Free A History of Zionism by Walter Laqueur Page A

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