An Archeology of Prejudice

...In Hungary, where Jews accounted for 5 per cent of the population before 1914 and 6 per cent thereafter, 60 per cent of them lived in the capital, Budapest...

...They denounced Jews as misanthropes who would share with their fellow citizens neither table nor libations, prayers or sacrifices...

...Thus in 1870 a police commissioner in central France reported no Jews living in his small town...

...Moreover, "neither before nor since that postwar era has the fate of Europe's Gentile majority and its Jewish minority been entangled as intimately, as passionately, as contentiously—as ferociously...

...As Sachar remarks of Austria, "the swelling influx of Ostjuden, in all their pungent and often exotic ethnicity, their harddriving desperation-rooted upward mobility, was a source not only of cultural effervescence but of culture shock and growing popular resentment...

...they owned 48 per cent of retail shops and paid 40 per cent of the direct taxes...

...More than half the commercial firms there and 85 per cent of Hungary's banks and financial institutions were Jewish owned...

...That depends what you mean by symbiosis...

...where their liberal intellectuals functioned at the cutting edge of political and cultural engagement...

...Several years later another Frenchman deplored the immigrant hordes with whom acculturated Jews like him were being confused, and called on the Republic to stop the inrush "of these predatory, coarse and dirty Tartars...

...This was where, as the Foreword points out, the Jews long lived as "a people unto themselves...

...Growing up Catholic, Orthodox or Lutheran meant the absorption of suspicion at best—most often of obloquy and contempt, focused or unfocused—perpetually refreshed by catechism and liturgy right through the 19th century and much of the 20th...

...When persecution drove them westward into more secular societies, their bizarre garb, mien and gabble shocked Jews and non-Jews alike...

...Jewish pride—the insolentiajudeorum Saint Agobard denounced in the ninth century—continued to lie in the eye of the beholder...

...So is prejudice...

...The intelligentsia clamored, the white-collar classes yelped...

...It seems to be doing so, substituting new aversions and new intolerances forold...

...Besides, by that point race—promoted from descriptive to allegedly scientific rank— had become a religion too...

...Into the 1930s they made up four out of five of the country's millionaires, and owned the major theaters and newspapers...

...The looming semi-European realms of Russia and Ukraine receive merely glancing mention...

...regarded as superior, could be dismissed as flawed...

...The same subtitle, on the other hand, is too modest when it claims to cover only the aftermath of the Great War—meaning the first of the World Series...

...People get embroiled and can't get out...

...Witness the revealing disjunction in the book's subtitle of Europeans and Jews—reminiscent of a respected French statesman's recent lament that a bomb meant to blow up a Paris synagogue had also maimed French passersby...

...Research, reason, skill can cope with malaria or (perhaps) with AIDS, not with bias...

...But for Lazare Jews were themselves architects of their outsiderdom: "exclusivism, separation, defilement...

...How that turned out we can see from the fin-de-siècle tragedy of Captain Alfred Dreyfus...

...or dealer in grain, associated with hoarding and speculation...

...As in Germany and Austria, social interaction in Hungary was livelier than in Poland, but that made for trouble too...

...Similarly, too little attention is given to anti-Jewish dreamers (except in their brutish guise), when their misguided rationales could tell us something about his theme...

...of the Jew as trader, thus again suspect because trading in horses or cattle was easily connected with conning and dirty tricks...

...He does not sufficiently note the more numerous Jews who did not dream, but wrought...

...In Poland, for example, where slightly over 10 per cent of the country's population was Jewish, nearly onethird of those who lived in the largest cities were Jewish...

...But he could as easily have been talking about Jews...

...Long synonymous with money power, Jews now were increasingly linked with oppressive capital, disturbing financial forces, disruptive modernity, and social degeneration (another newish term and the title of a book by an Austro-Hungarian Jew, Max Nordau...

...Dreamland: Europeans and Jews in the Aftermath of the Great War (Knopf, 385 pp., $30.00), does not heed them, even though the history of prejudice plays a crucial role in the history of human attitudes...

...The conqueror's force included a contingent of Jewish mercenaries, and the large Jewish community that grew in the cosmopolitan port enjoyed the same rights as Macedonians...

...In 1897 the Protocols of the Sages of Zion appeared...

...Native Egyptians and resident Greeks, however, decried what they perceived as Jewish particularism and standoffishness imposed by a jealous God and His peculiar dietary exigencies...

...Which prompts the author to ask: "Was the symbiosis in the end a productive one...

...The future would feed on these malevolent fantasies, but Howard M. Sachar in his new book...

...In Poland, Sachar lists associations of social workers, chartered accountants, dentists, insurance appraisers, physicians, barristers, writers, artists, technicians, and academicians demanding that the alien interlopers be deprived of the means to earn a living, hence forced to leave the country...

...Going into the army was viewed as another path to successful assimilation...

...My answer would be No, No and No: no symbiosis, as the text demonstrates...

...Jews constituted a majority of attorneys and doctors, and 52 per cent of tradesmen...

...Eugen Weber, professor emeritus of Modern European History at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of The Hollow Years: France in the 1930's and Apocalypses...

...one in which each benefits the other," and figuratively "a relationship or association of mutual advantage between people...

...and no heroic ideal—at most a desperate self-deception...

...In 1894, two generations after Tocqueville, Bernard Lazare, the Leftist Jew soon to become a Dreyfusard, traced fin-de-siècle anti-Semitism (then a new word) to lasting "hostility, even repugnance...

...Only time can prevail over prejudices...

...Rich like a Jew' was a commonplace locution...

...Nevertheless, Dreamland offers a rich archeology of group and [in]human relations that inevitably dwells mostly on ruins...

...Many people involved in domestic violence, said Wiseman, are complicit in the circumstance: "Which is not to blame the victim, but to point out how difficult it is to escape from the situation, for whatever combination of reasons...

...In fact, the book ranges in time from the late 19th century pretty much to mid-20th century, and in space over Central and some of Eastern Europe: Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bohemia, Austria, Germany and,pour la bonne bouche, France...

...As a well-known society hostess observed at the century's end, "I've got too little religion to change it...

...All of that reinforced the image of them and of their fellow-Jews, no matter how assimilated, as foreigners: Others under the skin...

...ALTHOUGH Sachar does not mention it, many Jews simply converted and melted into their surroundings, as they had done through the ages...

...He ends as he began, on a question about Jewish dreamers...

...Perhaps Dreamland should have been Heartacheland...

...an alien organism...

...The latter must be Sachar's meaning, to judge from one more question at the conclusion of his Foreword: "Was the dream of an ongoing entwinement of destinies a puerile illusion or a visionary, even heroic ideal...

...Success finds no mercy...

...Other stereotypes were piled on this heady compost...

...There were minor ones like that of the wandering Jew, a transient in settled societies, a stranger, hence suspect and strange...

...Why were Jews who jettisoned their customs and mores tarred with the same brush as those who held on to them...

...Jew" is not simply a usurer (as in a 1784 police report, drawn up against le nommé Salomon, juif de profession), but a grasping, dishonest or extortionate fellow...

...Ironically, when Jews sought to escape money-grubbing charges by turning to liberal careers that offered better status though less money, they were resented for being intrusive, or obtrusive...

...Between 1933 and 1945 two-thirds of Europe's Jews disappeared...

...The quotation has serious implications...

...Writers & Witing An Archeology of Prejudice By Eugen Weber After Alexander the Great founded Alexandria, in 332 BCE, it quickly became an important center of Hellenic trade, science and scholarship...

...Lithuania, Greece, the Balkans, Italy, the Netherlands, and Britain none at all...

...In their invisible ghettos...

...In this context it is a platitude to say (but it has to be said because it is crucial) that the Christian Church laid the groundwork of anti-Jewish hatred even in places where there were no Jews to hate...

...Yet, we are told, "social interaction was minimal...

...The verb "to jew" means to squeeze or do someone out of something...

...In Hungary, Sachar tells us, 25 Jews were generals on the eve of 1914, and one served as the War Minister from 1910 to 1917...

...Yet all this time, particularly in Eastern Europe, the concentration of Jews in urban centers, their educational institutions and their professions, made them look more numerous than they were...

...Adolf Hitler was born in 1889...

...But my dusty conclusion should not obscure the valuable contribution Dreamland makes to Jewish history in the parts of the world it covers—especially the light it casts on the Jews' social and economic roles, and on the reasons for resentment against them...

...Even enthusiastically embracing the ambient culture (German, French, etc...

...My dictionary suggests "an interaction between two dissimilar organisms living in close physical association...

...The groundswell of frustration, envy and hostility was then exacerbated when the War and postwar brought floods of refugees, and a Depression embittered competition...

...By that time many assimilated Jews, who had abandoned religious observance like their fellow nationals, found it hard to treat religion seriously enough to take the step of conversion that would help them pass...

...And it turns out that funds to launch the virulently anti-Semitic Libre Parole in 1892 were provided by Gaston Wiallard, a converted Jew, who functioned as the newspaper's manager until his ineptness allowed Edouard Drumont to turf him out...

...or peddler, an activity of the poor and old...

...Subsequent gradual detachment from the church and its beliefs had little effect on established prejudice, for by then it had been digested as a cultural tradition that did not have to be examined any more than the return of the seasons...

...One could be dubbed a Jew even if one were not Jewish...

...there had been one, but he had just been baptized...

...In 1879 a German journalist, Wilhelm Marr, coined the term "anti-Semite...

...a closed corporation, rigorously shut off from the rest of the world...

...and mysterious ones, not just because the Jews were kept and kept themselves apart, but because as people of the book they functioned as literates in oceans of illiteracy...

...Doctors, lawyers, engineers, bureaucrats, university and high school teachers led anti-Jewish campaigns...

...Denounced as Judaization, verjudung, enjuivement, their "disproportionate" role in economic, cultural, even political life evoked resentment—notably from the most articulate...

...Not least of attitudes toward Jews or, indeed, of Jews...

...62 per cent of the physicians, half the lawyers and nearly half the journalists were Jews...

...The Jews were further accused of impiety, of shameful practices and dire diseases, of dark conspiracies, ritual murder, and offensive smells...

...His book explores at length the excruciating quandary ofapeople unwanted where it is and un welcome where it might wish to be...

...But as Baron Edmond de Rothschild still complained in 1913, the newcomers preferred to "remain among themselves, retain their primitive language, speak and write in jargon...

...There were also major stereotypes: of the Jew as usurer and money-grubber in places where money was scant and unfamiliar...

...Race is a social construct and so is religion...

...In 1889 Pierre de Margerie, a young French diplomat and future Dreyfusard on his way to take up a post in Constantinople, caught a glimpse of the new arrivals in Vienna's railway station and described them as "dirty, disgusting, loose-lipped, the nose encroaching on the chin, and two greasy locks hanging on each side of their ears...

...where some of their dreamers struggled for a more just, ideally classless, society...

...But that is another story...

...In lands like Poland and the Russian Pale, Jews lived in narrow communities with their own language, schools and customs...

...In 1886 Edouard Drumont published a bestseller: La France juive...

...Explicating, deconstructing such forces does not diminish their importance, their impact, their effects...

...Rathenau thought Jews should be bred and educated as Germans...

...In some ways it recalls the remarks that Frederick Wiseman, the documentary filmmaker, made about battering and spousal abuse...

...Tocqueville was writing about blacks in the new United States, "the memory of whose slavery dishonors the race, and the race perpetuates the memory of slavery...

...In Berlin, the Jewish patrician Walther Rathenau expressed the same revulsion: "An Asian horde on Prussia's sandy plains...

...not much of a dream...

...Sachar, meanwhile, has written a thought-provoking book crammed with information that is well worth pondering...

...Everyday language retained and reinforced those bigoted images...

...In France, some Jewish officer dynasties went back to the Napoleonic wars...

...Because the most vivid remains of the encounter between Europeans and Jews lie in Eastern and Central Europe, the book's focus is justified...

...Lazare's views were not only shared but improved upon by others, demonstrating that stereotypes are mere caricatures of experience...

...Alexis de Tocqueville knew that "there is a natural prejudice that leads men to despise those who have been their inferiors, long after they have become their equals...

...He almost managed to bring about what a stream of foes panting to get their paws around Jewish throats and into Jewish pockets had not: an extermination by the book, a mass extirpation...