Antisemitism, the Limits of Antisemitic Rhetoric, and a Movement against Russian Students at German Universities, 1908-1914

Abstract

In pioneering articles in the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, authors like Norbert Kampe, Jack Wertheimer, and Keith Pickus described the experience of Jewish students and antisemitism at nineteenth century German universities.1 Many fraternities excluded Jewish students from membership. Large numbers of students signed the 1880 antisemitic petition that called on the German government to limit the numbers of Jews entering professions and to halt Jewish immigration. Perhaps most importantly, the Verein deutscher Studenten (Union of German Students) propagated antisemitism and styled itself as a nationalist vanguard. According to Norbert Kampe, antisemitism became a rigid social norm within student society and together these factors made universities important sites of antisemitic activism.2 Standard narratives describe the efforts of organised antisemites at universities as shaping the development of the antisemitic movement more generally.3 A new generation of scholars, however, has called into question some aspects of this picture. New comparative research has been important in measuring the particular strength of antisemitism in Germany. Historians are now more aware, in Albert S. Lindemann’s words, of how “post-Holocaust awareness has distorted perceptions of antisemitism”.4 A recent comparative study of the universities of Oxford and Heidelberg suggests that, in fact, German institutions were “more welcoming” to Jews than Britain’s oldest universities.5 Marion Kaplan and Oded Heilbronner have emphasised the importance of considering hostility to Jews as one among the many different conflicts and divisions within German society of this period. Concern about antisemitism was not at the centre of most German Jewish men’s and women’s lives.6 With this article I seek to contribute to this new move within the historiography of German Jewry.