Modern Antisemitism in Western Europe

Reviewed by: Philosemitism: Admiration and Support in the English-Speaking World for Jews, 1840–1939 David Weinberg Philosemitism: Admiration and Support in the English-Speaking World for Jews, 1840–1939, by William D. Rubinstein and Hilary L. Rubinstein. London: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. 276 pp. $59.95. The present work seeks to counter what the authors believe is the overwhelming emphasis in modern Jewish historical research on the hostility of the larger society toward its Jewish minority. As such, it represents a contribution to a small but growing field of study that includes such controversial and tendentious books as William Rubinstein’s The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews Under the Nazis (London, New York, 1997), Alan Edelstein’s An Unacknowl edged Harmony: Philo-Semitism and the Survival of European Jewry (Westport, CT, 1982), and Albert Lindemann’s Esau’s Tears: Modern Antisemitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge, 1997). The book is divided into two sections. The first part surveys the efforts by elites in English-speaking countries to protest against the major incidents of persecution against Jews in the last two centuries. The result is a numbing listing of pronouncements and written statements by prominent political, cultural, and religious leaders in response to such events as the Damascus Affair, the Mortara case, the Beilis case, the Dreyfus Affair, and the onset of Nazi persecution in the 1930s. In the second more thoughtful [End Page 164] section, the authors attempt to create typologies of philosemites, including liberals, Christians, Zionists, and conservatives. Though the book contains numerous interesting historical tidbits, it is marred by methodological flaws and geographical limitations. The Rubinsteins never actually define what they mean by the term “philosemitism.” As a result, they fail to clearly and consistently explain the underlying assumptions that influenced Christians to defend Jews in the post-emancipation era. The fact that support of Jews was often commingled with other sentiments, including British patriotism, anti-Catholicism, Russo-and Francophobia, and conversionism—which the Rubinsteins either briefly note or downplay as significant in the second section of the book—suggests that philosemitism may not have been as ideologically pure or as consistently noble as they suggest. Nor does the reader gain any sense of the effect of the philosemitic statements and protests that the Rubinsteins chronicle upon governments in Europe and in the countries of persecution. In contrast, antisemitism served as the foundation of both mass political movements that influenced governments and regimes that executed public policy. (Indeed, an important motivating factor for at least some defenders of Jews among the British elite was the association of antisemitism with mass political action.) Most disturbingly, in their efforts to emphasize pro-Jewish sentiment, the Rubinsteins fail to recognize the strange irony that united philosemites with antisemites. In both cases, Jews were viewed less as human beings than as exemplars of larger ideas or forces, i.e., the long-suffering holders of the original “truth” on the one hand, and the source of all of the world’s ills on the other. The authors correctly point out that at times British Jews sought to restrain government and religious leaders from taking assertive positions against the persecution of Jews. Unlike the Rubinsteins, British Jewish leaders under stood that, however welcome, philosemitic attitudes were often based upon unrealistic perceptions of Jews and were fundamentally shaped by the unequal relationship that existed between the Christian majority and the Jewish minority. The book is also severely limited by its emphasis upon the English-speaking world. As the Rubinsteins readily admit, the altruism of British, American, Canadian, and Australian leaders was generally not shared by officials in eastern Europe or in the Middle East, where the majority of Jewry lived in the period under discussion. (It should also be noted that in the case of the Damascus Affair, anti-Jewish sentiments were fueled by western European residents and officials based in the Ottoman Empire.) Even in English-speaking countries, “philosemites” generally displayed little mag nanimity toward Jewish refugees from eastern Europe who sought asylum in their own country. The authors seem to miss the irony, for example, that protests in England against the pogroms...

Reviewed by: Das Europäische Zeitalter der Juden Dean Phillip Bell Das Europäische Zeitalter der Juden, by Friedrich Battenberg. Volume 1: Von den Anfängen bis 1650; Volume 2: Von 1650 bis 1945. 2nd ed. Darmstadt: Primus Verlag, 2000. Vol. 1: 324 pages and 1 map; Vol. 2: 388 pages and 1 map. DM 68.00 (p). These two volumes represent the second edition of Friedrich Battenberg’s important survey of the history of the Jews in Europe published a decade ago. With great breadth, useful historical context, detailed indexes, and impeccable organization and clarity, this overview is an invaluable teaching tool. The volumes are more than mere synthesis; combining as they do a wide range of historical work on the subject with Battenberg’s own impressive scholarship in a number of areas, such as the legal position of the Jews in medieval and early modern Germany, this work will be of interest to established scholars in a variety of fields as well. Battenberg begins by noting the recent interest in the history of the Jews, par ticularly in Germany. Two motives, he maintains, for this interest are the Holocaust and the relationship of the history of the Jews to the general problem of the history of minorities. Battenberg contends that the world history of the Jews unfolded in three phases: the Oriental period (including the Hellenistic and Babylonian periods) ending in the tenth century with the decline of the Babylonian academies and the rise of Spanish Jewry; the period of European Jewry stretching from the tenth through the middle of the twentieth century; and finally, the period of American and national, including Israeli, Judaism. Chapter 2 reviews the beginnings of European Jewry, focusing on the settlements in Spain and Italy before the tenth century (including Visigothic Spain and the growing independence of Spanish Jewry from the Babylonian academies); Chapter 3 addresses the beginnings of Frankish Jewry during the Merovingian and Carolingian periods and through the Rhenish communities during the crusades. Chapter 4 details the develop ment and expulsion of the Jewish communities from England and France in the high and later Middle Ages, while Chapter 5 focuses on the urban Jewry of the Holy Roman Empire until the fourteenth century—here Battenberg frequently supplies greater detail than in other sections. Chapter 6 examines late medieval Judaism in middle and western Europe, with sections on Sepharad and a look at attempts at centralization that were both internal and external to the Jewish communities, and Chapter 7 Jews between the Reformation and Counter Reformation, in which the burgeoning communities of eastern [End Page 151]Europe are first treated in detail. Volume I is rounded out with a chapter on middle Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century. This chapter includes a good deal of useful context and more extensive information on Jewish demographics, and reveals some of Battenberg’s own research strengths. Volume II begins with a chapter devoted to important contextual information related to general European developments, Jewish religious custom and observance, communal structure—as evident in particular communities selected—, and social structures, including the increasing polarization of Jewish society and the increasing number of impoverished Jews. Chapter 2 traces the external and internal ruptures of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, including the Chmielnicki massacres, Lurianic kabbalah—based almost exclusively on the work of Scholem and taking little account of recent literature—, resettlement in England, and the intellectual and communal challenges reflected in da Costa and Spinoza in Amsterdam. Chapters 3 and 4 trace the long eighteenth century, including Haskala, Chasidism, and the beginnings of Emancipation. The remainder of Volume II follows traditional lines of interpretation, examining the crisis and conservative reaction of the first half of the nineteenth century (Chapter 5), assimilation and the course of Emancipation (Chapter 6), struggles within Judaism, including the reform and neo-orthodox movements (Chapter 7), the origins of modern antisemitism (Chapter 8), and the origins and development of Zionism (Chapter 9). Chapter 10 reviews the history of the Jews during the First World War and in the Interwar period, Chapter 11 the rise of the Nazis and World War II, and finally and briefly, Chapter 12 the effects...

Reviewed by: Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries by David Sorkin Simon Rabinovitch David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 528; 17 b/w illus., 11 maps. $35.00 cloth. "Jewish emancipation" has a bit of a bad rap. The phrase has come to be associated with, at best, highly contingent political rights in Europe and the futility of Jewish "assimilation," and at worst, failure in the form of the Holocaust. The [End Page 113] success of individual Jews in joining the professions, in economic advancement, and in cultural contributions in places where emancipation was most far-reaching has also been seen as contributing to the birth of modern antisemitism and the antisemites' fear of Jews' infiltration from within European society. But what was, or is, "Jewish emancipation?" Despite the word's connotations today of freedom from bondage by grand declaration, the term "emancipation" as applied to Jews follows the meaning applied to other persecuted religious groups, such as Catholics in England before 1829, and refers to the rather haphazard and variable process of Jews gaining legal rights and joining the body politic. As David Sorkin argues in Jewish Emancipation: A History of Across Five Centuries, when viewed as a long-term process affecting all modern Jews, emancipation is "the principal event of modern Jewish history" (354); to understand modern Jewish history, we therefore need to zoom out and understand the process of how states and Jews struggled to define Jewish rights, individually and as a group. We also need to understand that how states changed the way they governed the political rights of Jews fit into more general processes of modern state formation—as Sorkin convincingly argues, Jewish emancipation cannot be separated from the development of modern citizenship, and modern citizenship cannot be separated from the process in which Europe decorporated its laws and society. When states first created the concept of citizenship, they did not simply shake off the old corporate privileges—religion provided the hierarchy around which modern citizenship was built. While Sorkin identifies regions with politically similar states (he divides Europe into western, central, and eastern parts, and also discusses the Ottoman Empire and the Atlantic world), his main point is that emancipation is hyper-local; in no two places does the process of Jews gaining political rights unfold the same way. Sorkin argues that much of the groundwork for civil equality, and how the process of emancipation would unravel in a given place, was built when societies were still governed by group privileges and disabilities. In city-states where Jews made up one of several merchant colonies, the privileges Jews gained on par with others translated into civil equality as states adopted modern notions of citizenship. Sorkin begins with an overview of how, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a number of European commercial hubs—Ancona, Venice, Livorno, Bordeaux, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and London—gave Jews, or sometimes New Christians who reverted back to Judaism, considerable group privileges. Historians have long focused on Amsterdam's role as an early harbinger of Jewish modernity, but Sorkin suggests that what made Amsterdam, along with London and Bordeaux, remarkable, is that in the transition from corporate legal rights to citizenship, the Jews' corporate parity transformed into equal citizenship. Jews gained similar corporate privileges on par with Christian burghers in cities and towns in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, especially those owned by members of the Polish nobility, but the partitioning of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century put the fate of Jewish rights in the hands of Prussia, Austria, and Russia. In contrast to western and eastern Europe, the Holy Roman Empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries granted far-reaching individual rights to a tiny Jewish elite, while resisting the extension of corporate privilege and seeking to limit the presence and visibility of Jews. It is Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II (r. 1765–1790) who would provide a model of contingent emancipation: with each legislative act increasing their privileges, Jews were expected to reciprocate through integration in dress, language, and military service. Joseph II's model of a finely managed, localized, and progressively radical process of integrating...

S HULAMIT Volkov. Germans, Jews, and Antisemite,): Trials in Emancipation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii + 311.LARS FISCHER. The Socialist Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xix + 252.One of most contentious issues in historiography of Holocaust is question of origins: How far back does one look for causes? Answers range from immediate context following outbreak of World War II to depths of Middle Ages. But many, perhaps most, historians believe that one has to begin by examining rise of modern anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany. Much has been written on this issue, but as we see by examining these two books from two different generations of scholars - collection of essays, written over course of thirty years, by Shulamith Volkov, one of outstanding experts in field; and revised dissertation of Lars Fischer- interpretive consensus is still far off.Another question that has been asked repeatedly is one that personally drives Volkov's scholarship: was it so hard to see approaching disaster? Her essays are an attempt to evoke and analyze the true complexity of situation, fact that matters were indeed so obscure and so multidimensional that it was practically impossible, even for many clear sighted men and women, to see through and extract ominous signs (p. x). In first of three parts that make up volume, Volkov offers an international perspective by outlining differences of perception and opinion among Jews in late nineteenth century and in late 1930s. In former period, Russia's Jews - obviously afflicted enough in their own country - looked anxiously at developments in Western and Central Europe, and what they saw pushed them even further toward Zionism. Conversely, German Jews did not believe that conditions in Tsarist Empire, however deplorable, could ever be replicated in their country. Forty years later, even after what we see in retrospect as absolutely clear signal sent by Kriatainacht, blinders remained. Precisely because events of November 1938 seemed so like traditional pogrom, some observers actually believed that Nazis represented nothing new after all: terrible and murderous, to be sure, but ultimately just one more old style enemy to be opposed and overcome. Moreover, many Zionists, however concerned about their brethren in Third Reich, remained even more focused on fighting British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine - an attitude encapsulated in Ben Gurion's notorious remark: Had I know that it were possible to save all children of Germany by bringing them over to England, or save only half of them by transferring them to Eretz Idrael, I would have chosen latter (p. 61).Volkov's honesty in dealing with complexity of issue extends even to her own family. In remarkable prologue to book, titled My Father Leaves His German Homeland, she recounts how her father had always portrayed himself as committed Zionist who decided to emigrate to Palestine as soon as Hitler came to power. But after his death, family discovered letters that he had written from Germany in spring and summer of 1933 to his fiancee - native of Tel Aviv who had gone to Berlin to study medicine but returned home already in March 1933. The letters revealed his deep attachment to Germany and his agonizing over decision to leave. Indeed, in letter of May 2, Volkov's father (then twenty-five-years old) recounted hearing Hitler speak on radio day before and being swept up as by a gigantic force of nature. He then asked plaintively: Is there really no possibility at all for Jew to take part in this thing here? (p. T). Within ensuing weeks he came to his senses and left for Palestine. Yet this troubling story sticks with reader throughout book and reminds us that there are no easy answers to question: Why did people not see what was coming? …