84; and nationalism, 9,
and social harmony, 289 119, 122–24, 126, 128, 252–56, 260, 262, 269,
consciousness, 102. See also self-consciousness 271, 288, 303–8, 463n105; and nationality of
conservatives: and capitalism, 205, 206, 208, German Jews, 139, 144, 179, 181–82; purity
210, 440n76; and concept of liberalism, 221, of, 63–66, 174–75; and race, 199; and social
236, 291; and history of German Reich, 270; harmony, 279, 280, 286, 289–96, 298–300;
Lazarus on, 336; and origins and effects of as theme of Dispute, 174–75. See also mixed
antisemitism, 214, 215, 275, 435n27, 446n153, culture; political culture
447n163; parties, 399n27; in Prussian Diet Culturkampf. See Kulturkampf
and Reichstag, 444n118; and religion, 263; currency, 270, 463n108
and state socialism, 238, 453n95 Customs Union, 19
conspiracy, 44, 158, 193, 300, 366, 434n11,
436n43 Dahlmann, Friedrich Christoph, 224, 227, 250,
constitution: and concept of liberalism, 224, 283, 456n143
229, 236, 248, 300–301; in Dispute literature, Dahrendorf, Ralf, 300
384; and German Reich, 27, 269; and histo- Das Judentum im deutschen Geschichtsbild
ry of nationalism, 255; and Israelitic Synod, (Liebeschütz), 396n100
348; and national culture, 304; in Prussia, “Das Judentum in der Musik” (Wagner), 228,
402n5, 460n59; and Volksgemeinschaft, 297 447n163
conversion (of Greeks and Romans), 128 Das Leben Jesu (Strauss), 457n6
conversion (of Jews): Cassel on, 399n17; “Declaration of the Notables”: description,
Christian suspicion of, 198; Cohen on, 131, 23–24; in Dispute literature, 383; and
133, 149, 425n185; in Germany, 264, 396n98, nationalism, 48–50, 172–73, 402n5; partici-
398n16, 436n36, 444n115; Graetz on, 140; pants, 27, 396n100; Treitschke on, 185; on
Joël on, 82; Lazarus on, 130, 332–32; Luther work, 176
on, 360; Meyer on, 414n21; Mommsen on, Declaration of the Rights of Man, 18
164, 166; nationalism and, 304; Naudh on, decomposition: national, 25–27, 429n2; tribal,
74; Philippson on, 415n30; in Southern 123, 125; religious, 370
France, 61; in Spain, 201, 437nn55–56; de-Judaization (de-Jewification), 223, 283, 284
Treitschke on, 11, 36, 95, 424n172 De Lagarde, Paul, 382
Corn Laws, 235 Delbrück, Rudolf, 270
corporal punishment, 34, 43, 45, 398n10, Delitzsch, Frank, 352
402n58 democracy, 229, 250, 302
cosmopolitanism, 26, 43, 47, 70, 77, 79, 95, 112, Democracy in America (Toqueville), 465n3
117, 124, 146, 157, 221, 280, 315, 429n2 democrats: and capitalism, 206; and concept
Coswig (Anhalt), 21 of liberalism, 221, 225–28, 230, 235, 287,
cultural code, 6, 389n8 450n43; and history of German Reich, 269;
“cultural insiderism,” 137, 426n202 Sartre on, 306; and state socialism, 239–40
“cultural pluralism,” 298, 299, 386, 387, 468n59 “Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit” (Boeh-
culture: Dispute consensus on, 185–86; in lich) 8
Dispute literature, 386; and failure of lib- Der “Berliner Antisemitismusstreit” (Krieger),
eralism, 301; and German-Jewish spirit, 76; 396n100
 Index 511

Der deutsche Liberalismus (Baumgarten), 230 Die Juden (Wolff), 379

Der Kulturkämpfer, 446nn148–49 Die Juden und der Deutsche Staat (Naudh), 22,
Der Monat (Boehlich), 390n15 220, 395n90, 447n162
Dernburg, Joseph, 347 Die Staatslehre (Fichte), 419n86
Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germa- “Die Todten an die Lebenden” (Freiligrath),
nenthum (Marr), 219, 446n154 121–22, 421n131
“Der Sozialismus und seine Gönner” Dio Cassius (Cassius Dio Cocceianus), 128
(Treitschke), 244, 411n86 Directoire, 232
Der Streit der Fakultäten (Kant), 419n91 Disraeli, Benjamin, 272, 407n61, 456n151
Der Stürmer, 379 diversity (cultural, national), 68, 69, 71, 97, 110,
descent, 320–25, 327–30, 332. See also ethnic- 114, 119, 252, 265, 281, 291, 292, 298, 306, 343,
ity; race 345, 346, 393n50, 408n33, 466n13, 468n55
Deutsche Geschichte (Treitschke), 450n42, Dohm, Christian Wilhelm von, 281–82, 286
455n125 Dorpalen, Andreas, 385, 410n68
Deutsche Jahrbücher für Politik and Literatur, 19 Dreßen, Wolfgang, 421n131, 432n32
Deutsche Kämpfe: Neue Folge (Treitschke), Dreyfus affair, 254, 441n90
413n1 Droysen, Johann Gustav, 17, 24, 224, 227
Deutsche Reichspartei, 399n27 Dühring, Eugen, 66, 160, 204–5, 437n49,
Deutscher Michel, 15–16 447n163
Deutscher Nationalverein, 19 Durkheim, Émile, 425n190
Deutsches Anonymenlexikon (Holzmann and
Bohatta), 395n90 Eagleton, Terry, 292, 293
Deutsches Pseudonymenlexikon (Holzmann The Earliest Programme for a System of Ger-
and Bohatta), 395n90 man Idealism (Schelling), 465n5
Deutsches Volksthum (Jahn), 404n23 economy: Baruch on, 369–70; and civil rights,
Deutschkonservative Partei, 399n27 150–54; and concept of liberalism, 223–25,
Deutschland und der Socialismus (Bamberger), 229–36, 242, 249, 251, 302, 448n6, 451n68;
239, 451n68 and development of antisemitism, 194–98,
Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and 214–19, 276, 277; and history of German
Adorno), 278, 440n81 Reich, 266–72, 464n112; Lazarus on, 333–35;
Die Deutsche Wacht, 22, 81–82, 219–20, 395n91, and mixed culture, 55, 64, 79–88, 174–75,
416n48 409n55; and nationalism, 52, 94, 118, 119,
Die Emanzipationskampf des vierten Standes 183, 289, 303–4, 404n26, 405n40; and race,
(Meyer), 444n125 201–3; and religion, 258, 260, 262; and
Die Fabel von der jüdischen Masseneinwan- scapegoating of Jews, 167–69, 430n24,
derung (Neumann), 23, 56–57 432n40; and social harmony, 290, 291–92,
“Die Falle des Antirassimus” (Reemtsma), 295, 298; and state socialism, 237, 238, 240,
390n10 241; Treitschke on, 11, 176–77, 310, 313. See
“Die Fortschrittspartei and die Sozial- also capitalism; socioeconomic framework;
demokratie” (Richter), 238 usury
Die Freiheit (Treitschke), 454n123 education: and antisemitism’s origins, 5,
Die Gegenwart, 20 42–46, 172, 198, 275; and concept of liberal-
Die Judenfrage als Racen-, Sitten- und Kul- ism, 223, 231, 236, 237, 243; in Dispute litera-
turfrage (Dühring), 447n163 ture, 380–82, 471n8; and immigration,
512 Index

education (cont.) Engels, Friedrich, 208, 226–27, 444n124, 453n95

405n40; Lazarus on, 328, 335–37; and mixed England: assimilation in, 11, 12, 58–60; and
culture, 66, 68, 88–90; and nationalism, Balkan crisis, 92–94; Baruch on, 370; and
100, 101, 104, 122, 414nn23–24; and political capitalism, 212, 441n90; and concept of lib-
culture, 12–13, 32–34, 38–40; and state so- eralism, 231–35, 250, 451n62, 456n148; and
cialism, 238; Treitschke on, 33, 156, 157, 163, German Jewish question, 51, 54, 276, 312,
165, 310, 313–15, 398n9, 414n24, 431n2 315, 335, 404n27; history of antisemitism in,
“Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage” (Cohen), 300–303; and history of German Reich, 271,
421n115 272; and history of nationalism, 255; and
“Ein Wort über unser Judentum” (Treitschke), immigration, 56, 405n36; monarchy in, 225;
17 nation building in, 437n53; persecution in,
Eisenmenger, Johann Andreas, 36, 130, 311, 351, 160; religion in, 161; and social harmony,
352, 398n16 280, 299, 467n35, 468n62; and state social-
Elbe, 268, 328 ism, 239, 241
“Elements of Antisemitism” (Horkheimer and
English Toleration Act (1689), 306
Adorno), 390n12
Enlightenment: and concept of liberalism, 232,
Eley, Geoff, 272, 301, 462n80, 463n100, 464n112,
234, 250, 301, 455n125; in Dispute literature,
465nn124-125, 468n63, 469nn64-66, 469n68,
385, 386; and emancipation, 11, 53–54, 73,
469nn76-78, 481n63
150–51, 154, 181, 430n14, 466n21; Graetz on,
Elias, Norbert, 458n26
17; and history of nationalism, 253; and
elitism, 42–43
modernity, 282–85; and political culture, 33,
emancipation: and capitalism, 210–11; and
183–85; and race, 199; and social harmony,
civil rights, 146–54, 182–83, 428n2; debate
279, 280, 286, 289, 290; Treitschke on, 156,
about, 171–73; and development of anti-
semitism, 4, 44, 46, 194–95, 220, 434n11, 159, 310, 314
435n22, 441n90; and development of “Entdecktes Judenthum” (Eisenmenger),
liberalism, 223, 228, 230, 450n44, 453n97; 398n16
Dispute ambivalence on, 8, 9, 181–85, 187; in Entkirchlichung, 258
Dispute literature, 379, 381–84; and eternal Entsittlichung, 72
hatred, 126; Graetz on, 16, 138, 426n210, Erfahrung der Differenz (Salecker), 390n10
428n2; and liberalism, 6; and mixed cul- Ersatzreligion, 261–66
ture, 68, 73, 74, 82; and modernity, 282–85, Esau, 90
466n21; and nationalism, 49–50, 53–54, 59, “Essay on the Origin of Language” (Herder),
94, 95, 109, 114, 115, 138–40, 143, 144, 266, 407n11
402n4, 407n59, 413n16, 414n21; and race, Eternal Jew, 363–64, 374, 375
200–201; and social harmony, 281–82, 290, “ethical socialism,” 395n89
295; Treitschke on, 11, 156, 158–60, 165–67, ethics: and concept of liberalism, 233, 246–48,
169, 178, 181–82, 314, 315, 428n2 287; in Dispute literature, 387; in econom-
empiricism, 111 ics, 211–12, 218, 443n106; Kantian, 429n14;
Endner, Wilhelm: on economics, 176–77, 183; Lazarus on, 346–48; and religion, 180, 264;
on mixed culture, 86–88, 412n96, 432n41; and social harmony, 279; and state social-
on origins and effects of antisemitism, 219; ism, 241. See also morality
publications of, 390n17; on race, 98, 187, Ethics of Judaism (Lazarus), 394n87
286; response to Treitschke, 17, 21; on ethnicity: in Dispute literature, 383; and
Treitschke’s response to Breßlau, 400n30 nationalism, 52, 55–62, 252–58, 266, 288,
 Index 513

304, 404n24, 457n11, 458n14, 458n19; and in German war with, 107, 334; and mixed
social harmony, 279, 289, 296–99. See also culture, 69, 84; and nationalism, 47–48,
descent; race 252–56, 324, 402n4, 457nn1–2, 458n17; na-
“ethnic pluralism,” 473n47 tion building in, 437n53; Protestants schol-
ethnocentrism, 202 ars in, 415n28; race in, 201, 203–4; religion
“ethno-class,” 119, 421n126 in, 259; war with Prussia, 2, 264, 270. See
Eurocentrism, 423n154 also French Revolution
Europäische Triarchie (Hess), 396n112 Franck, F., 335
Evans, Richard J., 272 Franconia, 203
Ewald, Georg Heinrich August von, 336, 344, Franco-Prussian War, 2, 264, 270
470n5 Fränkel, Zacharia, 21
Frankfurt, 7, 8, 27, 361, 362, 363, 364, 372
Faith in Nation (Marx), 391n25 Frankfurt Hauptwache, 449n39
fascism, 7, 300, 301 Frankfurt National Assembly, 18, 226, 227,
Federal Assembly, 225 450n44
Feldman, Louis H., 423n151 Frankish Empire, 461n78
feminism, 265–66 Frankish race, 203–4, 439n70
ferment, 26, 27, 316, 386, 396n112, 429n2 Frantz, Constantin, 442n98
Feuerbach, Ludwig A., 426n196 Frederick William III, king of Prussia, 264
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 135, 140, 160, 215, 248, Frederick William IV, king of Prussia, 264
260, 313, 419n86, 455n132 Freemasons, 434n11, 435n27
“Fichte and the National Idea” (Treitschke), Freiligrath, Ferdinand, 121–22, 421n131
419n86 Freisinnige Party, 23, 392n44, 396n98
finance capital, 218 French Revolution: and capitalism, 205; and
Financial Times, 291 concept of liberalism, 231, 287; and devel-
Finkielkraut, Alain, 254, 457n11 opment of antisemitism, 193, 197; and his-
Fischer, Jens Malte, 447n163 tory of nationalism, 255, 458n23; imagery
Fischoff, Ephraim, 394n84, 394n86, 395n89 of, 403n18; and social harmony, 279, 290.
Flanders, 212 See also France
Forckenbeck, Max von, 24 Freytag, Gustav, 207, 221, 378, 379, 446n150
Fortschrittspartei, 238, 450n43. See also Prog- Friedrichstadt (Berlin), 23
ress Party Friedrich Wilhelm (Emperor Friedrich III),
Fortuyn, Pim, 292, 299 22–23
Fourier, Charles, 441n90 Fries, Jacob, 193, 260
France: assimilation in, 11, 12, 58–61, 407n59; Fritsch, Theodor, 395n90
Bamberger on, 18, 160, 161; Baruch on, 370, Frömmigkeit, 459n48
372; capitalism in, 206, 207, 212, 441n90;
and concept of liberalism, 193, 194, 230–36, Gagern, Heinrich von, 456n143
243, 245, 250, 434nn10–11; economy in, Galicia, 404n32
432n40; emancipation in, 466n21; and Galilee, 433n3
German Jewish question, 51, 54, 276, 312, Gall, Lothar, 458n17
315, 335, 336; history of antisemitism in, Gans, Eduard, 336
300–303, 311; and history of German Reich, Gartenlaube, 169, 217–19, 445n137, 445n139,
271, 272; Jewish population, 442n99; Jews 445n142
514 Index

Gärungsmittel. See ferment Germany: academia in, 335–36; and anti-

Gaulish race, 203 semitism’s origins, 4, 13, 212, 213, 275–76,
Gebildete Doppelgänger (Jensen), 390n10, 391n18 300–303, 469n76; and Austria-Hungary, 31;
“Gegen die Freiheitsstrafen” (Mittelstädt), 34, and Balkan crisis, 91–93; Bourdeau on an-
398n10 tisemitism in, 47–48; as experiential space,
Gehlsen, Joachim, 412n104 463n96; history of liberalism in, 232–33, 235,
Geiger, Abraham, 21, 392n40 237, 247–50, 448n14; and history of nation-
Geismann, Georg, 386, 387 alism, 252–56, 458n17; Jewish population,
Geldhochmut, 236 442n99; and social harmony, 279
Geldner, Karl, 397n121 Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, 224, 462n93
Gelehrtenhochmut, 236 Gesamtgeist, 15, 393n50
Gemeinschaft, 306 Geschäft, 80, 81
Gemlich, Adolf, 399n18 Geschichte der Juden (Graetz), 15–16, 140–41,
Gemüthlich, 80, 410n68, 411n69 313, 426n210
Gemüthlichkeit, 84 Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft, 306
generalization, 340–41 Gewerbeordnung, 270
Genesis, 433n2 Gironde, 232
Gentz, Friedrich, 233 Glagau, Otto, 217–18, 398n9, 410n65, 441n87,
German Bund, 459n45 445n142, 446n148
The German Guard, 305 Glaubensarten. See confessions
Germania, 214–15, 400n28, 403n13, 408n33, Gneist, Rudolf, 24, 452n87
412n104 God, 222, 333, 349–50, 355, 373
German Jews: in Dispute literature, 383, Goebbels, Joseph, 7
472n37; Lazarus on, 327–30, 334–40, 343; Goedsche, Hermann, 399n27
middle class image, 168–69; Mommsen on, Goethe, Johann: Bamberger on, 160; and
120, 165–66; and nationality, 136–45, 173–74, Christianity, 437n49; and development of
179, 181–82, 184–85, 416nn40–41; Treitschke antisemitism, 215; Graetz on, 140; hatred
on, 51–54, 58–62, 165–66, 286, 311–12 of Jews, 199; and Lazarus, 349, 356, 423n165;
German Quarterly, 268 and mixed culture, 66, 408n32; Treitschke
German Question, Jewish Question (Rose), 383 on, 313
German Reich: constitution, 27; and foreign Goodhart, David, 291–92
affairs, 31, 397n1; history, 2, 214–20, 266–73, Gotha, 210, 249, 456n143
462n83, 462n93; and history of nationalism, Gotheim, Georg, 397n120
252; Jews in office in, 444n115; and national Goya, Francisco, 403n18
spirit, 104, 324; and origins and effects of Göze, Johann Melchior, 338
antisemitism, 40, 172; and religion, 262, 264, Graetz, Heinrich: on civil rights, 428n2; and
459n45; and social harmony, 280; socialism eternal hatred, 126–28; first response,
in, 237–42. See also Reichstag 15–17; at Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar,
German spirit: affinity with Jewish spirit, 66, 21; and mixed culture, 64; Mommsen on,
76–79, 175–76, 277, 337; description, 64, 70; 432n33; and nationalism, 56, 58–60, 122,
in Dispute literature, 382, 387; and Judaism, 173–74, 404n26, 404n32, 405n37, 406n59;
136; Lazarus on, 320–21, 336, 342–43, 347; on nationality of German Jews, 137–41,
Treitschke on, 312; and work, 79–88, 217, 143, 181–82, 426n205, 426n210, 427n211,
277, 410n68. See also national spirit 427n225, 428n2; on origins and effects of
 Index 515

antisemitism, 40, 172; on Roman anti-Ju- Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of

daism, 180; on Shylock myth, 429n4; terms Religion, 309
for Jews, 393n55; Treitschke on, 313 Hecker, Friedrich, 285
Gramsci, Antonio, 462n84, 465n125 Hegel, Georg: Bamberger on, 160; and Chris-
Gray, John, 294, 297, 299 tianity, 437n49; and Cohen, 21; and concept
Great Britain. See England of liberalism, 222, 236, 245–48, 455n125; and
“Great Depression,” 270, 463n112 economy, 409n55; and German antisemites,
Greek civilization: Baruch on, 367; and capi- 434n10; “historical irony,” 230, 450n41; on
talism, 206, 440n82; Christianity in, 131, 133; “historyless peoples,” 406n58; Lazarus on,
Lazarus on, 347, 354, 357; and mixed cul- 336; and modernity, 283; and Naudh, 43;
ture, 72, 175; Mommsen on, 25, 26, 421n134 and “objective spirit,” 393n50; as reaction-
Grégoire, Abbé, 458n23 ary, 458n14; on religion, 116, 135, 421n116;
Grenzboten, 219, 221, 431n6, 445n139, 446n150 and social harmony, 279, 281, 465n6
Grenzen der Aufklärung (Claussen), 390n10 Heidelberg University, 20, 361, 363, 471n1
Gretchenfrage, 13, 392n36 Heilbronner, Oded, 469n76
Grimm, Hermann, 24–25 Heine, Heinrich: contribution to German
grossdeutsche position, 264, 267 culture, 276; Graetz on, 140, 141; and mixed
Gründer, 80, 82–83, 176, 215, 218, 410n66, culture, 78, 89, 174, 409n55, 410n66; refer-
444n125, 463n106 ence to Jews, 441n85; on religion, 394n87;
Gründerkrach, 79, 270, 410n65 Treitschke on, 313; Wagner on, 447n163
Gründerzeit, 20, 33, 269–70, 310, 397n6, heliocentrism, 45–46
463n106 Helmholtz, Hermann, 160
“Grundsätze der Realpolitik” (Rochau), Hep-Hep movement, 35, 37, 150, 194–95, 311,
229–30 365, 367, 435n18, 435n22
guild system, 83, 84, 212 Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 393n50
Gutzkow, Karl, 437n50 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 66, 215
Herod, 368
Habermas, Jürgen, 288, 300–301, 304, 469n67 Herzfeld, Hans, 251, 465n1
Häckel-Darwin (Ernst Häckel and Charles Herzog, Dagmar, 285, 301
Darwin), 136 Hess, Moses, 396n112
Hacking, Ian, 405n35 Hessen, 197, 427n211, 450n44
Hage, Ghassan, 306, 439n74 Hilberg, Raul, 399n20, 436n42
Hall, Stuart, 297 Historiae (Tacitus), 126, 422n147
Hamburg, 372, 441n85 historicism, 16, 117, 232, 250, 253
Hamburger, Ernest, 388, 396n98 Historische Rechtsschule, 117
Hamerow, Theodore S., 451nn63–65, 452n79, history: and capitalism, 205–14; and Christian-
462n92 ity-Judaism relationship, 129–36; and civil
Handbuch der Judenfrage (Fritsch), 395n90 rights, 147, 154; and eternal hatred, 126–29;
Hänel, Albert, 452n86 and nation building, 120–21, 177–78, 187;
Harmonies économiques (Bastiat), 223, 278 occidental, 127, 423n154; and race, 199–205;
Harris, James, 435n22 and social groups, 244; Treitschke on, 173,
Hartmann, Eduart von, 136 175
Haym, Rudolf, 224, 225, 456n143 historyless (peoples), 406n58
Hebrews, 350 Hitler, Adolf, 7, 37, 294, 300, 303, 399n18
516 Index

Hobbes, Thomas, 232, 263, 432n32, 461n65, Immaculate Conception doctrine (1854),
467n47 460n58
Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Ju- immigration: and development of anti-
denthums, 14, 23, 356, 392n43 semitism, 216; Dispute consensus on, 186;
Hoffmann, Christhard, 27, 387 Lazarus on, 329, 354, 357–59; and national-
Holocaust, 302 ism, 51–62, 99, 173–74; Naudh on, 167, 177;
Hölscher, Lucian, 260, 261 and origins and effects of antisemitism,
Holst, Ludolf, 430n15 276; and responses to Treitschke, 22–23;
Holstein. See Schleswig-Holstein and slavery, 439n66; statistics, 56, 358–59,
Holy of Holies, 349, 350 405n37, 405n39, 406n44; Treitschke on,
Holz, Klaus, 53, 383–84, 390n10, 403n22, 11–12
404n25 India, 468n62
Holzmann, Michael, 395n90 individualism: and capitalism, 205, 440n76;
Horkheimer, Max, 7, 278, 280, 302, 383, 384, and concept of liberalism, 231–32, 234, 246,
390n12, 440n81, 468n62 247, 251, 455n125; Hegel on, 466n6; and
Hottinger, Heinrich, 352 history of German Reich, 268; Lazarus
Hsia, R. Po-Chia, 443n107 on, 324; and national culture, 303–8; and
Huber, Victor Aimé, 240 religion, 258, 261; and social harmony, 281,
Hughes, Michael, 227, 267, 462n83 292, 295–96
humanism, 210, 269, 276, 298 industrialization: and capitalism, 207–10,
humanitarianism, 33, 34, 350, 359 442n99, 468n64; and development of
humanity: Baruch on, 369; and concept of antisemitism, 195–96, 290–91; and develop-
liberalism, 233; and exaggerated national- ment of liberalism, 221, 223–24, 243, 287;
ism, 100, 101, 177; and German spirit, 70–71; and history of German Reich, 268–72,
Lazarus on, 317–18, 321–25, 327, 330, 338, 464n112, 464n114; and modernity, 283, 289;
339, 342–43, 346–48, 353; and modernity, and Volksgemeinschaft, 298
282; and nationality of German Jews, 140, “innere Staatsbildung,” 268. See also internal
142; and national spirit, 112–14, 420n97; nation building
and race, 200; and religion, 129–30, 132–33, internal nation building, 288, 319
264, 418n76; and social harmony, 279, 295; Iran, 461n70
Treitschke on, 313 Islam, 93, 116, 212, 281, 306, 344, 441n82
human rights, 152–53, 182, 278, 370–71, 387, Israel, 74, 333, 344, 347, 349, 391n24, 409n45
430n21 Israel im Heere (Naudh), 447n162
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 243, 245, 286, 290, Israelites, 131, 133, 284, 313, 315, 334, 372
295, 296, 379, 467n34 Israelitic Synods, 2, 14, 129–30, 348, 353, 354,
Hume, David, 233, 234 356, 392n43, 423n163, 424n166
Hungary, 18 Italy, 18, 19, 25, 32, 59, 212, 312, 320, 353, 458n17

Iccarim (Albo), 355–56 Jacob, 373

idealism, 106, 112, 113, 187, 199, 251, 355, 413n15 Jacobins, 193
“idealistic realism,” 249 Jacoby, Russell, 298
Iggers, Georg, 247 Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig, 404n23
Iliad (Homer), 131 Janik, Allan, 451n48
Illuminati, 193, 434n11 Jarausch, Konrad H., 231
 Index 517

Jassy, 394n83 on economics, 176; on emancipation, 148,

Jehovah, 293, 349 182; at Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar, 16;
Jellinek, Adolf, 191 on mixed culture, 82; on nationalism, 58;
Jensen, Uffa, 12, 380–81, 385, 390n10, 391n18 on nationality of German Jews, 136–37, 141,
Jeremiah (prophet), 349 144, 182, 416n40; on origins and effects of
Jerusalem, 349, 375 antisemitism, 41, 172; response to
Jesuits, 262, 352 Treitschke, 14, 166–67
Jesus: crucifixion of, 95–96, 130, 414n23, 433n2, Jones, Larry Eugene, 231
434n11; Hegel on, 437n49; and Jewish eco- Josephus, Titus Flavius, 128
nomic spirit, 86, 277; Renan on, 351, 458n13 Joshua, Book of, 369
Jew-baiting, 35–37, 171, 311 Journal des débats, 47–48
Jew-eaters, 36–37, 311. See also Jew-hatred journalism, 52, 64, 65, 88, 95, 159, 314, 436n36.
Jew-hatred: Baruch on, 363–68, 370–71, 373–75; See also press
in Dispute literature, 381; eternal, 126–29, “Juchhe nach Italia,” 19
172, 192; Lazarus on, 351; and national cul- Judaism: Baruch on, 376; Cohen on, 21; in
ture, 304; and origins and effects of anti- Dispute literature, 387; and exaggerated
semitism, 4, 36–37, 197, 199–202, 262, 275 nationalism, 97; Graetz on, 15–17, 138,
Jewification/Judaization, 6, 80, 217, 219, 220, 427n211; Hegel on, 465n6; Lazarus on,
240, 243 333–35, 339, 344, 348–56; and mixed culture,
Jewish arrogance, 11, 64, 157–59, 173, 404n26 67, 75, 76, 86; and nationalism, 180–81, 262,
Jewish characteristics, 25–26, 198 263; and national spirit, 107–11, 113; and
Jewish dialectics, 78 nation building, 126; and rationalism, 284,
Jewish question: Breßlau on, 97–98; Cohen on, 424n166; recognition of, 427n211; relation-
134; Glagau on, 218, 445n142; interpreta- ship to Christianity, 129–36, 175, 179, 191,
tions of, 275–76; Jellinek on, 191; Lazarus 276–77, 293, 330–33, 339–40, 344, 348–56,
on, 142, 317; Naudh on, 73, 220; Philippson 441n82; in Rome, 128–29; and social har-
on, 418n81; Treitschke on, 10–11, 51–54, mony, 279, 280, 281; Tacitus’s interpretation
58–62, 67, 91, 94, 124, 125, 155, 157–59, 165, of, 422n147; and work, 211, 442n101
168–69, 171, 173–74, 183, 184, 245, 294, 311, Judenfrage, 382, 400n30. See also Jewish ques-
399n20, 429n2. See also Judenfrage tion
Jewish spirit: affinity with German spirit, 66, Judengasse, 362, 364
76–79, 175–76, 277, 337; and Christianity, Judenthum, 398n12, 470n1. See also Judaism
136, 199; in Dispute literature, 387; and Judenthum in allen dessen Theilen (Holst),
economics, 79–88, 196, 207–8, 210–14, 430n15
216–19; Lazarus on, 330, 346–47, 353, 354; Jüdische Presse, 15
and mixed culture, 64, 71; and origins and Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar, 16, 21
effects of antisemitism, 40, 196. See also jusnaturalism, 148, 154, 387
national spirit Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis), 423n152,
Jewish Theological Seminary. See Jüdisch- 423n159
Theologisches Seminar
“The Jews are our misfortune,” 5, 38, 41, 63, Kaiser, attempt on life of, 33, 142, 239, 270, 310,
117, 314, 379 397n7
Joël, Manuel: background, 392n40; and Kaiserreich, 260, 266, 272, 303
Christianity-Judaism relationship, 135–36; Kallen, Horace Meyer, 298, 468n59
518 Index

Kampe, Norbert, 385 Kutschke, August (pseud. Gotthelf Hoff-

Kant, Immanuel: and civil rights, 150, 429n14; mann), 362
Cohen on, 143, 429n11; and development
of antisemitism, 215, 277; Graetz on, 140; Langer, Ulrich, 249, 251, 385, 386, 388
Hegel on, 465n6; Lazarus on, 329, 336, 356; language: and concept of nation, 102–3, 106,
and modernity, 283; and religious diversity, 108, 116, 122, 178, 269, 416n46, 418n81; La-
110–11, 132–34, 180, 262, 419n91, 425n180; zarus on, 319, 321–28, 336, 346
Treitschke on, 313 Lasker, Eduard, 43, 44, 78, 218, 401n44,
Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (Cohen), 21 426n196, 452n86
Kathedersozialismus: definition, 240–41; Lassalle, Ferdinand, 209, 451n68, 453n95, 471n2
and development of liberalism, 245, 300, Latin civilization, 25–26
453n91, 453n95; Dühring on, 447n163; Op- Lausitz, 412n96
penheim on, 20, 83, 394n80, 411n85; La vie de Jésus (Renan), 457n6, 458n13
Treitschke on, 186; and Wagner, 216. See Lazare, Bernard, 443n148
also socialism Lazarus, Moritz: on agricultural work, 412n98;
Katz, Jacob, 217, 445n142 background, 2, 393n49; on Christianity-Ju-
Katznelson, Ira, 466n21 daism relationship, 129–30, 134–35, 180–81,
Keller, A., 353, 356 423n165; Cohen’s critique of, 394n87; on
Khomeini, Ruhollah M., 461n70 concept of nation, 101–15, 177, 178, 417n72,
King John (Shakespeare), 374 419n97; in Dispute literature, 378, 387–88,
Kings, Book of, 369 473n58; first response, 14–15, 392n42,
Kladderadatsch, 395n92 392n44, 393n46, 393n50; on German-Jewish
kleindeutsche position, 31, 93, 171, 224, 267, spirit, 76, 78–79, 175, 176; on immigration,
397n1, 450n41, 450n44 55–56, 173–74, 404n34; on mixed culture,
Kleinstaaterei, 19, 249 68–71, 174–75, 293, 296; on nationality of
Kohn, Hans, 27, 28, 227, 449n28 German Jews, 141–43, 179, 182, 428n232;
Kossuth, Lajos, 18 nature of analyses, 91; Treitschke’s response
know-nothings, 99 to, 156; “What Does National Mean,” 317–59
Kofler, Leo, 434n15, 440n75 League of Antisemites, 40, 192, 219, 318, 362, 374
Königstrasse (Berlin), 87 League of St. Sebastian, 362
Kreuzzeitung, 40, 214, 216, 395n90, 399n20, Leben und Tod des deutschen Judentums (Bab),
399n27. See also Neue Preussische Zeitung 379
Krieger, Karsten, 391n18, 396n100 Lederer, Helen, 309
Kronecker, Leopold, 336 legislation, 137, 183, 239, 270
Kulturfrage, 382 Leicht, Alfred, 418n72
Kulturkampf: and Christianity-Judaism re- Leipzig, 348, 353, 423n163
lationship, 131–32; and development of Le libéral, 234, 451n62
antisemitism, 215, 446n149; and develop- Leo XIII, Pope, 205
ment of liberalism, 247, 288, 452n86; and Leon, Abram, 443nn102–3, 443nn108–9
education, 414n24; Germania on, 400n28; Lessing, Gotthold, 138, 140, 141, 181, 313, 317,
Mommsen on, 27; and nationalism, 50, 51, 338, 402n5, 403n13, 426n208
117–18, 262–63, 460n58, 460n60. See also Leuschen-Seppel, Rosemarie, 440n81
Catholicism Levene, Mark, 288
Kulturkämpfer (Glagau), 446n148 Levithan (Hobbes), 432n32
 Index 519

Levy, Richard S., 435n22 Lutheranism, 215, 261, 263–64, 440n77

Lexicon Pseudonymorum (Weller), 395n90
liberalism: and capitalism, 205, 206, 208–10, Macaulay, Thomas B., 453n97
440n76; and civil rights, 147, 150–51, 154, Magnus, Heinrich Gustav, 336
430n14; concept of, 229–37, 451n48, 451n68; Maimonides, 347, 354, 355, 443n101
definition, 222; development of, 221–23, Mainz, 2, 18, 19, 363
448n11, 456n151, 465n125; Dispute ambiva- Malthus, Thomas, 417n66
lence on, 6–10, 12–13, 175; Dispute consen- Mammon, 207, 209, 211, 291
sus on, 185; in Dispute literature, 381–87; Manchesterism: and capitalism, 208, 210; and
exaggerated, 292; failure of, 300–303, 305; concept of liberalism, 221, 222, 224, 229, 235,
and history of German Reich, 266–73; in- 244, 287, 288, 300, 451n68, 469n67; Glagau
terpretations of, 3–5, 286–87, 289; Marx on, on, 218; and history of German Reich, 270;
439n75; and mixed culture, 71–72, 85–86; and mixed culture, 86; and state social-
and modernity, 282–85; and nationalism, 6, ism, 240, 241, 453n91; as theme of Dispute,
31–40, 49, 95, 112, 117–21, 177, 307–8; and ori- 176–77, 187, 277. See also capitalism
gins and effects of antisemitism, 43–46, 165, Manchester School, 451n68. See also Manches-
171, 191, 193–96, 214, 215, 217, 219, 275–78, terism
434n15, 446n149; and press, 65; and race, Manichaean dualism, 204–5
199, 200; and religion, 258, 259, 263; and Mannus (god), 50, 403n15
social harmony, 281, 299–300; Treitschke’s Mar, Samuel (Talmudic sage), 107, 333, 418n79
concept of, 14, 242–56. See also National Marburg University, 21
Liberal Party Marr, Wilhelm: Allgemeine Zeitung des Ju-
Liebeschütz, Hans, 16, 17, 385, 396n100 denthums, 191, 433n2; and development of
Lightfoot, John, 352 antisemitism, 196, 218–20, 447n162; and
“limpieza de sangre,” 201, 437n55 development of liberalism, 221; and Die
Lindemann, Albert S., 383 Deutsche Wacht, 22, 411n71; in Dispute lit-
Linz, 414n23 erature, 382
List, Friedrich, 229, 453n95 Marrano, 60
Lloyd, David, 295, 296, 467n47 marriage, 118, 177–78, 259, 277
Löbau, 15 Martialis, Valerius, 408n32
Locke, John, 280, 283 Marwitz, Ludwig von der, 193
“Loreley” (Heine), 89 Marx, Anthony, 256–57, 391n25
Lotze, Hermann, 350, 423n165 Marx, Karl: on bourgeois society, 468n62; and
Louis Napoléon (Napoleon III), 243 capitalism, 208–11; on commodity fetish-
Louis Philippe, 243 ism, 198–99, 436n44; on communism,
Low, Alfred D., 473n47 439n75, 442n96; “concrete” and “abstract,”
Lucinde (Schlegel), 426n205 307, 470n91; on free trade, 229; and Freilig-
Luther, Martin: Bamberger on, 160; and rath poem, 421n131; and “Manchester
Catholicism, 264–66; and Christianity- school,” 451n68; and speculation, 409n55;
Judaism relationship, 130, 424n170; and and state socialism, 452n88, 453n95
development of antisemitism, 193; and Masons, 434n11. See also Freemasons; Ilumi-
Jews as “misfortune,” 399n20; Lazarus on, nati
330–32, 339, 340, 349, 470n3; and race, 198; Massing, Paul, 208, 302, 383, 384, 436n36,
Treitschke on, 313. See also Reformation 440n81, 446n154, 453n91
520 Index

materialism: and capitalism, 205; and develop- Mischvolk idea, 382, 386, 473n47
ment of antisemitism, 216, 218, 291; Lazarus “Missgeburt,” 420n107
on, 330, 337; and national spirit, 106, 108, “Missgewächs,” 114, 420n107
111–12, 187; and Sabbath, 413n15; Treitschke Mittelstädt, Otto, 34, 43, 45, 310–11, 398n10
on, 157, 313 mixed culture: and affinity of German and
Mathy, Karl, 456n143 Jewish spirits, 76–79; concept of, 66–76,
Max Weber and the Jewish Question (Abra- 295; in Dispute literature, 379–80; and eco-
ham), 386, 390n10 nomics, 79–88; Endner on, 86–88, 412n96,
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 18 432n41; Jewish contribution to, 88–90; as
Megay, Edward, 244, 246 theme of Dispute, 174–75, 186, 276–77;
Mehring, Franz, 378–79, 383, 444n124, 444n126, Treitschke on, 63, 312. See also culture
471n2 modernity: and capitalism, 206, 210, 213,
Meinecke, Friedrich, 251 441n82; and civil rights, 205; and concept
Memel, 22, 54–55 of liberalism, 221, 222, 236, 245, 287, 300;
“Memorandum on Peace” (Gervinus), 462n93 and development of antisemitism, 191–92,
Mendelssohn, Moses, 265, 281, 336, 337, 347, 195–98, 217, 220, 435n27; and history of
355, 466n13 German Reich, 267, 271–72, 464n119; and
Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix, 64, 160, 312, nationalism, 266, 282–85, 289, 466n21; and
336, 425n185, 447n163 religion, 258, 259, 262, 263, 265; and social
The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 429n4 harmony, 281–82, 286, 290–92, 295, 297, 299;
Metternich system, 236 and state socialism, 237
Meyer, Michael A., 16, 384–85, 386, 387, 473n43 Moleschott, Jacob, 426n196
Meyer, Rudolf, 215, 444n124, 444nn125–26 Mommsen, Theodor: on amalgamation, 290;
Meyer, Seligmann: on Christianity-Judaism ambivalence of, 6; on Antisemitenpetition,
relationship, 426n196; on Disraeli’s re- 431n6; on assimilation, 286; background, 2,
marks, 407n61; on emancipation, 414n21; 24, 432n30; and Baumgarten, 450n42; and
first response, 15; on immigration, 405n37; development of liberalism, 287; in Dispute
on Judaism, 427n211; on nationality of Ger- literature, 378, 381, 385, 386, 472n37, 473n47;
man Jews, 141, 182; on origins and effects and Freytag, 207; on Graetz, 432n33; and
of antisemitism, 40, 41, 172, 400n30; on history of nationalism, 253, 254; letters,
religious differences, 424n178; on religious 24–28, 428n2; and “Missgeburt,” 420n107;
education, 414n23; on Sabbath, 413n15 on mixed culture, 72; and nationalism,
Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 447n163 50–51, 61–62, 173, 177–78, 294, 403n14,
Middle Ages, 197, 263, 339, 346, 353, 354 404n24; on nation building, 119–26, 184,
Mikrokosmos (Lotze), 350 421n134; nature of analyses, 91; response to
military, 66, 266–68 Treitschke, 22, 23, 161–66; on state social-
Mill, John Stuart, 233, 245, 247, 250, 296, 430n20, ism, 238; Treitschke’s interpretations of, 25,
454n123, 455n130. See also Die Freiheit 27, 123–26, 397nn119–121
Minima Moralia (Adorno), 465n4 Mommsen, Wolfgang, 464n112
Minogue, Kenneth, 396n103 monarchy: and concept of liberalism, 225, 229,
Minz, Abraham ben Judah ha-Levi, 353 233, 243, 249, 250, 450n44; dual, 31, 93; and
Miquel, Johannes, 238 state socialism, 240
miscegenation, 26, 328, 382 monotheism, 115, 129, 131–32, 135, 219, 422n147,
Mischcultur. See mixed culture 424nn174–75
 Index 521

Montesquieu, Charles de, 232 and development of antisemitism, 192,

morality: and capitalism, 207, 211–12; and 276–78; in Dispute literature, 379, 381–88;
Christianity-Judaism relationship, 133, 135, as Ersatzreligion, 261–66; exaggerated,
176, 277; and development of liberalism, 96–101, 172–73, 177, 186, 420n107; Graetz on,
225, 242, 245; and emancipation, 150, 183; 16–17; history in France, 252–56, 457n1; and
Lazarus on, 319, 327, 330, 348, 351, 353–56, history of German Reich, 266–73, 462n83;
359; and national character, 117; and na- interpretations of, 3–5, 389n5; Lazarus on,
tionalism, 171, 177, 179, 257–59, 266, 303–5; 317–21, 325–27; and modernity, 283, 290,
and political culture, 33–34; Rosenberg on, 466n21; Naudh on, 42–43; and race, 199,
380; and social harmony, 278–81, 289, 291, 204, 439n71; and society, 294, 296–300,
293, 294, 297–98; as theme of Dispute, 185, 458n26; as theme of Dispute, 47–62, 174–75;
278, 382; Treitschke on, 162, 310. See also types of, 252. See also national unity;
ethics; Sittlichkeit nation-state; patriotism; state
The Moral Theology of the Jesuit Priest Cury Nationalitätenfrage (Bauer), 417n72
(Keller), 353 nationality: and culture, 288; of German
moriscos, 437n54, 437n56 Jews, 136–45, 173–74, 179, 181–82, 184–85,
Mosaism, 348 416nn40–41; Lazarus on, 318, 341–44; and
Moses, 41–42, 74, 131, 409n45 mixed culture, 69–70, 75; and religion,
Mosse, George L., 231, 385 132–36. See also citizenship
mother tongue, 112, 328, 420n98 National Liberal Party: Bamberger in, 17–19;
Müller, Adam, 236 Breßlau in, 17; and capitalism, 207; and de-
multiculturalism: and development of anti- velopment of antisemitism, 219; and failure
semitism, 276; in Dispute literature, 386; of liberalism, 302; history of, 223–30, 287,
Lazarus on, 345–47; and religion, 265; and 448n11, 448n14, 450n41, 450n43; and history
social harmony, 291–96, 298, 299, 306 of German Reich, 266–67, 270, 271; Lasker
Munck, 335, 347 in, 401n44; and nationalism, 58–62, 117–19,
Musen-Almanach für das Jahr 1797, 408n32 403n14, 404n24; and origins and effects
“Muttersprache” (folksong), 420n98 of antisemitism, 40, 172, 186, 195, 214, 218,
275, 399n27; position of, 1–3, 6, 392n44; and
Nadyr, Moses Aron, 15, 141, 174, 429n4, 430n24 Prussian Diet elections, 32; publications,
Napoléon I, 167, 197, 200, 232, 234, 235, 243, 221; responses to Treitschke, 17–20;
432n36, 432n40, 434n11, 441n90 Treitschke in, 13–14, 222, 229, 242, 250–51,
Napoléon III, 28, 243 271, 287, 310; on war, 249. See also liberalism
Napoleonic wars, 193, 407n59 National Socialism, 379. See also Nazis
Nassau, 427n211 national spirit: and concept of nation, 101–16;
“Nathan” (Lessing), 317, 402n5 Dispute consensus on, 187; Lazarus on,
National Assembly. See Frankfurt National 321–25, 327, 330, 347; and origins and effects
Assembly of antisemitism, 276–77; and race, 177–79.
Nationaler Antisemitismus (Holz), 390n10 See also German spirit; Jewish spirit
nationalism: and ambivalence of Dispute, national unity: and assimilation, 179–80, 286;
6–10, 13; and assimilation, 11–12; charac- and concept of nation, 105, 108, 111, 114–15,
teristics of, 9–10, 391n24; and civil rights, 177, 258; and culture, 174–75, 303; and de-
147; and concept of liberalism, 222, 224, velopment of liberalism, 6, 229, 242, 248,
235, 251, 288; and concept of nation, 256–58; 287–89, 450n44; in Dispute literature,
522 Index

national unity (cont.) 421n116; response to Treitschke, 17, 21–22,

388, 474n58; and history of German Reich, 167. See also Nordmann, Heinrich; Nord-
267, 462n83; and language, 102–3; Lazarus mann, Johannes; Nordmann, M. G.
on, 320, 322–25; and origins and effects of Nazis, 4, 300. See also National Socialism
antisemitism, 275; and Prussia, 380; and Neander, August, 336
religion, 95, 180–81, 264–65, 414n21; as theme Nero (emperor), 126, 128
of Dispute, 186, 294–95; Treitschke’s demand Netherlands, 58, 242–43, 259, 320, 442n99
for, 1, 183–85, 312. See also nationalism Neubauer, Ad., 404n27
Nationalverein, 19, 450n43 Neue Allemannia, 235–36
Nationalzeitung, 428n2 Neue Preussische Zeitung, 399n27. See also
nation-state: and Balkan crisis, 92; Bamberger Kreuzzeitung
on, 18–19; building of, 119–26, 147, 177, 180, Neue Rheinische Zeitung (Marx), 421n131
183–87, 268, 269, 286, 437n53; and capital- Neue Zeit, 444n126
ism, 213; characteristics of, 9, 391nn21–22; Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 447n163
Cohen on, 21; and development of lib- Neumann, Franz, 453n95
eralism, 6, 222, 225, 242, 246–49, 456n151; Neumann, Salomon, 23, 57, 173, 358, 405n35,
Dispute consensus on, 185–87; in Dispute 405n39, 406n41, 406n44
literature, 381; German Reich as, 266–73, Neustettin synagogue, 395n98
465n127; and history of nationalism, New Synagogue of Berlin, 23
255–56, 459n26; and modernity, 282–85; Niendorf, Marc Anton, 395n90
Mommsen on, 24–28, 122, 422n134; and Niethammer, Lutz, 468n59
national culture, 303–8; and national Nietzsche, Friedrich, 269, 446n147, 458n14
spirit, 101–16; objective and subjective ele- Niewyk, Donald L., 382
ments of, 178–79; Oppenheim on, 20; and Nipperdey, Thomas, 433n2, 434n4, 437n46,
race, 201, 204; and religion, 94–96, 116–19, 446n154, 472n29
180–81, 258–61, 265; and social harmony, Nitch and Tritch, 458n14
286–91, 293–96; Treitschke’s vision of, nobility, 201, 203–4, 266, 271–72, 287, 297,
31–40, 156–59, 162–66, 171, 315–16. See also 454n115
state “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage”
natural law: and communism, 440n75; and (Treitschke), 39
concept of liberalism, 223, 232, 250, 251; and Nordmann, Heinrich. See Naudh
development of antisemitism, 278; and Nordmann, Johannes, 395n90
emancipation, 150, 154, 182–83 Nordmann, M. G. See Nordmann, Johannes
Naudh: on assimilation, 179–81, 183; and North German Federation, 270
Christianity-Judaism relationship, 131, 180,
181, 424n173, 424n174; and concept of na- objektiver Geist, 15
tion, 110, 178–79, 416n48; on economics, “Of Luxury” (Hume), 233
176–77; on emancipation, 414n21; and eter- Old Lutherans, 263
nal hatred, 126; on mixed culture, 71–74, Omayyad, 59
86–87, 175; nature of analyses, 91; and ori- “On Antisemitism” (Freytag), 378
gins and effects of antisemitism, 41–42, 172, On Liberty (Mill), 430n20, 454n123. See also
219, 220, 400n30, 400n37, 447n162; publica- Die Freiheit; Mill, John Stuart
tions of, 390n17, 395n90, 411n71; on race, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in
98, 178–80, 187, 286; on religion, 116–19, 179, Germany (Heine), 394n87
 Index 523

“On the History of the Stock-Market Fraud” 391n24; and mixed culture, 65, 88–89; and
(Oppenheim), 20 national culture, 304; and nationality of
Oppenheim, Heinrich Bernhard: and de- German Jews, 144–45; and race, 204; as
velopment of liberalism, 223, 244, 287, Staatsgesinnung, 91–94; and Volksgemein-
453n91; on economics, 176; and failure of schaft, 296, 297. See also nationalism
liberalism, 300; and Kathedersozialisten, Paul (apostle), 129, 331, 414n23
394n80, 411n85; on mixed culture, 82–84, Paulskirche parliament, 18. See also Frankfurt
174, 412n101; on nationalism, 58; on nation- National Assembly
ality of German Jews, 141, 144, 182; nature Penslar, Derek J., 460n60
of analyses, 91; obituary, 20, 394n83; on The People Speak! (Harris), 435n22
origins and effects of antisemitism, 43–46, “Perpetual Peace” (Kant), 425n180
172, 401n49; response to Treitschke, 17, 19, Perrot, Franz, 214
20, 176, 401n41, 401n51; on state socialism, Peschel, Oskar, 349, 350, 423n165
240, 241 Petersdorff, H. von, 465n1
Oppert, Jules, 335 Pfefferkorn, Johannes, 36, 130, 311, 351, 398n16
Origin of Christianity (Renan), 354 Pharisees, 26
Orthodox Jews, 421n115, 424n166, 425n192 philanthropy, 34, 43, 164, 310–11
Ortsbürger, 195 Philipp II, 368
Ottoman Empire, 92–94, 213 Philippe, Louis, 243
“Our Prospects” (Treitschke): first responses Philippson, Ludwig: on advertisements,
to, 14–22; on international relations, 91–94; 413n108; Book of Memories, 334; on Chris-
text of, 309–16 tianity-Judaism relationship, 425n194;
on emancipation, 148–50, 182–83; first
Palatinate, 226 response, 15, 393n52; at Israelitic Synod,
Palestine, 26–27, 67, 194, 211 348; on mixed culture, 83; on nationalism,
Pandulph (Shakespeare), 374 47–48, 58, 96–97, 177, 402n5, 405n37, 414n22,
pan-Germanism, 31, 93 414n24, 415n30, 418n81, 457n2; and nation-
pan-Slavism, 85, 92–93 ality of German Jews, 140–41, 143–44, 179,
pantheism, 135 182; on popular opinion, 401n54; response
papal infallibility, 460n58 to Treitschke, 167, 176; on work, 410n68
Parekh, Bhikhu, 297, 468n55 Philo (of Alexandria), 347
Paris Commune, 19, 239 Philosophie des Rechts und der Gesellschaft
Parsons, Talcott, 296 (Oppenheim), 20
particularism: and concept of liberalism, 246, Philosophy of History (Hegel), 116
301, 302, 469n72; Dispute consensus on, 187; Phoenicians, 72, 456n148
in Dispute literature, 386; and history of Plessner, Helmuth, 462n80
German Reich, 269; Lazarus on, 318, 346; Pickus, Keith H., 386
Mommsen on, 166, 184; and nationalism, Pietism, 261–64, 460n60
172, 179, 180, 258 Pilate, 375
“passive revolution,” 267, 462n84, 465n125. See Pius IX, Pope, 460n58
also Gramsci, Antonio Plato, 337
pastor collocutus, 50, 403n16 Plutarch, 305
patriotism: Breßlau on, 119; and concept of pogroms, 159, 183, 219, 435n18
liberalism, 235, 236, 300–301; definition, Poland, 230, 449n28
524 Index

Poliakov, Léon, 437n55, 439nn67–68, 439n70 17; and development of liberalism, 224,
Polish Jews: and assimilation, 58–60; Baruch 450n43, 452n86; and Kulturkampf, 460n60;
on, 362; Graetz on, 16–17, 404n32; immi- Lasker in, 401n44; and Neumann, 23; Op-
gration of, 55–57, 173–74, 212, 357, 405n37; penheim in, 20; and origins and effects of
Treitschke on, 11–12, 23, 52–53, 312 antisemitism, 46; and Prussian Diet elec-
political culture: and bourgeois society, 12–13, tions, 31; and state socialism, 238;
183–85; and concept of liberalism, 223, 226, Treitschke on, 309–10
231–37, 246, 302, 448n6, 451n68; Dispute proletariat, 223, 225–26, 229, 237–42, 243–44,
consensus on, 187; and education, 12–13, 453n97. See also social class; work
32–34, 38–40; and history of German Reich, Prospect, 291
267, 268, 270–72; and nationalism, 288, 304, protective tariffs, 229, 266, 270–71,
305; and origins and effects of antisemi- 464nn112–113
tism, 172, 214, 277; and press, 32, 35; and Protestantism: and capitalism, 207, 440n77;
religion, 33–34, 38–42, 179, 184–85, 258, 259, and Christianity-Judaism relationship,
262, 289; and social harmony, 278–80, 290, 132, 133, 135, 424n173, 425n194; Cohen on,
293–95, 298, 468n55. See also culture 21; and development of antisemitism,
Politics (Aristotle), 397n119, 441n91 214, 435n27; in Dispute literature, 382;
Politische Gründer und die Korruption in in France, 415n28; Hegel on, 466n6; and
Deutschland (Meyer), 215, 444n124 Kulturkampf, 400n28; Lazarus on, 340, 345,
Pomeranian riots, 396n98 351, 393n50; Meyer on, 424n178; and mixed
Pompeius, Gnaeus P. Magnus, 349 culture, 68–69; and modernity, 283; and
populism, 205, 208, 216–17, 219, 240, 292, 303, nationalism, 111, 180, 181, 259–66, 397n1,
390n16, 435n27, 447n163 459n48, 461n71; Prussian publications on,
Portugal, 59, 61 399n27; and race, 199; and Schleiermacher,
positivism, 18, 36, 103, 121, 131, 210, 247, 393n50, 426n205; and social harmony, 280, 281
400n37, 435n31 Protestant Synod, 33–34263, 310
Postone, Moishe, 390n12, 411n70, 442n100, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 399n27
440n81, 470n88, 470n91 Proudhon, Pierre Joesph, 441n90, 448n6. See
Poznan, 14, 55, 407n59, 449n28 also Proudhonism
prejudice, 169, 281–82 Proudhonism, 206, 208, 210, 441n90
press: Catholic, 400n28; and history of nation- Proudhonist Volksbank project, 18
alism, 253; Jewish involvement in, 52, 167, Prussia: Bamberger on, 18–19; and concept of
174, 207, 216, 276, 313–14, 357, 369, 398n14, liberalism, 223–30, 236, 243, 248–49, 287,
399n21, 403n22, 405n40; Marr on freedom 448n14, 449n28, 450n44, 455n134, 456n142,
of, 220; and mixed culture, 64–65, 88–89, 456n143; constitution, 402n5, 461n71; and
413nn108–9; and National Liberal Party, development of antisemitism, 40, 193,
117; and origins and effects of antisemitism, 194, 214–16, 446n150; Freiligrath poem in,
44–45, 401n54; and political culture, 32, 35; 421n131; and German nation-state, 397n1;
Treitschke on, 157, 158, 313–14 and history of German Reich, 267, 269–72,
Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 22 463n108, 464n119; and history of national-
Preussische Jahrbücher, 1, 10–13, 57, 230, 234, ism, 253, 254; and immigration, 55–57, 60,
268, 309, 406n44, 454n109 357–59, 404n35, 405n37, 406n59; Jewish
Pringsheim, Nathanael, 336 population, 336; Judaism in, 427n211; and
Progress Party: Bamberger in, 19; and Breßlau, Lazarus, 14–15, 328, 336, 357–59, 393n46,
 Index 525

393n50; mixed culture in, 412n96; and Rechtsbewusstsein, 117

Mommsen, 24, 432n30; and nation build- Rechtsstaat, 96, 149, 287–88, 452n86
ing, 120; publications in, 399n27; race in, Reemtsma, Jan Philipp, 202, 381, 390n10,
204; religion in, 259–62, 460n59; riots in, 438n59
396n98; Rosenberg on, 380; social harmony Reflections on the Revolution in France
in, 289–90; and state socialism, 240; usury (Burke), 233, 420n97
in, 443n107; war with France, 2, 264, 270. reform, state-led, 229, 238, 240–42, 244–45, 251,
See also Schleswig-Holstein 288, 452n88, 465n125
Prussian Diet, 17, 23, 31–32, 35, 309, 311, 398n15, Reformation, 85, 197, 280, 362. See also Luther,
444n118 Martin
“Prussian Edict of Emancipation,” 467n34 Reform Jews, 135, 421n115
Prussian Unionist Church, 261, 263–64 Rehearsal for Destruction (Massing), 302
psychische Ethnologie, 15 Reichsbote, 432n36
Pufendorf, Samuel von, 89, 412n106 Reichsfeinde, 40–41
Pulzer, Peter, 210, 270, 385, 396n100, 397n6, Reichsglocke (Gehlsen), 412n104
442n98, 444n124, 446n154, 463n106, 469n76 Reichsmünzgesetz, 270
Punic wars, 72 Reichsnationalismus, 268, 269
Reichstag, 13, 43, 208, 361, 444n118, 449n39,
Quatrefages, Jean Louis Armand, 120, 421n128 450n43, 462n83. See also German Reich
Reichsverfassungskampagne, 18, 226–27
Raabe, Gustav, 204 Reimarus, Hermann Samuel, 140
race: and Christianity-Judaism relationship, Reiss, H. S., 425n180
131; concept of, 192, 198–205, 295, 436n45; religion: Baruch on, 370–71, 376; and civil
and development of antisemitism, 191–93, rights, 149, 150, 153–54; Cohen on, 21,
218, 219, 276, 277, 285, 433n2, 436n40, 429n11; and concept of liberalism, 232, 247;
436n41, 446n147, 447n163; Dispute con- and development of antisemitism, 193, 216,
sensus on, 187; in Dispute literature, 382, 219, 276–78, 440nn76–77; Dispute consen-
384–85, 387–88, 472n30, 474n58; European sus on, 185, 187; in Dispute literature, 381,
view of, 201–5; and failure of liberalism, 385, 386; equality in, 99, 176, 184, 440n75;
300; Lazarus on, 330, 332, 343–44, 470n1; Gartenlaube on, 445n139; and German-
and mixed culture, 72–74, 87–88, 174–75; Jewish spirit, 76, 78–79, 176; Graetz on
and nationalism, 97–101, 103, 106–7, 110–14, development of, 16–17; Lazarus on, 320,
115, 118, 139, 177–79, 253–54, 288, 303–4, 327, 332–34, 337–40, 343; Mendelssohn on,
458n11, 458n14; and Volksgemeinschaft, 296, 466n13; and mixed culture, 63–65, 67–69,
297. See also descent; ethnicity; racism 73–74, 85, 174; and modernity, 283–85;
racism: and assimilation, 286; and capitalism, Mommsen on, 26–27; and nationalism,
209; and nationalism, 48–49, 58, 403n11; 47–49, 52–53, 57, 59, 96–102, 107–11, 113–19,
Oppenheim on, 20; and “race,” 198, 202; 125, 128, 132–41, 144, 171, 177, 179, 180–81,
and Wagner, 447n163. See also race 258–66, 269, 303–5, 403n13, 415n30, 418n78,
Ragins, Sanford, 382, 387, 392n42 421n115, 458n13, 459n48, 461n65; Oppen-
Rahden, Till van, 387, 404n24 heim on, 20; and political culture, 33–34,
Ranke, Leopold von, 16 38–42, 179, 184–85, 258, 259, 262, 289; and
realism, 250 race, 198, 199, 436n41; and social harmony,
Realpolitik (Rochau), 229 278–80, 289, 295; and state socialism, 240;
526 Index

religion (cont.) Rothschild, Amschel Mayer, 43, 369

Treitschke on, 10, 156–59, 161, 163–67. See Rotteck, Karl von, 195, 284
also religiosity; specific denominations Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 249, 257
religiosity: Lazarus on, 79, 338–39, 353; and Rubin, Isaac Illich, 442n100
nationalism, 258, 261–66, 277–78, 459n48; Ruge, Arnold, 20
and social harmony, 289, 295, 299. See also Ruggiero, Guido de, 14
religion Rülf, Isaac, 22, 54–55, 173
Renaissance, 202 Rümelin, Gustav, 105, 318, 325–27, 334, 342,
Renan, Ernest: and Christianity-Judaism rela- 417n66
tionship, 423n165, 424n166; Graetz on, 140; Rumpelmayer, Johann, 395n90
and Lazarus, 351, 354, 417n72, 424n166; and Rürup, Reinhard, 8, 435n31
nationalism, 253–54, 256, 288, 457n6, 457n11, Russia, 85, 92–94, 176, 270, 327
458n13; on race, 204, 433n2 Russian Jews, 16–17, 23
republicans, 225, 227, 230, 239, 253 Ruth, Book of, 417n68
“The Republic of the United Netherlands”
(Treitschke), 242–43 Sabbath, 94, 146, 147, 314, 412n97, 413n15
Retallack, James, 444n127 Saint-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 45, 46
Salecker, Hans-Joachim, 382, 390n10
Revue des deux mondes, 411n83
Sanhedrin, 434n11
Rhineland, 223–24, 226, 435n18, 443n107
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 198, 306, 436nn43–44
Ricardo, David, 448n6
Saturn eating offspring, 51, 403n18
Richter, Eugen, 238, 452n86
Savigny, Friedrich C. von, 117
Riehl, Heinrich, 410n68, 453n98
Saxons, 120, 121
Riesser, Gabriel, 64, 138, 139, 181, 227, 312,
Schein, 148, 413n13, 429n2, 429n4
449n28, 450n44
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 465n5
Rieß, Peter, 336
Schenkendorf, Max von, 420n98
Ringer, Fritz K., 469n72
Scheuring, Thomas August, 194
Rise of Political Anti-Semitism (Pulzer),
Schiller, Friedrich, 70–71, 233, 295, 296, 342,
396n100
408n32, 467n47
Rivkin, Ellis, 309 Schlegel, Friedrich, 233, 426n205
Rochau, Ludwig August von, 229–30, 449n39, Schleiden, Mathias J., 352
450n40 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 138, 426n205
Rodbertus, Karl, 241, 444n126 Schleswig-Holstein, 24, 164, 248, 432n30,
Rohling, August, 130, 340, 351, 352 449n28, 456n142, 470n1
Roman Empire: Baruch on, 367; and capital- Schmidt, Julian, 446n150
ism, 211; Christianity in, 131, 180; and ha- Schmoller, Gustav, 240, 244, 454nn108–10
tred, 126–29, 200, 423n151, 423n155; Lazarus Schoeps, Julius H., 386
on, 344, 347, 354, 357; and mixed culture, 72, Schönberg, Gustav, 453n91
175; Mommsen on, 25–27, 123, 421n134; and Schopenhauer, Arthur, 135–36, 204
nationalism, 461n78 Schulze-Delitzsch, Hermann, 238
romanticism, 117, 206, 233, 254 Schutzbürger, 195
Römische Geschichte (Mommsen), 2, 25–27, Secchi, Paulo Maria, 429n4
123, 396n113, 397nn119–21 “The Secession” (Bamberger), 271
Rose, Paul, 383 self-consciousness, 324, 382. See also con-
Rosenberg, Arthur, 379–80, 471n8 sciousness
 Index 527

self-criticism, 356–57 of antisemitism, 196, 215, 216, 444n126,

“Self-Criticism” (Baumgarten), 229 445n131; and history of German Reich,
Sell, Friedrich C., 239, 241 270, 271; liberals on, 238–40; and Mehring,
Semites: and concept of nation, 111; definition, 471n2; and Neumann, 23; Philippson on,
191, 433n2; Lazarus on, 328–30; and race, 410n68; religion as defense against, 185, 266
254, 276, 415n32, 433n2; Treitschke on, 313 socialism: and capitalism, 205, 206, 208–10;
“Semitism,” 130, 191 Christianity as defense against, 185;
Sephardim, 404n24 and concept of liberalism, 235, 243, 300,
Serbia, 92 456n151; and development of antisemitism,
Sewell, William H., 439n70, 468n51 215, 216, 277; Dispute consensus on, 186–87;
Shakespeare, William, 66, 374 in German Reich, 237–42, 453n95; and
Shari’a, 306 nationalism, 97, 177, 265–66, 458n11; Op-
Sheehan, James J., 417n66, 446n151, 452n76, penheim on, 20, 176; Treitschke on, 161, 176,
464n114, 464n117 215, 431n20; and Volksgemeinschaft, 296. See
Shem (Genesis), 433n2 also Kathedersozialismus
Shylock myth, 245, 413n13, 429n4 “Socialism and its Patrons” (Treitschke),
Sieg, Ulrich, 387 411n86
Siemens, Werner von, 24 social justice, 241
Sieyes, Abbé, 203, 235, 297, 439n70 society: on antisemitism, 32–35, 40–45, 172,
Sigl, Johann Baptist, 412n104 193, 275, 289–91, 293–94, 399n21; Baruch
“The Significance of the Jews for Preservation on, 370; and concept of liberalism, 231,
and Resuscitation of the Sciences in the 246, 250, 302; and concept of nationalism,
Middle Ages” (Schleiden), 352 256–58, 458n26; corporate, 199; harmony
Silesia, 17 of, 278–82, 286–300, 467n35; and his-
Simultanschulen, 431n2 tory of German Reich, 268; Lazarus on,
Sittengesetz, 150. See also morality 325–27; and national unity, 183–85, 303–8;
Sittlichkeit, 116, 119, 179, 220, 245, 284, 295. See Treitschke on, 157, 158, 171, 431n4. See also
also morality bourgeois society; civil rights; social class;
slavery, 201, 202, 367, 371, 373, 438n61, Volksgemeinschaft
438–39nn64–66 socioeconomic framework: and Christianity-
Slavs, 92–94, 176, 186, 328 Judaism relationship, 131; and development
Smith, Adam, 234, 448n6, 454n113 of antisemitism, 194–98, 435n22; and devel-
Smith, Anthony D., 458n19, 458n24 opment of liberalism, 275; and nationalism,
Smith, Steven B., 280, 392n41, 432n32, 465n5, 49–50, 56, 173, 403n13, 405n40; and race,
466n6, 466nn10–14 201–3, 438n63; and state socialism, 237; and
Smith, Helmut Walser, 265, 435n27, 459n40, Volksgemeinschaft, 297. See also economy;
460nn54–55, 461nn74–75, 461n79, 466n9 social class
social class: and concept of liberalism, 223, 231, Socrates, 337, 437n49
244, 448n6; and history of German Reich, Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, 409n55
269; and religion, 265; and social harmony, Sokel, Walter H., 204
282. See also bourgeois society; proletariat Sollors, Werner, 426n202
Social Democracy: and capitalism, 208, Soll und Haben (Freytag), 207
210, 411n92; and concept of liberalism, Solomon the Wise, 369
451n68, 452n86, 452n88; and development Sonderweg, 54, 250, 271, 296, 392n36, 465n125
528 Index

Sonnenberg, Max Liebermann von, 208 445n133; in Dispute literature, 378–79, 382;
sozialer Rechtsstaat, 395n89 Endner on, 87; and nation building, 123,
Sozialistengesetz, 239, 270, 288, 452nn86–87 124; Oppenheim on, 20; on Social Democ-
Spain, 201–2, 234, 437n47, 437n53, 437n55, racy, 215, 444n126, 445n131; and Treitschke’s
458n17 conception of antisemitism, 38, 42; and
Spanish Jews, 11, 52, 53, 58–61, 173, 174, 212–13, Wagner, 240
312 stock market, 52, 209, 217–18, 270, 357
speculation, 77, 277, 291, 409n55, 454n115 Stoicism, 233
Speeches on Religion (Schleiermacher), Strauss, David Friedrich, 136, 140, 253, 254,
426n205 457n6
Spielhagen, Friedrich, 335 strikes, 238, 269
Spinoza, Benedict de, 14, 66, 283, 336, 347, Strousberg, Bethel Henry, 43
432n32 suffrage, 220, 238, 272
“The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate” (He- Suhrkamp publishing house, 8
gel), 279 Sulla (emperor), 368
Staatsgesinnung, 91–94, 144–45, 158. See also Sybel, Heinrich von, 224, 229, 335
patriotism Syllabus Errorum, 460n58
Staatssozialist, 241 Szántó, Simon, 348
Stahl, Friedrich Julius, 264, 336, 461n71
Stamm. See tribes Tacitus, 126–29, 315, 422n147, 422n151, 465n6
ständische, 199 Tal, Uriel, 386, 390n10
state: and civil rights, 146–47, 149, 150, 154, 183, Talmon, Jacob L., 210
428n2; and concept of nationalism, 255–58; Talmud, 130, 133, 339, 347, 350–52, 354, 355,
and development of liberalism, 244–47, 371–72, 418n79, 424n166
454n117, 454n123, 455n130; in Dispute litera- “The Talmud Jew” (Rohling), 352
ture, 382, 383; and exaggerated nationalism, Tamir, Yael, 391n24
96, 177; and history of German Reich, 268; territory, 319–20
Jewish lack of, 127–28, 421n134; and Juda- “Teutonic Knights” (Treitschke), 243
ism, 129, 132, 422n147; Lazarus on, 320, 327, “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew” (Luther),
328, 333–35, 348–56; and mixed culture, 470n3
63, 86–87, 175; and modernity, 282; and Theological-Political Treatise (Spinoza), 14
national culture, 303–8; and nationality Theweleit, Klaus, 455n140
of German Jews, 139, 144–45; and national Thierry, Augustin, 234
spirit, 101, 107, 109, 110, 115, 421n115; and pa- Third Estate, 201, 203, 235, 297
triotism, 93; and role of religion, 96, 116–19, Thomas, Paul, 295, 296, 467n47
179, 263–64, 277, 278, 414n22, 414n24, Thomasian, 440n80. See also Aquinas, Saint
415n30, 421n116; and social harmony, Thomas
281–82, 291–96, 467n47, 468n55; and social- Thompson, Edward P., 225
ism, 237–42. See also nation-state Thomson, George, 409n55
Steinthal, Heymann, 319, 393n49, 416n46 The Times, 242
Sterling, Eleonore, 443n107 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 278–79, 297, 299
Stöcker, Adolf: on capitalism, 209, 210; and tolerance: Baruch on, 370–71; and concept
Christlich-Soziale Arbeiterpartei, 453n95; of liberalism, 232, 288, 289, 301, 305, 306;
and development of antisemitism, 215–17, in Dispute literature, 385, 386; and social
 Index 529

harmony, 280–81; Treitschke on, 156, 163, Über die Sittliche Berechtigung Preussens in
183, 315 Deutschland (Lazarus), 14
Toleration Act (1689), 306 Über Rom und Paris nach Gotha (Bamberger),
Tönnies, Ferdinand, 292 456n143
“Too Diverse” (Goodhart), 291–92 ultramontanism, 27, 39, 67–68, 88, 96, 144, 221,
Torah, 354–55 261–63, 401n54, 426n198, 460n58
Toussenel, Alphonse, 206–7, 441n90 ultra-orthodox, 67
trade unionism, 241 United States, 99, 161, 230, 231, 247, 270, 290, 299
Traditionalisierung, 440n80 universalism: and civil rights, 147, 149, 150, 153,
Traube, 335 154, 163, 182–83, 430n14; and development
Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 259 of antisemitism, 276, 278; and develop-
Treitschke, Heinrich von: ambivalence of, ment of liberalism, 246; Dispute consensus
5–10, 136–45, 179–80, 198, 442n99; back- on, 187; in Dispute literature, 387; and
ground, 13–14, 455n134, 471n1; Baruch’s modernity, 282–84; and nationalism, 110,
letter to, 360–77; and Baumgarten, 450n42; 112–15, 255, 257, 420n100; Naudh on, 175;
and Breßlau, 41, 400n30; critics of, 41–46; and religion, 129, 130, 132–33, 440n75; and
“Declaration of the Notables” on, 396n100; social harmony, 280, 289, 293; and state
in Dispute literature, 378–88; Dühring on,
socialism, 239
447n163; Endner on, 87; on Fichte, 455n132;
University of Salamanca, 437n55
and Freytag, 207; and Graetz, 16–17, 428n2;
University of Tübingen, 325, 417n66
influences on, 216–18; initial remarks, 10–12;
“Unsere Aussichten.” See “Our Prospects”
intentions in “Our Prospects,” 155–70; inter-
(Treitschke)
pretations of antisemitism, 171–73, 299, 303;
Unsere Zeit (Bamberger), 18
and Jews as “misfortune,” 38, 56, 117, 303, 314,
usury: Aristotle on, 442n91; Baruch on, 367;
379, 399n20; as “liberal Tory,” 275–78, 465n1;
definition, 443n107; and development of
on Mill, 454n123; and Mommsen, 25, 27,
antisemitism, 195, 197, 218, 291; and Jewish
123–26, 397nn119–21; nature of analyses, 91;
spirit, 80, 211–14, 443n104; Treitschke on, 155,
and Oppenheim, 411nn85–86; and origin of
157, 176, 313, 315, 454n115. See also economy
Dispute, 1–5; at Preussische Jahrbücher, 230;
responses to “Our Prospects,” 14–22; text of
“Our Prospects,” 309–16 Valbert (Cherbuliez), 83
“Treitschke-Streit,” 8 Valentin, Gustave, 335
tribes: and civil rights, 146, 148, 182; and devel- Vaterland (Sigl), 412n104
opment of antisemitism, 216, 218, 277; La- Vatican, 27
zarus on, 330, 333, 470n1, 474n58; Momm- Veit, Moritz, 64, 312, 358
sen on, 162, 164; and nationalism, 52, 62, Verbindungen, 282
119, 177–78, 397n121, 404n24; psychology Verein für Sozialpolitik, 244, 453n91
of, 437n50 Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus, 27
Tridon, Gustave, 441n90 Verjudung, 220, 447n160. See also Jewification
“trouser-selling youths,” 22, 54–55, 61, 357 Verkirchlichung, 258
Turgot, Jacques, 84, 244, 454n113 Versailles, 264
Turkey, 92, 94, 116, 213 verspätete Nation, 54. See also Sonderweg
Victoriastrasse (Berlin), 87
Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden Vienna, 260
(Dohm), 281–82 Vienna Congress, 193, 449n28
530 Index

Virchow, Rudolf, 23, 24, 460n60 “What We Demand of Modern Jewry” (Stöck-
Visigoths, 203 er), 216–17
Vogt, Carl, 415n28, 426n196 Whig Party, 451n62
Volk, 101, 102, 105, 106, 109, 246, 416n48, 417n52, White, Dan, 197, 301, 302
428n232, 470n1 White Nation (Hage), 439n74
Völkerpsychologie, 15, 319, 389n3, 393nn49–50, white race, 202–3
416n46 Wilhelm I, Emperor, 248
Volkov, Shulamit, 15, 192, 302, 386, 389n8, Willetts, David, 291
399n20 wills, 198
Volksgeist: definition, 15, 393n49; Graetz on, 16; Winkopp, Peter Adolph, 460n60
and nationalism, 55, 117, 171–72, 326; and Wistrich, Robert, 411n92, 440n81, 441n84,
origins and effects of antisemitism, 44, 302 444n130, 445n141, 447n155
Volksgemeinschaft, 278, 294, 296–300 Wolff, Theodor, 379, 385
Volksthum, 53, 138–39, 403n23. See also na- “A Word about Our Jews” (Treitschke), 17
tionality work: agricultural, 412n98; and capitalism, 205,
Vom Judenhass zum Antisemitismus 207, 208, 442n96; and concept of liberalism,
(Claussen), 390n10 234, 242; and German spirit, 79–88, 217, 277,
410n68; Glagau on, 218; and history of Ger-
von der Dunk, Hermann, 441n90
man Reich, 268–69; Lazarus on, 334–35; and
Vorlesung über die Philosophie der Weltge-
race, 201–3; as theme of Dispute, 176–77, 186;
schichte (Hegel), 421n116
Treitschke on, 313; value of, 211, 442n101; and
Vossische Zeitung, 23, 404n27
Volksgemeinschaft, 298. See also proletariat
World War I, 298, 458n14, 469n76
Wagener, Herman, 395n90
Württemberg, 267, 427n211, 450n44
Wagner, Adolf, 66, 216, 240–41, 406n44, 453n95
Würzburg, 194–95
Wagner, Richard, 67, 160, 196, 204, 221, 228,
382, 447n160, 447n163
“Xenien” (Goethe and Schiller), 408n32
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 232, 241, 456n151
war, 248, 268, 271, 275. See also civil war
Young Germany, 409n50
Warsaw, 407n59 Young-Hegelian, 409n55
Wartburg Festival (1817), 193, 260 Yuval-Davis, Nira, 458n18
Wawrzinek, Kurt, 422n141
Weber, Max, 8, 232, 382, 458n19 Zabulon, 375, 471n3
Weber, Max, Sr., 24 Zangwill, Israel, 468n59
Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 385 Zeitgeist, 44
Weiland, Daniela, 446n149 Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprach-
Weimar, 462n93 wissenschaft, 2, 15, 319, 321, 416n46
welfare state, 291–92 Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung, Ber-
Weller, Emil, 395n90 lin, 391n18
Weltgeist, 230, 249 Zimmermann, Moshe, 434n5
Wends, 412n96 Zionism, 395n89, 468n59
Wertheim, Ph., 358 Zollparlament, 19
Westphalia, 260 Zucker, Stanley, 385, 416n40, 448n6, 453n95,
What Does National Mean (Lazarus), 14, 101, 463n108
317–59, 392n44 “Zur Judenfrage” (Endner), 21