Roots of Hate: Anti-Semitism in Europe Before the Holocaust

Nobody wants to be an anti-Semite anymore. This is what distinguishes anti-Semitism of today from that before the Holocaust. There is no pride in it anymore. The memory of the Holocaust has delegitimized the hatred of the Jews in our days. Since modern anti-Semitism has no legitimacy anymore, it lacks clear conceptualization. What remains are parts of a system of resentment that needs to cover its traces. The concept of anti-Semitism was born in the nineteenth century before the Holocaust. Not only has the Holocaust complicated contemporary conceptualizations of anti-Semitism, but also the foundation of the state of Israel as the expression of Jewish political sovereignty. This is why Brustein’s study on antiSemitism in Europe before the Holocaust is not only an important historical study of comparative structure of prejudice. The book would be already worth its price for those interested in historical comparative studies. Brustein compares France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Romania and covers the years 1879 to 1939. The countries were chosen to demonstrate a wide range of antiJewish sentiments. Germany and Romania displayed high levels of anti-Semitism, Great Britain and Italy low levels, and France somewhere in the middle. But clearly more is at stake here. According to Brustein, the Germans did not hate the Jews more than any other Europeans. Brustein’s intellectual foe is Daniel Goldhagen and his study Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust in which Goldhagen claims that German anti-Semitism was qualitatively different from other European forms of antiJewish prejudice. Its eliminationist character not only made the Holocaust a purely German affair, but it looked for its root causes in deep German culture. Brustein does not agree with this. His claim is that there was no special path to German history. It seems that this is why Brustein opens his comparative study of European anti-Semitism with the fact that not only did the crimes of the Nazis draw world-wide attention in the years before the destruction process started, but also that most nations did not want to accept Jewish refugees when the Nazis offered them to the world in early 1938. For Brustein, clearly something more is going on than Germans hating the Jews. And he refuses to read history backwards. This is what makes this book such fascinating reading since it allows the reader to connect anti-Jewish prejudice before the Holocaust with those we witness all over Europe today. Now, how does Brustein go about making his case? First, he looked at the articles published in the American Jewish Year Book (AJYB), which reported all anti-Semitic acts in the European countries that Brustein studied. In addition, Brustein analyzed newspaper articles and tried to code the various anti-Semitic acts. He then attempted to distinguish between the religious, racial, economic, and political roots of anti-Semitism. Brustein does not entirely buy into the various sociological approaches that try to explain anti-Semitism. His data demonstrate the multifaceted qualities of anti-Semitism. The anti-Semites identified secularized Jews with commerce in the same way that people identified them as the people who reduce everything to money. And the anti-Semites saw such Jews as carriers of modernity. Jews represented for them the break-up of traditional society. The anti-Semites saw the modernist project as something alien, and denounced it as Jewish, rationalistic, individualistic, and secular. The anti-Semites sought to get back in touch with deeper, spiritual, organic values and, above all, with the nation. Brustein demonstrates as well that the philosophers of the Enlightenment and their quest for universalism did not leave much space for Jewish particularism. Then, the thinkers of the Enlightenment accused the Jews of resisting universalization. But in a dialectical twist, Brustein shows also the other side of this. There is a nostalgic and Romantic longing for a better world that the Jews prevent from coming into being. We all know about the identification of the Jews