Antisemitism

A historian once speculated on what would happen if a time-traveler from 1945 arrived back in Europe just before the First World War, and told an intelligent and well-informed contemporary that within thirty years a European nation would make a systematic attempt to kill all the Jews of Europe and exterminate nearly six million in the process. If the time-traveler invited the contemporary to guess which nation it would be, the chances were that he would have pointed to France.¹
Richard J. Evans,
The Coming of the Third Reich, 2004

Antisemitism has been part of the landscape of Europe for centuries—at moments of social tension that landscape erupted in pogroms, when the everyday harassment exploded in bloody riots.²

In the eighteenth century, the situation of the Jews began to change, along with the rest of the population’s approach to ethnic issues. The Industrial Revolution and political transformations tied to the French Revolution led to far-reaching economic and social transformations, which were only exacerbated in the century to come. The “science” of races seemed to bring order to minds set ablaze by these changes, especially by pointing to the “culprits” behind the pains of modernity: it was usually, but not always, Jews who were blamed.

Nor did the conservative images from Christianity subside, the aversion to the “killers of Christ,” now backed with conspiracy theories, maintaining the Jews had sowed all sorts of revolutions and had created capitalism. The line between these two models of antisemitism was “easy to cross.”³

At the same time, the nineteenth century became an epoch of progressive emancipation for the Jews—with the vanishing legal obstructions they could increasingly get involved in economics and politics. “The process of assimilation was accelerating fast, with thirty-five Jewish-Christian marriages for every one hundred purely Jewish marriages in Berlin by the outbreak of the First World War, compared with only nine around 1880, and no fewer than seventy-three per hundred in Hamburg.”⁴

Alt text — Marx’s Jewish origins were frequently invoked by right-wing antisemites, in spite of the fact that Marx did not consider himself a Jew, and his father was baptized before his son’s birth.
photo: NAC 3/1/0/17/11060

Paradoxically, it was just this process of an “alein” society joining the national community that horrified the antisemites. Charles Maurras, the future intellectual leader of French monarchism, experienced a shock during his first visit to Paris, seeing the names of the buildings’ inhabitants. “Names starting with K, W, and Z, which our typesetters deride as Jewish letters.” “Are the French still at home in France?” he asked himself.⁵ In Maurras’s magazine, Action Française, “[t]wo-thirds of the articles published in 1908–14 attacked the Jews.”⁶

The Great War and the smaller international and civil conflicts that broke out in its wake caused a huge wave of pogroms, in which thousands of Jews lost their lives. In the territories of the former Russian empire alone, as many as 150,000 may have been killed.⁷ This did not lead to reflection or a tempering of antisemitic emotions; on the contrary, Jews were increasingly associated with both communism and unchecked capitalism.⁸

It is an inescapable fact that people of Jewish origin were amply represented among the Bolshevik leaders. But the same goes for the Italian Fascist Party activists before 1938,⁹ as well as the volunteers for the German Imperial Army in 1914—a society making up one per cent of the Reich’s citizens supplied two per cent of its volunteers.¹⁰ The members of a relatively well-educated, emancipating minority stoked envy and hatred in some of those they considered their countrymen and for whom they risked their lives in the trenches.