26. Anti-Semitism

Jewish Question

In his seminal 1896 book The Jewish State, Theodor Herzl criticized opponents of his plan to create a Jewish state in Palestine, as a solution to the “Jewish Question,” calling them “disguised anti-Semites of Jewish origin.” In 1898, Herzl began a series of diplomatic initiatives to build support for a Jewish country. He was received by Kaiser Wilhelm II on several occasions, one of them in Jerusalem, and attended the Hague Peace Conference, enjoying a warm reception from many statesmen. Herzl appealed to the Rothschilds, Sir Samuel Montagu, later cabinet minister, and to the Chief Rabbis of France and Vienna. In preparatory notes for his appeal to Baron Maurice de Hirsch to underwrite the Jewish State, Herzl concluded his request with the words “Honor, Freedom, Fatherland,” the old motto he recalled from his days in the Burschenschaft (fraternity) Albia, which was associated with Georg von Schönerer, the prominent anti-Semite and the leading exponent of Pan-German movement and völkisch nationalism in Austria.[1]

Despite their open anti-Semitism, the Pan-German and Völkisch movements, which began to flourish mainly in Vienna, in the late nineteenth century, were closely associated with Jews who sought to resolve the age-old “Jewish Question” through full assimilation into German nationality, a tendency that initially inspired the Zionism of Herzl. Among German nationalists and Zionists, as Francis Nicosia explained in The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, “there was a common acceptance of the völkisch inviolability and separateness of the peoples of the world and the necessity of a völkisch basis for the state.”[2] As Nicosia further outlines:

 

While Herder’s dictum led Zionists and some German nationalists to favor separate but not necessarily unequal national entities, each with its own state preserving its own separate völkisch character, the anti-Semites made qualitative distinctions between the racial or national groups of the world, specifically, between Germans and Jews. Their relationship was soon defined as one of hostility and struggle between the superior and the inferior, between good and evil. For all of them, however, the liberal concept of a pluralistic so­ciety, supported by the overwhelming majority of Jews in Germany throughout the nineteenth century, was unacceptable.[3]

 

The term “anti-Semitism” is itself problematic and ultimately manipulative. There are two types of anti-Semitism. One involves negative opinions of Jews as followers of the religion of Judaism. The other, usually referred to as “racial antisemitism,” involves hostility to Jews driven by the belief that they constitute a distinct race, with inherent negative traits that are in-born.[4] The term “antisemitic” was first employed in 1860 by the Austrian Jewish scholar Moritz Steinschneider (1816 – 1907) to criticize the false ideas of the French philosopher Ernest Renan (1823 – 1892) about how “Semitic races” were inferior to “Aryan races.”[5]

The Zionist rejection of the liberal and assimilationist orientation of the majority of central and west European Jews was firmly rooted in the conviction that the Jews constituted a separate race.[6] The Zionists drew on the same well-spring of racist ideas as the pan-German and völkisch movements. Even the ideas of Joseph Ar­thur de Gobineau were enthusiastically received by a few German Zionists before World War I. In 1902, the Zionist newspaper Die Welt, founded by Herzl in 1897, accepted Gobineau’s theories on racial degeneration and the desir­ability of maintaining racial purity, noting that Gobineau had shared his admiration for the Jews as a strong people who believed in the necessity of maintaining its own racial purity. Elias Auerbach (1882 – 1971) and Ignaz Zollschan (1877 – 1948), central European Zionists during the years before World War I, went so far as to praise much of the racial philosophy of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wagner’s son-in-law, who would become highly influential in the pan-Germanic Völkisch movements of the early twentieth century.[7]

In his diaries, Herzl refers to Plato, Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling. Herzl, who was described by his cousin as having “absorbed [Nietzsche’s] style,” got ahold of every Nietzsche volume available.[8] Herzl’s idea of the “new Jew” was profoundly similar to that of Nietzsche’s “new European man” or Übermensch.[9] Nietzsche’s influence on Zionism expressed itself in a desire to move away from the rabbinical past into an empowering future for the Hebraic New Man.[10] Chaim Weizmann was a great admirer of Nietzsche, and sent Nietzsche’s books to his wife, adding a comment in a letter that “This was the best and finest thing I can send to you.”[11] By World War I, was referred to as “Nietzsche in Action,” or the “Euro-Nietzschean (or Anglo-Nietzschean) War,”[12] Nietzsche had acquired a reputation as an inspiration for both right-wing German militarism and leftist politics.[13] During the Dreyfus affair the French antisemitic Right also labelled the Jewish and leftist intellectuals who defended Dreyfus as “Nietzscheans.”[14] Nietzsche had a distinct appeal for many Zionist thinkers around the start of the twentieth century, most notable being Ahad Ha’am, Hillel Zeitlin, Micha Josef Berdyczewski, A.D. Gordon and Martin Buber, who went so far as to extoll Nietzsche as a “creator” and “emissary of life.”[15] Berdyczewski made a pilgrimage in 1898 to the fledgling Nietzsche-Archiv in Weimar, where Nietzsche, who was by then already insane, was living under the care of his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.[16]

Antisemitenpetition 

A new element in Pan-Germanism was introduced in 1879 with the use of the neologism “anti-Semitism,” marking a break from “anti-Judaism,” favoring a racial and scientific notion of Jews as a nationality instead of a religion.[17] Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth was married to Bernhard Förster (1843 – 1889), who became a leading figure in the anti-Semitic faction on the far right of German politics and wrote on the Jewish question, characterizing Jews as constituting a “parasite on the German body.”[18] Anti-Semitic sentiments came to the fore in 1880 when Förster, joining with Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg (1848 – 1911), a German officer who became noted as an anti-Semitic politician and publisher, drew up the Antisemitenpetition, a petition titled “The Emancipation of the German People from the Yoke of Jewish Rule,” that was submitted to Bismarck.

The petition was inspired by the best-selling pamphlet Der Sieg des Judentums über was Germanenthum von night confessionellen Standpunk (“The Victory of Judaism over Germandom”) by Wilhelm Marr (1819 – 1904) and by individuals who during the revolutions of 1848 announced that the time had come to “emancipate [Germany] from the Jews.”[19] Marr was a friend of Wagner’s collaborator on the Süddeutsche Press, “Forty-Eighter” Julius Fröbel. Marr was a Lutheran, though it has been sometimes claimed that he was a Jew.[20] Nevertheless, Marr’s second wife Helene Sophia Emma Maria Behrend, was Jewish, while his third wife, Jenny Therese Kornick, had mixed Christian-Jewish parents. This is despite the fact that Marr eventually became the head of the Léman-Bund, a secret society which belonged to Young Germany. In 1845, he was expelled from Lausanne, and went to Hamburg, where published the satirical magazine Mephistopheles.

Marr was a delegate to the National Assembly in Frankfurt after the March-Revolution of 1848. Marr joined the revolution of 1848 in Hamburg, but became disillusioned by the failure of the revolution to democratize Germany, and like many other “Forty-Eighters,” went to live in North and Central America. After the failure of the revolution he became, like so many other former revolutionaries, a proponent of the idea of German unification under Prussian leadership.[21] Marr was influenced by the Burschenschaft, student associations which were significantly involved in the March Revolution and the unification of Germany, and included Mazzini’s friend Carl Schurz, whose Jewish wife Margarethe was a student of Julius Fröbel. The Burschenschaft rejected the participation of Jewish and other non-German minorities as members, “unless they prove that they are anxious to develop within themselves a Christian-German spirit.”[22]

When he returned to Hamburg, Marr’s views had radically changed and he now focused his criticism on the Jews, writing his essay “Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums uber das Judenthum. (“The Way to Victory of Germandom over Judaism”), which was published in 1862. His organization, the League of Antisemites, established the first popular political anti-Jewish movement and introduced the word “anti-Semite” into the political discourse. In 1879, the often-reprinted “The Victory of Judaism over Germandom,” was a best-seller. In it, he warned that, “the Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness have overpowered the world.” He called for resistance against “this foreign power” which was engaged in an 1,800-year global conspiracy against non-Jews.

In his pamphlet, Marr rejected the notion of assimilation as a means for Jews to become Germans. He argued that Jewish emancipation, resulting from German liberalism, had allowed the Jews to gain control of German finance and industry. According to him, the struggle between Jews and Germans would only be resolved by the victory of one and the ultimate annihilation of the other. A Jewish victory, he concluded, would result in finis Germaniae (“the end of the German people”). To prevent this from happening, in 1879, Marr founded the Antisemiten-Liga (“League of Antisemites”), the first German organization committed specifically to combating the alleged threat to Germany posed by the Jews and advocating their forced removal from the country.

Among the with 225,000 signatories the petition were Wagner’s friend Hans von Bülow, and Nietzsche’s former publisher Ernst Schmeitzner (1851 – 1895). Also involved in the petition were Adolf Stoecker (1835 – 1909), a German court chaplain to Kaiser Wilhelm I, and Heinrich von Treistschke (1834 – 1896), a member of the National Liberal Party. Stoecker was impressed with Martin Luther’s 1543 book On the Jews and their Lies, and held that to be a good Christian meant hating the Jews.[23] The foundation of the Christian Social Party by Stoecker in 1878, helped to galvanize anti-Semitic activity in Germany and brought Sonnenberg into politics. The key demands of the petition were:

1. Restriction of immigration of Eastern Jews from Austria-Hungary and Russia.
2. Exclusion of Jews from all positions of authority, especially from judgeship.
3. Ban on the employment of Jewish teachers at elementary schools and strict limits on their employment at all other schools.
4. Resumption of official statistics on the Jewish population.

Bernhard Förster planned to create a “pure Aryan settlement” in the New World, and had found a site in Paraguay which he thought would be suitable. The couple persuaded fourteen German families to join them in the colony, to be called Nueva Germania, and the group left Germany for South America in 1887. The colony failed miserably. Faced with mounting debts, Förster committed suicide by poisoning himself in 1889. Four years later, Elisabeth left the colony and returned to Germany. Friedrich Nietzsche’s mental collapse occurred by that time, and upon Elisabeth’s return in 1893 she found him an invalid whose published writings were beginning to be read and discussed throughout Europe. Elisabeth took a leading role in promoting her brother, especially through the publication of a collection of his fragments under the name of The Will to Power. She reworked his unpublished writings to fit her own ideology, often in ways purportedly contrary to her brother’s stated opinions. Through Elisabeth’s editions, Nietzsche’s name became associated with German militarism and National Socialism, while later twentieth-century scholars have strongly disputed this conception of his ideas.

Burschenschaft Albia

In the fall of 1880, Albia became affiliated with the Akademische Lesehalle, where Georg von Schönerer delivered a speech that was enthusiastically received.[24] William McGrath has identified a long list of Jewish students in the 1870s and early 1880s associated with radical nationalist student societies. As members of the circle of Engelbert Pernerstorfer (1850 – 1918), they were among the charter members of the Leserverein der deutschen Studenten Wiens, which was committed to a combination of socialism and extreme German nationalism, stimulated by Bismarck’s creation of a united German empire, and influenced by the ideas of Schopenhauer, Wagner and Nietzsche. According to Pernerstorfer:

Socialism will be the first to create a condition consciously, in which no one will be prevented by restrictive social forms from becoming a whole man… Only then will Richard Wagner’s dream and the majesty of the work of art become true.[25]

William McGrath has identified a long list of Jewish students in the 1870s and early 1880s associated with radical nationalist student societies. As members of the circle of Engelbert Pernerstorfer, they were among the charter members of the Leserverein der deutschen Studenten Wiens, which was focused almost exclusively on extreme German nationalism, and influenced by the idea of Shopenhauer, Wagner and Nietzsche. The Pernerstorfer Circle consisted mainly of assimilated Jews who, disappointed by the bourgeois liberalism of their previous generation, were seeking alternatives. As summarized by Jacques Le Rider:

These young men were dissatisfied with the liberal ideology, which they thought too individualistic, too indifferent to social problems, too cosmopolitan and too flatly rationalistic. They sympathized with the socialist movement, stood with German nationalism against Habsburg politics, and defended “new values”: nature, country, art, the new mythology and the Volk were the guiding notions of their movement, which declared for Nietzsche and Wagner.[26]

The list of Pernerstorfer’s Jewish supporters included Victor Adler (1852 – 1918), a founding figure of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria; Heinrich Friedjung (1851 – 1920), who became Austria’s foremost German nationalist historian; the Jewish composer Gustav Mahler (1860 – 1911), a follower of Schönerer influenced by Wagner; Sigmund Freud; Arthur Schnitzler (1862 – 1931); and Heinrich Braun (1854 – 1927), a close friend of Freud’s and later a prominent Social-Democrat in Germany. Adler married Braun’s wife Emma, and their son was Friedrich became a close friend of Albert Einstein.[27] One Austrian historian recalled a student meeting where Adler and Friedjung joined others in singing “Deutschland über alles,” while Mahler accompanied them on the piano with “O du Deutschland, ich muss marchieren” (“O you Germany, I must march”).[28] In his memoirs, Schnitzler recalled a popular saying on those days: “Anti-Semitism did not succeed until the Jews began to sponsor it.”[29]

By 1878, the Leseverein was dissolved as a danger to the state, but by 1881 its leadership managed to completely takeover the Akademische Lesehalle.[30] Members of the Pernerstorfer circle, especially Adler, Pernerstorfer and Friedjung, were the moving spirits, together with von Schönerer, in founding the Deutsche Klub, the political organization formed to carry on the work of the Leseverein after its dissolution, and were the major contributors to the charter of the deutschnational movement. “The charter, which influenced all the mass political movements of modern Austria, centered on demands for radical social and political reform as well as for the satisfaction of extreme German nationalist ambitions.”[31]

It was at this time that Herzl joined the Leseverein. Leon Kellner, a Viennese contemporary and author of an early biography, reported that in December 1880, Herzl was chairman of the Akademische Lesehalle’s social club, which organized beer-drinking evenings featuring German nationalist songs. According to Kellner, “At that time the waves of the German nationalist movement were rising high in this student association; Herzl was one of its most enthusiastic champions.”[32] Schnitzler, a fellow student and friend of Herzl during his university years, described him as a “German-national student and spokesman in the Akademische Lesehalle.”[33] In the fall of 1880, Albia became affiliated with the Lesehalle. During the 1880-1881 semester when Herzl joined Albia, von Schönerer delivered a speech that was enthusiastically received.[34]

McGrath also established that Herzl’s close friend Oswald Boxer was a member in 1880-1881 of the Deutscher Klub, the parent organization of the deutschnational movement. Schönerer, along with Adler, Friedjung and Pernerstorfer were supporters of the Linz Program of 1882, the charter of the deutschnational movement, that called for the complete Germanization of the Austrian state. “This charter,” explains MacGrath, “which influenced all the mass political movements of modem Austria, centered on demands for radical social and political reform as well as for the satisfaction of extreme German nationalist ambitions.”[35] Despite his close friendship with Jews, Pernersdorfer wrote in 1882 that, “the Jews with their ancient, dominating racial characteristics still confront the Indo-Germanic peoples… as alien and unchanging.”[36]

However, Schönerer’s increasingly antisemitic policies culminated in the amendment of an “Aryan paragraph” in the Linz Program in 1885, a clause that reserved membership solely for members of the “Aryan race” and excluded from such rights any non-Aryans, particularly those of Jewish and Slavic descent. Being one of the first documented examples of such a paragraph, countless German national sports-clubs, song societies, school clubs, harvest circles and fraternities followed suit to also include Aryan paragraphs in their statutes. The rise of ant-Semitism drove away Adler and Pernerstorfer, who became leaders of the Socialist party, while Friedjung returned to the liberal fold. Nevertheless, their experiences in the deutschnational continued to influence their outlooks.[37]


[1] Kornberg. Theodor Herzl, p. 52.

[2] Nicosia. The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, p. 17.

[3] Ibid., p. 19.

[4] “Antisemitism in History: Racial Antisemitism, 1875–1945.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved from https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/antisemitism-in-history-racial-antisemitism-18751945

[5] Avner Falk. Anti-Semitism: a History and Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Hatred (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008), p. 21.

[6] Nicosia. The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, p. 18.

[7] Ibid., p. 18.

[8] Benjamin Silver. “Twilight of the Anti-Semites.” Jewish Review of Books (Winter 2017). Retrieved from https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2397/twilight-of-the-anti-semites/#

[9] Jacob Golomb. “‘Thus Spoke Herzl’: Nietzsche’s Presence in Theodor Herzl’s Life and Work.” Nietzsche and Zion (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press). pp. 23–45.

[10] Steven E. Aschheim. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990 (University of California Press, 1992), p. 102.

[11] Kaufmann Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton University Press, 2008).

[12] William Mackintire Salter. “Nietzsche and the War.” International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 27, No. 3 (April, 1917), p. 357.

[13] Aschheim. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990, p. 135

[14] A.D. Schrift. Nietzsche’s French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism (Routledge, 1995).

[15] Jacob Golomb, ed. Nietzsche and Jewish culture (Routledge, 1997), pp. 234–35.

[16] Benjamin Silver. “Twilight of the Anti-Semites.” Jewish Review of Books (Winter 2017). Retrieved from https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2397/twilight-of-the-anti-semites/#

[17] Jean-Yves Camus & Nicolas Lebourg. Far-Right Politics in Europe (Harvard University Press, 2017).

[18] Karl Dietrich Bracher. The German Dictatorship (1970), pp. 59-60.

[19] Keith Pickus. Constructing Modern Identities: Jewish University Students in Germany, 1815-1914 (Wayne State University Press, 2017).

[20] “Wilhelm Marr.” Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieve from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/wilhelm-marr

[21] Moshe Zimmermann. Wilhelm Marr: The Patriarch of Antisemitism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University), p. 22.

[22] Decision of the Burschenschaft Congress of 1818.

[23] Green Harold. “Adolf Stoecker: Portrait of a Demagogue,” Politics and Policy, Vol. 31, Issue 1 (March 2003), p. 123.

[24] Cited in William J. McGrath. “Student Radicalism in Vienna.” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 2, No. 3, Education and Social Structure (July, 1967), p. 196.

[25] “Vienna 1900 - The Pernerstorfer Circle.” (University of Washington). Retrieved from https://depts.washington.edu/vienna/projects/pern/nationalism.htm

[26] Jacques Le Rider. Modernity and Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 1993), pp. 192-193; cited in Karl Baier. “Occult Vienna: From the Beginnings until the First World War.” In Hans Gerald Hoedl, Astrid Mattes & Lukas Pokorny, (eds.). Religion in Austria, Vol. 5, (Vienna: Praesens, 2020), p. 9.

[27] Galison, Peter. “Assassin of Relativity (Lecture).” Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlONXXn9_QI

[28] William J. McGrath. “Student Radicalism in Vienna.” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 2, No. 3, Education and Social Structure (July, 1967), p. 183.

[29] Cited in Jacques Kornberg. Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism (Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 47.

[30] Ibid., p. 190.

[31] Cited in William J. McGrath. “Student Radicalism in Vienna,” p. 198.

[32] Jacques Kornberg. Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism (Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 40.

[33] Cited in Kornberg. Theodor Herzl, p. 41.

[34] Cited in McGrath. “Student Radicalism in Vienna,” p. 196.

[35] William J. McGrath. “Student Radicalism in Vienna.” Journal of Contemporary History, 2, no. 3 (1967), p. 198.

[36] Cited in Kornberg. Theodor Herzl, p. 47.

[37] McGrath. “Student Radicalism in Vienna,” p. 201.

Zionism