Free A History of Zionism by Walter Laqueur Page B

post-1815 period, through the boom of the 1870s and the depression of the 1880s, to the world economic crisis and the rise of Nazism in the 1920s. Sometimes the coincidence seems striking: antisemitism sharply increased with the slump of 1873, and it fell almost equally dramatically after 1895 with the opening of a new boom. But such explanations leave many question marks, for while certain anti-Jewish attacks were triggered off by economic crises, others were of different origin; nor does this theory explain the occurrence of antisemitism in pre- and post-capitalist societies. The competitive character of capitalism provided, no doubt, an excellent breeding ground for collective dissatisfaction and insecurity, but why was it that the Jews were singled out for attack? Perhaps they were more exposed than other minorities; perhaps their influence had grown too fast? Whatever the explanation, there were two ominous aspects to the new antisemitism. While the government behaved on the whole correctly, its attitude vis-à-vis the Jews was one of icy coldness; it certainly did nothing to denounce or combat antisemitism. Very few non-Jews spoke up for their Jewish fellow citizens; there was no new Lessing to preach humanity and tolerance. More dangerous yet was the changing character of Judaeophobia, the transition from religious to racial antisemitism. Racial theories had existed in an inchoate form since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and had acquired respectability with the spread, from France, of the new, quasi-scientific doctrine of Gobineau and his disciples. In earlier times the enemies of the Jews had put the blame on their religion and on the ritual law which, they claimed, had caused the corruption of the Jewish people. Racial antisemitism rejected these arguments as irrelevant, maintaining that it had discovered the real reasons underlying the ‘Jewish danger’. The antisemitism of Stöcker was a half-way house between the old and the new antisemitism; the Jewish question, he maintained, was not only religious in character; but as a prominent churchman he could not very well accept the materialist concepts of pure racialists such as Dühring, and he referred therefore to the ‘cultural-historical aspects’ of the problem. The transition from religious to racial antisemitism was not as abrupt, and the ties between the old and the new antisemite doctrine not as tenuous, as they subsequently appeared to be. The changing argumentation merely reflected the climate of opinion of the new post-religious phase and the growth of anti-liberal and anti-humanist ideologies in general. Racial antisemitism could spread only among peoples indoctrinated for many centuries with religious anti-semitism who had been taught that the Jews had killed Christ and rejected his mission.
    For the German Jews the 1880s thus constituted a turning point, even though only a few realised it at the time. Carried to its logical conclusion, the new antisemitism meant the end of assimilation, the total rejection of the Jew. The magic circle was replaced by a new ghetto whose walls could no longer be scaled. For racial characteristics, according to the new doctrine, were unchangeable; a change of religion and the rejection of his own heritage did not make a Jew into a German, any more than a dog could transform itself into a cat. The antisemitism of the last quarter of the nineteenth century did not weaken the movement for assimilation among the Jews, but its limits became much clearer and even its extreme protagonists admitted that within the foreseeable future Jews would remain distinct from Germans.
    Full legal emancipation had been achieved in 1869; no more than a decade later it could have been seen that assimilation would not work. To those who argued on these lines, a national revival among the Jews should have taken place there and then. But the great majority of German Jews did not see it that way, and in retrospect one can see many good