Jew-Hatred Since the Enlightenment

...It is a sad reflection that, henceforth, anti-Semites will be able to make use of Katz' volume as a convenient source book of highbrow quotations on their favorite subject...

...Otherwise, the eminent Israeli historian could not possibly have carried out the massive research project that has resulted in From Prejudice to Destruction...

...But such were the requirements of Christian belief that no thought could be given to completely liquidating Jewry...

...Certainly the most important of these is Katz' contention that modern anti-Semitism is a direct outgrowth of traditional, Christian anti-Semitism...

...They now aspired to be admitted to social circles, to join clubs, lodges, and societies, or simply to frequent cafes, restaurants, theaters, and the like that had hitherto been both inaccessible and of no interest to them...

...Given its composite nature, Katz notes, modern anti-Semitism is a particularly "irrational phenomenon, inaccessible to overt, logically oriented argumentation...

...Judaism contained the principle of a narrow formalism, of exclusive fanaticism disdainful of strangers...

...Jews would be acceptable on condition that they, too, repudiate all that had been supposedly implied in their religious tradition...

...Schopenhauer??The Jewish people "lives para-sitically on other nations and their soil...

...Katz' answer is that the impact of modernity here was superficial...

...The rest of the Jews are the fatherland of the Jew...

...The secular perception of the Jews continued to be determined by the negative image inherited from Christianity...

...What an eye-opening experience...

...The reader who is skeptical about the validity of Katz' analysis need only work his way systematically through the pages of From Prejudice to Destruction...

...the Jews'] principle, their God, is the most practical principle in the world??egoism, and that egoism takes the form of religion...

...Modern anti-Semitism constitutes an example of "secularization on a grand scale": The archaic Christian image of the Jew, woven into the very fabric of Western culture and society, is maintained even while Jew-hatred is justified with arguments derived from newly evolved systems of thought...

...This is certainly true for those countries where anti-Semitism has becomevirulent, reaching the dimensions of a movement and allowing for the millenial Christian resentment to metamorphose into its modern form...

...Some advocated limiting the access of Jews to positions of power...

...this is the Pharisaic spirit, which later became the Talmudic spirit...

...As Katz describes the situation: "Emancipation, whether formally completed at one stroke as in France or acquired only gradually...

...Thus, liberal...

...Katz, always the cautious scholar, warns us that any "attempt to foresee the future on the basis of its analogies with the past is a futile undertaking...

...The basic elements of Christian anti-Semitism??the depiction of the Christ-killing Jews as a community of superstitious fools, hostile to those around them, despising whatever is sacred to their neighbors, acting totally without scruple in business dealings, and working secretly to undermine the public order??are directly echoed in the literature of modern Jew-hatred...

...Why did they not fundamentally change the non-Jew's perception of the Jew...

...There were, of course, significant differences among these men with regard to the focus of their anti-Semitism...

...Nor is there any guarantee that the memory of their pariah existence before emancipation will not affect their status in the future...

...To be sure, rationalism did demolish the "intellectual structure" of the traditional Christian worldview...

...This was the scandal of Jewish emancipation in the eyes of those non-Jews who had absorbed the image of the pariah people from their cultural surroundings...

...At the same time, having acquired the language of the larger society and adopted the basic elements of its culture, they began to take part in its intellectual and artistic life...

...The Jew does not belong to any place except that place in which he makes money: Would he not just as easily betray the king on behalf of the emperor as he would the emperor for the king...

...From Prejudice to Destruction contains a wealth of specific information that will be of interest to scholars...

...What is the worldly basis of Judaism...

...By carefully delineating the ways in which and-Jewish conceptions were "passed down and transmuted into terms consonant with the new social reality and intellectual environment," he brings us that much closer to comprehending the horrible events that followed Hitler's rise to power...

...Renan...

...Finally, Marx...

...Utilism, profit is the supreme principle of Judaism...

...The best that Jews could hope for was to be granted a ticket of admission to Western society at a very high price...

...What is his worldly god...

...It did so, however, without affecting the "underlying emotional layers" and "basic conceptual configurations...

...one involving a "most radical change in Jewish mores, religious character, and mentality...

...As Katz states: "Even where Christianity has declined, the residue of its anti-Jewish aspects has persisted, and thus Jewish cohesion and the inimical reaction to it have continued to feed of f each other...

...After all, the Jews were an accursed people destined to acknowledge the truth of the Gospel in the end of days...

...It is difficult to be more optimistic when the hostility toward Jews and Judaism inherited from Christianity is still a key structural element of the Western cultural tradition...

...Within the framework of a secularized Jew-hatred, there is no valid reason for ongoing Jewish existence...

...The modern anti-Semites did not agree on the programmatic implications of their hostility either...

...His specific approach to the subject is to trace the "transmission of the negati veimage of Jews and Judaism from generation to generation...

...Practical need, self interest...

...Haggling...

...At the same time, the evidence he brilliantly marshals in From Prejudice to Destruction leads to the inevitable conclusion that, at the minimum, anti-Semitism will continue to haunt Western society??and the Jews...

...Money...

...The wish to base anti-Semitism on grounds beyond the Jewish-Christian division remain [s] in fact a mere declaration of intent...

...But what about the impact of rationalism and the other acids of modernity...

...Indeed, Katz explains, they helped to perpetuate it: "[A] positive attitude toward individual Jews, as well as toward the possible absorption of the Jewish community into the non-Jewish state and society, could go along comfortably with the most condemnatory judgments about Judaism in general...

...Now the pariah people In Coming Issues Barry Gewen on Joseph Epstein's "Ambition: The Secret Passion" Kathleen Emmet on Evelyn Waugh's "A Little Order" Bruce Vladeck on Murray Milner's "Unequal Care" were riding high...

...The time for action had clearly come, and it ultimately took the form of the annihilation of European Jewry...

...His subject is the development of European anti-Semitism (more specifically, anti-Semitism in Western and Central Europe) from 1700 to 1933, and he has totally immersed himself in an ocean-sized cesspool of hate literature...

...Quite the opposite, there is obvious merit in ridding the world of a depraved, parasitic people...

...As he puts it: "In a broader sense, modern anti-Semitism turn[s] out to be a continuation of the premodern rejection of Judaism by Christianity, even when it...

...It is the last fact, Katz maintains, that accounts for the emergence of a full-blown anti-Semitic movement, for the transfer of Jew-hatred from the realm of ideology to that of action...

...Perhaps more dispiriting than the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals is Katz' convincing demonstration that even those thinkers who were sympathetic to the Jews' desire for acceptance in European society viewed them and their religion in a negative light...

...What is the worldly cult of the Jew...

...The "friends" of the Jews did not reject the ugly image of Jewishness that the intellectual anti-Semites put forward...

...On the contrary, he is forced by the evidence to face up to the conclusion that anti-Semitism is a structural component of Western society: The factors that gave rise to it in the past remain fully operative on the contemporary scene...

...others sought to deny Jews citizenship...

...Feuerbach...

...In chapter after chapter, he deals with major figures of the modern Western intellectual tradition??Voltaire, Fichte, Herder, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Fourier, Proudhon, Renan, Bauer, Marx, etc.??all of whom expressed hostility to Jews and Judaism in terms fully consonant with Christian anti-Semitism...

...Jew-hatred is far from having run its full course...

...professles] to be antagonistic to Christianity...

...Christian anti-Semitism had left its mark on them as well...

...Rather, he approaches it as a specialist in Jewish social history of the late medieval and early modern periods...

...thinkers helped sustain the sinister image of historical Judaism, involuntarily assisting those who shaped this image into a weapon to be used in the political fight against the Jews...

...Itismoreimportanttonotethat Katz comes to this question not by the route of Holocaust history...

...in Germany, Austria, and Hungary, meant the expansion of the living space of the Jews, physically, economically, socially, and intellectually____Jews settled in streets, towns, and districts where they had been previously excluded...

...Reviewed by David Singer Editor, "American Jewish Year Book" Jacob Katz is obviously a man with a strong stomach...

...This is seen in the very firm way in which Jews stick together...

...In this book Katz turns his attention to the modern period, seeking to account for the fact that there was no significant alteration in the pattern of relations between Jews and non-Jews despite the apparent decline in Christian influence...

...Katz, however, is more modest: he is satisfied to deal with one specific problem related to an overall understanding of the Holocaust...

...Often the two were even complementary...

...Voltaire, Kant and Hegel, for example, were particularly concerned with the abhorrent aspects of the Jewish religion...

...In the perspective of the Christian anti-Semitic tradition, the Jews were a pariah people, socially degraded and living on the margin of society...

...No anti-Semite, even if he himself [is) anti-Christian, ever for [goes] the use of those anti- Jewish arguments rooted in the denigration of Jews and Judaism in earlier Christian times...

...Among the choice selections that will be available to them are the following: Voltaire...

...Instead, in the course of the 19th century they made significant political, economic and social gains...

...Is another Holocaust possible...

...Nor do the lessons of history, as they present themselves to Katz in this instance, offer any consolation...

...It is less true of those countries [such as the United States] to which Jews immigrated only in the age of secularization, and where they could become citizens with equal rights and unlimited opportunities for advancement...

...His point of departure is the question why "anti-Jewish animosity grew in strength, paradoxically just when in the wake of the Enlightenment and modern rationality one might have expected it to disappear...

...They gained access to occupations and sources of livelihood outside those allotted to them in former generations...

...The general reader will be drawn to its larger themes...

...In the wake of the destruction of European Jewry, most students of anti-Semitism have sought to provide an all-embracing explanation for the Final Solution...

...Christian anti-Semitism was fully capable of generating murderous hostility against Jews...

...His previous contributions to the field, including such first-rate studies as Tradition and Crisis, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, and Out of the Ghetto, are all centrally concerned with Jewish-Gentile relations in a Christian context...

...Hence the Holocaust...

...In short, the emancipation of the Jews was linked to their emancipation from Jewishness...

...still others dreamed of completely eliminating the Jewish presence from society...

...Still, even in these countries, they remain a nonconforming minority of exceptional cohesion...

...Modern anti-Semitism, in contrast, operates with no similar restraint...

...but yet it is inspired with the liveliest patriotism for its own nation...

...To read this material with historical hindsight, with an awareness that its various strands ultimately came together in the Holocaust, is a nauseating experience...

...The one common denominator that bound them together was an anti-Jew-ishness rooted in models of the past, but speaking the language of the present...

...Fourier, Proudhon and Marx, on the other hand, were preoccupied with the Jew as an economic exploiter...

...Given Katz' overall stress on the link between Christian and modern anti-Semitism, it is important to emphasize that he regards the Final Solution as a phenomenon associated exclusively with the latter form of Jew-hatred...

...The Jews, of course, did not disappear as a distinct group in modern European society...