Anti-Semitism
In the political struggles of the concluding quarter of the 19th century an important part was playcd by a religious, political and social agitation against the Jews, known as "Anti-Semitism." The origins of this remarkable movement threatened to become obscured by legend. Some Jews contended that anti-Semitism was a mere atavistic revival of the Jew-hatred of the middle ages. The extreme section of the anti-Semites, who gave the movement its quasi-scientific name, declared that it is a racial struggle - an incident of the eternal conflict between Europe and Asia - and that the anti-Semites arc engaged in an effort to prevent what is called the Aryan race from being subjugated by a Semitic immigration, and to save Aryan ideals from being modified by an alien and demoralizing oriental Anschauung.
There was no essential foundation for either of these contentions. Religious prejudices reaching back to the dawn of history had been reawakened by the anti-Semitic agitation, but they did not originate it, and they have not entirely controlled it. The alleged racial divergence was only a linguistic hypothesis on the physical evidence of which anthropologists were not agreed, and, even if it were proved, it had existed ¡n Europe for so many centurie, that it cannot be accepted as a practical issue.
Anti-Semitism is then exclusively a question of European politics, and its origin is to be found, not in the long struggle between Europe and Asia, or between the Church and the Synagogue, which filled so much of ancient and medieval history, but in the social conditions resulting from the emancipation of the Jews in the middle of the 19th century.
If the emancipated Jews were Europeans in virtue of the antiquity of their western settlements, and of the character impressed upon them by the circumstances of their European history, they none the less presented ihc appearance of a strange people to ssome of their Gentile fellow-countrymen. They had been secluded in their ghettos for centuries, and had consequently acquired a physical and moral physiognomy differentiating them in a measure from their former oppressors. This peculiar physiognomy was, on its moral side, not essentially Jewish or even Semitic. It was an advanced development of the main attributes of civilized life, to which Christendom in its transition from feudalism had as yet only imperfectly adapted itself.
The ghetto, which had been designed as a sort of quarantine to safeguard Christendom against the Jewish heresy, had in fact proved a storage chamber for a portion of the political and social forces which were destined to sweep away the last traces of feudalism from central Europe. In the ghetto, the pastoral Semite, who had been made a wanderer by the destruction of his nationality, was steadily trained, through centuries, to become an urban European, with all the activities of urban economics, and all the democratic tendencies of occidental industrialism. Excluded from the army, the land, the trade corporations and the artisan gilds, this quondam oriental peasant was gradually transformed into a commercial middleman and a practised dealer in money. Oppressed by the Church, and persecuted by the State, his theocratic and monarchical traditions lost their hold on his daily life, and he became saturated with a passionate devotion to the ideals of democratic politics. Thus, the Jew who emerged from the ghetto was no longer a Palestinian Semite, but an essentially modern European, who differed from his Christian fellow-countrymen only in the circumstances that his religion was of the older Semitic form than that practised by Protestants and Roman Catholics.
Unfortunately, these distinctive elements, though not very serious in themselves, became strongly accentuated by concentration. Had it been possible to distribute the emancipated Jews uniformly throughout Christian society, as was the case with other emancipated religious denominations, perhaps there would have been no revival of the "Jewish Question". The Jews, however, through no fault of their own, belonged to only one class in European society - the industrial bourgeoisie. Into that class their strength was thrown, and owing to their ghetto preparation, they rapidly took a leading place in it, politically and socially. When the mid-century revolutions made the bourgeoisie the ruling power in Europe, the semblance of a Hebrew domination presented itself. It was the exaggeration of this apparent domination, not by the bourgeoisie itself, but by its enemies among the vanquished reactionaries on the one hand, and by the extreme Radicals on the other, which created anti-Semitism as a political force.
The movement took its rise in Germany and Austria. Here the concentration of the Jews in one class of the population was aggravated by their numbers. While in France the proportion to the total population was, in the early 1870s, 0.14 %, and in Italy, 0.12%, it was 1.22% in Germany, and 3.55% in Austria-Hungary. Berlin had 4.36% of Jews, and Vienna 6.62% (Andrée, Volkskunde, pp. 287, 291, 294, 295). The activity of the Jews consequently manifested itself in a far more intense form in these countries than elsewhere. This was apparent even before the emancipations of 1848.
France was the last State in which anti-Semitism obtained a foothold. To some extent, somewhat paradoxically, the ground was more favourable there than under a monarchical government. In a bourgeois republic the hostility of the anti-bourgeois elements is all the more intense, and in France, as elsewhere, the Jews are essentially a bourgeois class. Moreover, the anti-Semitic movement in Germany had driven many Jews-scholars and professional men, as well as men of commerce and finance-to take refuge in France. France had its strong reactionary and clerical elements, all by nature anti-Semitic, so that the materials for an anti-Jewish movement were all to hand.
The first anti-Jewish movement in France dates only from 1882. In that year Paul Bontoux, a financier who had formerly been in the service of the Rothschilds, but had been compelled to leave it on account of his mania for speculation, and had joined the Orleanist party, established the Union Generate, a Roman Catholic and aristocratic financial organization intended to compete with and destroy the alleged monopoly of the Jewish and Protestant financial houses. Bontoux's passion for speculation led to the inevitable consequence-the Union Generate failed in January, 1882, involving thousands of all classes in its ruin. Very inconsequentially the Jews were accused by the victims of having engineered the failure. This suggestion was sufficient to make the Jews of France the scapegoat for the speculations of Bontoux. The anti-Semitic movement thus started remained in the realm of theory for a few years, and beyond a certain amount of annoyance the Jews of France cannot be said to have suffered definitely from it.
At the elections of 1885, however, a large number of monarchists were returned, and the following year, either as a coincidence or a consequence, Edouard Drumont published his notorious " La France Juive," one of the bitterest attacks on the Jews ever penned. This work gave a great impetus to the movement, which was, however, still theoretical rather than practical. The Boulangist Movement gathered to itself the antiSemites in common with all the other disaffected elements in the State. The failure of the Boulangist movement was in part due to the efforts of a Jewish journalist and politician, M. Joseph Reinach. The Orleanists and Clericals and other Boulangists, in their rage and disappointment, attacked, in retaliation, not only Reinach, but the whole of the race to which he belonged. An anti-Semitic League, with branches in all parts of the country, was quickly formed, and the whole machinery of anti-Semitic charges and arguments was imported from Germany.
The Franco-Russian Alliance, effected on the morrow of one of the periodic outbreaks of massacre with which Russo-Jewish history is studded, gave the movement a pseudo-patriotic tinge, which brought many recruits to the standard of Drumont and his friends. The collapse of the Panama Canal Company, in which a few prominent French Jews were involved, still further assisted the movement, for, in accordance with many precedents, the Jew was made the scapegoat. Something in the nature of an anti-Jewish reign of terror ensued, in the course of which the hundreds of Jewish officers in the army were made the objects of attack. Against one of them, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the charge of treason was brought. Immediately a frenzy of anti-Semitism took possession of the country. The question of the guilt or innocence of Dreyfus was lost in the far larger question of the guilt or innocence of the Jewish race.
The agitation based on the charges of the existence of a Jewish conspiracy against the Christian world completely collapsed late in 1921. The credit for this is due to the London Times, which unearthed a copy of the original book upon the basis of which the so-called "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was fabricated. In August, 1921, this paper incontrovertibly demonstrated that the "Protocols" consist in the main of "clumsy plagiarisms" from a French political pamphlet directed against Napoleon III, and published in Brussels in 1865 by a French lawyer named Maurice Joly, and entitled "Dialogues in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu." Shortly after this expose, the Dearborn Independent dropped the publication of further anti-Jewish articles, although it is still engaged in circulating pamphlets containing reprints of the articles which have appeared.
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