# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Anti-Semitism

See also Antisemitism on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​ANTI-SEMITISM. In the political struggles of the concluding quarter of the 19th century an important part was played by a religious, political and social agitation against the Jews, known as “Anti-Semitism.” The origins of this remarkable movement already threaten to become obscured by legend. The Jews contend that anti-Semitism is a mere atavistic revival of the Jew-hatred of the middle ages. The extreme section of the anti-Semites, who have given the movement its quasi-scientific name, declare that it is a racial struggle—an incident of the eternal conflict between Europe and Asia—and that the anti-Semites are 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 is no essential foundation for either of these contentions. Religious prejudices reaching back to the dawn of history have been reawakened by the anti-Semitic agitation, but they did not originate it, and they have not entirely controlled it. The alleged racial divergence is, too, only a linguistic hypothesis on the physical evidence of which anthropologists are not agreed (Topinard, Anthropologie, p. 444; Taylor, Origins of Aryans, cap. i.), and, even if it were proved, it has existed in Europe for so many centuries, and so many ethnic modifications have occurred on both sides, that it cannot be accepted as a practical issue. It is true that the ethnographical histories of the Jews and the nations of Europe have proceeded on widely diverging lines, but these lines have more than once crossed each other and become interlaced. Thus Aryan elements are at the beginning of both; European morals have been ineradicably semitized by Christianity, and the Jews have been Europeans for over a thousand years, during which their character has been modified and in some respects transformed by the ecclesiastical and civil polities of the nations among whom they have made their permanent home. 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 the appearance of a strange people to 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 parasitic 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. Finally, this former bucolic victim of Phoenician exploitation had his wits preternaturally sharpened, partly by the stress of his struggle for life, and partly by his being compelled in his urban seclusion to seek for recreation in literary exercises, chiefly the subtle dialectics of the Talmudists (Loeb, Juif de l’histoire; Jellinek, Der Jüdische Stamm). 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, and that his physical type had become sharply defined through a slightly more rigid exclusiveness in the matter of marriages than that practised by Protestants and Roman Catholics (Andree, Volkskunde der Juden, p. 58).
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, 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 all 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 modern 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 excessive numbers. While in France the proportion to the total population was, in the early ’seventies, 0.14%, and in Italy, 0.12%, it was 1.22% in Germany, and 3.85% in Austria-Hungary; Berlin had 4.36% of Jews, and Vienna 6.62% (Andree, 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. Towards the middle of the 18th century, a limited number of wealthy Germany.Jews had been tolerated as Schutz-Juden outside the ghettos, and their sons, educated as Germans under the influence of Moses Mendelssohn and his school (see Jews), supplied a majority of the leading spirits of the revolutionary agitation. To this period belong the formidable names of Ludwig Börne (1786–1837), Heinrich Heine (1799–1854), Edward Ganz (1798–1839), Gabriel Riesser (1806–1863), Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864), Karl Marx (1818–1883), Moses Hess (1812–1875), Ignatz Kuranda (1811–1884), and Johann Jacobi (1805–1877). When the revolution was completed, and the Jews entered in a body the national life of Germany and Austria, they sustained this high average in all the intellectual branches of middle-class activity. Here again, owing to the accidents of their history, a further concentration became apparent. Their activity was almost exclusively intellectual. The bulk of them flocked to the financial and the distributive (as distinct from the productive) fields of industry to which they had been confined in the ghettos. The sharpened faculties of the younger generation at the same time carried everything before them in the schools, with the result that they soon crowded the professions, especially medicine, law and journalism (Nossig, Statistik des Jüd. Stammes, pp. 33-37; Jacobs, Jew. Statistics, pp. 41-69). Thus the “Semitic domination,” as it was afterwards called, became every day more strongly accentuated. If it was a long time in exciting resentment and jealousy, the reason was that it was in no sense alien to the new conditions of the national life. The competition was a fair one. The Jews might be more successful than their Christian fellow-citizens, but it was in virtue of qualities which complied with the national standards of conduct. They were as law-abiding and patriotic as they were intelligent. Crime among them was far below the average (Nossig, p. 31). Their complete assimilation of the national spirit was brilliantly illustrated by the achievements in German literature, art and science of such men as Heinrich Heine and Berthold Auerbach (1812–1882), Felix Mendelssohn (-Bartholdy) (1809–1847), and Jacob Meyerbeer (1794–1864), Karl Gustav Jacobi the mathematician (1804–1851), Gabriel Gustav Valentin the physiologist (1810–1883), and Moritz Lazarus (1824–1903) and Heymann Steinthal (1823–1899) the national psychologists. In politics, too, Edward Lasker (1829–1884) and Ludwig Bamberger (1823–1899) had shown how Jews could put their country before party, when, at the turning-point of German imperial history in 1866, they led the secession from the Fortschritts-Partei and founded the National Liberal party, which enabled Prince Bismarck to accomplish German unity. Even their financiers were not behind their Christian fellow-citizens in patriotism. Prince Bismarck himself confessed that the money for carrying on the 1866 campaign was obtained from the Jewish banker Bleichroeder, in face of the refusal of the money-market to support the war. Hence the voice of the old Jew-hatred—for in a weak way it was still occasionally heard in obscurantist corners—was shamed into silence, and it was only in the European twilight—in Russia and Rumania—and in lands where medievalism still lingered, such as northern Africa and Persia, that oppression and persecution continued to dog the steps of the Jews.
The signal for the change came in 1873, and was given unconsciously by one of the most distinguished Jews of his time, Edward Lasker, the gifted lieutenant of Bennigsen in the leadership of the National Liberal party. The unification of Germany in 1870, and the rapid payment of the enormous French war indemnity, had given an unprecedented impulse to industrial and financial activity throughout the empire. Money became cheap and speculation universal. A company mania set in which was favoured by the government, who granted railway and other concessions with a prodigal hand. The inevitable result of this state of things was first indicated by Jewish politicians and economists. On the 14th of January 1873, Edward Lasker called the attention of the Prussian diet to the dangers of the situation, while his colleague, Ludwig Bamberger, in an able article in the Preussischen Jahrbücher, condemned the policy which had permitted the milliards to glut the country instead of being paid on a plan which would have facilitated their gradual digestion by the economic machinery of the nation. Deeply impressed by the gravity of the impending crisis, Lasker instituted a searching inquiry, with the result that he discovered a series of grave company scandals in which financial promoters and aristocratic directors were chiefly involved. Undeterred by the fact that the leading spirit in these abuses, Bethel Henry Strousberg (1823–1884), was a Jew, Lasker presented the results of his inquiry to the diet on the 7th of February 1873, in a speech ​of great power and full of sensational disclosures. The dramatic results of this speech need not be dwelt upon here (for details see Blum, Das deutsche Reich zur Zeit Bismarcks, pp. 153-181). It must suffice to say that in the following May the great Vienna “Krach” occurred, and the colossal bubble of speculation burst, bringing with it all the ruin foretold by Lasker and Bamberger. From the position occupied by the Jews in the commercial class, and especially in the financial section of that class, it was inevitable that a considerable number of them should figure in the scandals which followed. At this moment an obscure Hamburg journalist, Wilhelm Marr, who as far back as 1862 had printed a still-born tract against the Jews (Judenspiegel), published a sensational pamphlet entitled Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanthum (“The Victory of Judaism over Germanism”). The book fell upon fruitful soil. It applied to the nascent controversy a theory of nationality which, under the great sponsorship of Hegel, had seized on the minds of the German youth, and to which the stirring events of 1870 had already given a deep practical significance. The state, according to the Hegelians, should be rational, and the nation should be a unit comprising individuals speaking the same language and of the same racial origin. Heterogeneous elements might be absorbed, but if they could not be reduced to the national type they should be eliminated. This was the pseudo-scientific note of the new anti-Semitism, the theory which differentiated it from the old religious Jew-hatred and sought to give it a rational place in modern thought. Marr’s pamphlet, which reviewed the facts of the Jewish social concentration without noticing their essentially transitional character, proved the pioneer of this teaching. It was, however, in the passions of party politics that the new crusade found its chief sources of vitality. The enemies of the bourgeoisie at once saw that the movement was calculated to discredit and weaken the school of Manchester Liberalism, then in the ascendant. Agrarian capitalism, which had been dethroned by industrial capitalism in 1848, and had burnt its fingers in 1873, seized the opportunity of paying off old scores. The clericals, smarting under the Kulturkampf, which was supported by the whole body of Jewish liberalism, joined eagerly in the new cry. In 1876 another sensational pamphlet was published, Otto Glogau’s Die Börsen und Grundergeschwindel in Berlin (“The Bourses and the Company Swindles in Berlin”), dealing in detail with the Jewish participation in the scandals first revealed by Lasker. The agitation gradually swelled, its growth being helped by the sensitiveness and cacoëthes scribendi of the Jews themselves, who contributed two pamphlets and a much larger proportion of newspaper articles for every one supplied by their opponents (Jacobs. Bibliog. Jew. Question, p. xi.). Up to 1879, however, it was more of a literary than a political agitation, and was generally regarded only as an ephemeral craze or a passing spasm of popular passion.
Towards the end of 1879 it spread with sudden fury over the whole of Germany. This outburst, at a moment when no new financial scandals or other illustrations of Semitic demoralization and domination were before the public, has never been fully explained. It is impossible to doubt, however, that the secret springs of the new agitation were more or less directly supplied by Prince Bismarck himself. Since 1877 the relations between the chancellor and the National Liberals had gradually become strained. The deficit in the budget had compelled the government to think of new taxes, and in order to carry them through the Reichstag the support of the National Liberals had been solicited. Until then the National Liberals had faithfully supported the chancellor in nursing the consolidation of the new empire, but the great dream of its leaders, especially of Lasker and Bamberger, who had learnt their politics in England, was to obtain a constitutional and economic régime similar to that of the British Isles. The organization of German unity was now completed, and they regarded the new overtures of Prince Bismarck as an opportunity for pressing their constitutional demands. These were refused, the Reichstag was dissolved and Prince Bismarck boldly came forward with a new fiscal policy, a combination of protection and state socialism. Lasker and Bamberger thereupon led a powerful secession of National Liberals into opposition, and the chancellor was compelled to seek a new majority among the ultra-Conservatives and the Roman Catholic Centre. This was the beginning of the famous “journey to Canossa.” Bismarck did not hide his mortification. He began to recognize in anti-Semitism a means of “dishing” the Judaized liberals, and to his creatures who assisted him in his press campaigns he dropped significant hints in this sense (Busch, Bismarck, ii. 453-454, iii. 16). He even spoke of a new Kulturkampf against the Jews (ibid. ii. p. 484). How these hints were acted upon has not been revealed, but it is sufficiently instructive to notice that the final breach with the National Liberals took place in July 1879, and that it was immediately followed by a violent revival of the anti-Semitic agitation. Marr’s pamphlet was reprinted, and within a few months ran through nine further editions. The historian Treitschke gave the sanction of his great name to the movement. The Conservative and Ultramontane press rang with the sins of the Jews. In October an anti-Semitic league was founded in Berlin and Dresden (for statutes of the league see Nineteenth Century, February 1881, p. 344).
The leadership of the agitation was now definitely assumed by a man who combined with social influence, oratorical power and inexhaustible energy, a definite scheme of social regeneration and an organization for carrying it out. This man was Adolf Stöcker (b. 1835), one of the court preachers. He had embraced the doctrines of Christian socialism which the Roman Catholics, under the guidance of Archbishop Ketteler, had adopted from the teachings of the Jew Lassalle (Nitti, Catholic Socialism, pp. 94-96, 122, 127), and he had formed a society called “The Christian Social Working-man’s Union.” He was also a conspicuous member of the Prussian diet, where he sat and voted with the Conservatives. He found himself in strong sympathy with Prince Bismarck’s new economic policy, which, although also of Lassallian origin (Kohut, Ferdinand Lassalle, pp. 144 et seq.), was claimed by its author as being essentially Christian (Busch, p. 483). Under his auspices the years 1880–1881 became a period of bitter and scandalous conflict with the Jews. The Conservatives supported him, partly to satisfy their old grudges against the Liberal bourgeoisie and partly because Christian Socialism, with its anti-Semitic appeal to ignorant prejudice, was likely to weaken the hold of the Social Democrats on the lower classes. The Lutheran clergy followed suit, in order to prevent the Roman Catholics from obtaining a monopoly of Christian Socialism, while the Ultramontanes readily adopted anti-Semitism, partly to maintain their monopoly, and partly to avenge themselves on the Jewish and Liberal supporters of the Kulturkampf. In this way a formidable body of public opinion was recruited for the anti-Semites. Violent debates took place in the Prussian diet. A petition to exclude the Jews from the national schools and universities and to disable them from holding public appointments was presented to Prince Bismarck. Jews were boycotted and insulted. Duels between Jews and anti-Semites, many of them fatal, became of daily occurrence. Even unruly demonstrations and street riots were reported. Pamphlets attacking every phase and aspect of Jewish life streamed by the hundred from the printing-press. On their side the Jews did not want for friends, and it was owing to the strong attitude adopted by the Liberals that the agitation failed to secure legislative fruition. The crown prince (afterwards Emperor Frederick) and crown princess boldly set themselves at the head of the party of protest. The crown prince publicly declared that the agitation was “a shame and a disgrace to Germany.” A manifesto denouncing the movement as a blot on German culture, a danger to German unity and a flagrant injustice to the Jews themselves, was signed by a long list of illustrious men, including Herr von Forckenbeck, Professors Mommsen, Gneist, Droysen, Virchow, and Dr Werner Siemens (Times, November 18, 1880). During the Reichstag elections of 1881 the agitation played an active part, but without much effect, although Stöcker was elected. This was due to the fact that the great Conservative parties, so ​far as their political organizations were concerned, still remained chary of publicly identifying themselves with a movement which, in its essence, was of socialistic tendency. Hence the electoral returns of that year supplied no sure guide to the strength of anti-Semitic opinion among the German people.
The first severe blow suffered by the German anti-Semites was in 1881, when, to the indignation of the whole civilized world, the barbarous riots against the Jews in Russia and the revival of the medieval Blood Accusation in Hungary (see infra) illustrated the liability of unreasoning mobs to carry into violent practice the incendiary doctrines of the new Jew-haters. From this blow anti-Semitism might have recovered had it not been for the divisions and scandals in its own ranks, and the artificial forms it subsequently assumed through factitious alliances with political parties bent less on persecuting the Jews than on profiting by the anti-Jewish agitation. The divisions showed themselves at the first attempt to form a political party on an anti-Semitic basis. Imperceptibly the agitators had grouped themselves into two classes, economic and ethnological anti-Semites. The impracticable racial views of Marr and Treitschke had not found favour with Stöcker and the Christian Socialists. They were disposed to leave the Jews in peace so long as they behaved themselves properly, and although they carried on their agitation against Jewish malpractices in a comprehensive form which seemed superficially to identify them with the root-and-branch anti-Semites, they were in reality not inclined to accept the racial theory with its scheme of revived Jewish disabilities (Huret, La Question Sociale—interview with Stöcker). This feeling was strengthened by a tendency on the part of an extreme wing of the racial anti-Semites to extend their campaign against Judaism to its offspring, Christianity. In 1879 Professor Sepp, arguing that Jesus was of no human race, had proposed that Christianity should reject the Hebrew Scriptures and seek a fresh historical basis in the cuneiform inscriptions. Later Dr Eugen Dühring, in several brochures, notably Die Judenfrage als Frage des Rassencharakters (1881, 5th ed. Berlin, 1901), had attacked Christianity as a manifestation of the Semitic spirit which was not compatible with the theological and ethical conceptions of the Scandinavian peoples. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had also adopted the same view, without noticing that it was a reductio ad absurdum of the whole agitation, in his Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (1878), Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886), Genealogie der Moral (1887). With these tendencies the Christian Socialists could have no sympathy, and the consequence was that when in March 1881 a political organization of anti-Semitism was attempted, two rival bodies were created, the “Deutsche Volksverein,” under the Conservative auspices of Herr Liebermann von Sonnenberg (b. 1848) and Herr Förster, and the “Sociale Reichsverein,” led by the racial and Radical anti-Semites, Ernst Henrici (b. 1854) and Otto Böckel (b. 1859). In 1886, at an anti-Semitic congress held at Cassel a reunion was effected under the name of the “Deutsche antisemitische Verein,” but this only lasted three years. In June 1889 the anti-Semitic Christian Socialists under Stöcker again seceded.
Meanwhile racial anti-Semitism with its wholesale radical proposals had been making considerable progress among the ignorant lower classes. It adapted itself better to popular passions and inherited prejudice than the more academic conceptions of the Christian Socialists. The latter, too, were largely Conservatives, and their points of contact with the proletariat were at best artificial. Among the Hessian peasantry the inflammatory appeals of Böckel secured many adherents. This paved the way for a new anti-Semitic leader, Herrmann Ahlwardt (b. 1846), who, towards the end of the ’eighties, eclipsed all the other anti-Semites by the sensationalism and violence with which he prosecuted the campaign. Ahlwardt was a person of evil notoriety. He was loaded with debt. In the Manché decoration scandals it was proved that he had acted first as a corrupt intermediary and afterwards as the betrayer of his confederates. His anti-Semitism was adopted originally as a means of chantage, and it was only when it failed to yield profit in this form that he came out boldly as an agitator. The wildness, unscrupulousness, and full-bloodedness of his propaganda enchanted the mob, and he bid fair to become a powerful democratic leader. His pamphlets, full of scandalous revelations of alleged malpractices of eminent Jews, were read with avidity. No fewer than ten of them were written and published during 1892. Over and over again he was prosecuted for libel and convicted, but this seemed only to strengthen his influence with his followers. The Roman Catholic clergy and newspapers helped to inflame the popular passions. The result was that anti-Jewish riots broke out. At Neustettin the Jewish synagogue was burnt, and at Xanten the Blood Accusation was revived, and a Jewish butcher was tried on the ancient charge of murdering a Christian child for ritual purposes. The man was, of course, acquitted, but the symptoms it revealed of reviving medievalism strongly stirred the liberal and cultured mind of Germany. All protest, however, seemed powerless, and the barbarian movement appeared destined to carry everything before it.
German politics at this moment were in a very intricate state. Prince Bismarck had retired, and Count Caprivi, with a programme of general conciliation based on Liberal principles, was in power. Alarmed by the non-renewal of the anti-Socialist law, and by the conclusion of commercial treaties which made great concessions to German industry, the landed gentry and the Conservative party became alienated from the new chancellor. In January 1892 the split was completed by the withdrawal by the government of the Primary Education bill, which had been designed to place primary instruction on a religious basis. The Conservatives saw their opportunity of posing as the party of Christianity against the Liberals and Socialists, who had wrecked the bill, and they began to look towards Ahlwardt as a possible ally. He had the advantages over Stöcker that he was not a Socialist, and that he was prepared to lead his apparently large following to assist the agrarian movement and weaken the Social Democrats. The intrigue gradually came to light. Towards the end of the year Herr Liebknecht, the Social Democratic leader, denounced the Conservatives to the Reichstag as being concerned “in using the anti-Semitic movement as a bastard edition of Socialism for the use of stupid people.” (1st December). Two days later the charge was confirmed. At a meeting of the party held on the 3rd of December the following plank was added to the Conservative programme: “We combat the oppressive and disintegrating Jewish influence on our national life; we demand for our Christian people a Christian magistracy and Christian teachers for Christian pupils; we repudiate the excesses of anti-Semitism.” In pursuance of the resolution Ahlwardt was returned to the Reichstag at a by-election by the Conservative district of Arnswalde-Friedeberg. The coalition was, however, not yet completed. The intransigeant Conservatives, led by Baron von Hammerstein, the editor of the Kreuz-Zeitung, justly felt that the concluding sentence of the resolution of the 3rd of December repudiating “the excesses of anti-Semitism” was calculated to hinder a full and loyal co-operation between the two parties. Accordingly on the 9th of December another meeting of the party was summoned. Twelve hundred members met at the Tivoli Hall in Berlin, and with only seven dissentients solemnly expunged the offending sentence from the resolution. The history of political parties may be searched in vain for a parallel to this discreditable transaction.
The capture of the Conservative party proved the high-water mark of German anti-Semitism. From that moment the tide began to recede. All that was best in German national life was scandalized by the cynical tactics of the Conservatives. The emperor, strong Christian though he was, was shocked at the idea of serving Christianity by a compact with unscrupulous demagogues and ignorant fanatics. Prince Bismarck growled out a stinging sarcasm from his retreat at Friedrichsruh. Even Stöcker raised his voice in protest against the “Ahlwardtismus” and “Böckelianismus,” and called upon his Conservative colleagues to distinguish between “respectable and disreputable anti-Semitism.” As for the Liberals and Socialists, they filled the air with bitter laughter, and declared from the housetops that the stupid party had at last been overwhelmed by its own ​stupidity. The Conservatives began to suspect that they had made a false step, and they were confirmed in this belief by the conduct of their new ally in the Reichstag. His début in parliament was the signal for a succession of disgraceful scenes. His whole campaign of calumny was transferred to the floor of the house, and for some weeks the Reichstag discussed little else than his so-called revelations. The Conservatives listened to his wild charges in uncomfortable silence, and refused to support him. Stöcker opposed him in a violent speech. The Radicals and Socialists, taking an accurate measure of the shallow vanity of the man, adopted the policy of giving him “enough rope.” Shortly after his election he was condemned to five months’ imprisonment for libel, and he would have been arrested but for the interposition of the Socialist party, including five Jews, who claimed for him the immunities of a member of parliament. When he moved for a commission to inquire into his revelations, it was again the Socialist party which supported him, with the result that all his charges, without exception, were found to be absolutely baseless. Ahlwardt was covered with ridicule, and when in May the Reichstag was dissolved, he was marched off to prison to undergo the sentence for libel from which his parliamentary privilege had up to that moment protected him.
His hold on the anti-Semitic populace was, however, not diminished. On the contrary, the action of the Conservatives at the Tivoli congress could not be at once eradicated from the minds of the Conservative voters, and when the electoral campaign began it was found impossible to explain to them that the party leaders had changed their minds. The result was that Ahlwardt, although in prison, was elected by two constituencies. At Arnswalde-Friedeberg he was returned in the teeth of the opposition of the official Conservatives, and at Neustettin he defeated no less a person than his anti-Semitic opponent Stöcker. Fifteen other anti-Semites, all of the Ahlwardtian school, were elected. This, however, represented little in the way of political influence; for henceforth the party had to stand alone as one of the many minor factions in the Reichstag, avoided by all the great parties, and too weak to exercise any influence on the main course of affairs.
During the subsequent seven years it became more and more discredited. The financial scandals connected with Förster’s attempt to found a Christian Socialist colony in Paraguay, the conviction of Baron von Hammerstein, the anti-Semitic Conservative leader, for forgery and swindling (1895–1896), and several minor scandals of the same unsavoury character, covered the party with the very obloquy which it had attempted to attach to the Jews. At the same time the Christian Socialists who had remained with the Conservative party also suffered. After the elections of 1893, Stöcker was dismissed from his post of court preacher, and publicly reprimanded for speaking familiarly of the empress. Two years later the Christian Socialist, Pastor Neumann, observing the tendency of the Conservatives to coalesce with the moderate Liberals in antagonism to Social Democracy, declared against the Conservative party. The following year the emperor publicly condemned Christian Socialism and the “political pastors,” and Stöcker was expelled from the Conservative party for refusing to modify the socialistic propaganda of his organ, Das Volk. His fall was completed by a quarrel with the Evangelical Social Union. He left the Union and appealed to the Lutheran clergy to found a new church social organization, but met with no response. Another blow to anti-Semitism came from the Roman Catholics. They had become alarmed by the unbridled violence of the Ahlwardtians, and when in 1894 Förster declared in an address to the German anti-Semitic Union that anarchical outrages like the murder of President Carnot were as much due to the “Anarchismus von oben” as the “Anarchismus von unten,” the Ultramontane Germania publicly washed its hands of the Jew-baiters (1st of July 1894). Thus gradually German anti-Semitism became stripped of every adventitious alliance; and at the general election of 1898 it only managed to return twelve members to the Reichstag, and in 1903 its party strength fell to nine. A remarkable revival in its fortunes, however, took place between 1905 and 1907. Identifying itself with the extreme Chauvinists and Anglophobes it profited by the anti-national errors of the Clericals and Socialists, and won no fewer than twelve by-elections. At the general election of 1907 its jingoism and aggressive Protestantism were rewarded with twenty-five seats. It is clear, however, from the figures of the second ballots that these successes owed far more to the tendencies of the party in the field of general politics than to its anti-Semitism. Indeed the specifically anti-Semitic movement has shown little activity since 1893.
The causes of the decline of German anti-Semitism are not difficult to determine. While it remained a theory of nationality and a fad of the metaphysicians, it made considerable noise in the world, but without exercising much practical influence. When it attempted to play an active part in politics it became submerged by the ignorant and superstitious voters, who could not understand its scientific justification, but who were quite ready to declaim and riot against the Jew bogey. It thus became a sort of Jacquerie which, being exploited by unscrupulous demagogues, soon alienated all its respectable elements. Its moments of real importance have been due not to inherent strength but to the uses made of it by other political parties for their own purposes. These coalitions are no longer of perilous significance so far as the Jews are concerned, chiefly because, in face of the menace of democratic socialism and its unholy alliance with the Roman Catholic Centrum, all supporters of the present organization of society have found it necessary to sink their differences. The new social struggle has eclipsed the racial theory of nationality. The Social Democrat became the enemy, and the new reaction counted on the support of the rich Jews and the strongly individualist Jewish middle class to assist it in preserving the existing social structure. Hence in Prince Bülow’s “Bloc” (1908) anti-Semites figured side by side with Judeophil Radicals.
More serious have been the effects of German anti-Semitic teachings on the political and social life of the countries adjacent to the empire—Russia, Austria and France. In Russia these effects were first seriously felt owing to the fury of autocratic reaction to which the tragic death of the Russia.tsar Alexander II. gave rise. This, however, like the Strousberg Krach in Germany, was only the proximate cause of the outbreak. There were other elements which had created a milieu peculiarly favourable to the transplantation of the German craze. In the first place the medieval anti-Semitism was still an integral part of the polity of the empire. The Jews were cooped up in one huge ghetto in the western provinces, “marked out to all their fellow-countrymen as aliens, and a pariah caste set apart for special and degrading treatment” (Persecution of the Jews in Russia, 1891, p. 5). In the next place, owing to the emancipation of the serfs which had half ruined the landowners, while creating a free but moneyless peasantry, the Jews, who could be neither nobles nor peasants, had found a vocation as money-lenders and as middlemen between the grain producers, and the grain consumers and exporters. There is no evidence that this function was performed, as a rule, in an exorbitant or oppressive way. On the contrary, the fall in the value of cereals on all the provincial markets, after the riots of 1881, shows that the Jewish competition had previously assured full prices to the farmers (Schwabacher, Denkschrift, 1882, p. 27). Nevertheless, the Jewish activity or “exploitation,” as it was called, was resented, and the ill-feeling it caused among landowners and farmers was shared by non-Jewish middlemen and merchants who had thereby been compelled to be satisfied with small profits. Still there was but little thought of seeking a remedy in an organized anti-Jewish movement. On the contrary, the abnormal situation aggravated by the disappointments and depression caused by the Turkish war, had stimulated a widespread demand for constitutional changes which would enable the people to adopt a state-machinery more exactly suited to their needs. Among the peasantry this demand was promoted and fomented by the Nihilists, and among the landowners it was largely adopted as a means of checking what threatened to become a new Jacquerie (Walcker, Gegenwärtige Lage Russlands, 1873; Innere Krisis Russlands, 1876). The tsar, Alexander II., strongly sympathized ​with this movement, and on the advice of Count Loris-Melikov and the council of ministers a rudimentary scheme of parliamentary government had been drafted and actually signed when the emperor was assassinated. Meanwhile a nationalist and reactionary agitation, originating like its German analogue in the Hegelianism of a section of the lettered public, had manifested itself in Moscow. After some early vicissitudes, it had been organized, under the auspices of Alexis Kireiev, Chomyakov, Aksakov and Kochelev, into the Slavophil party, with a Romanticist programme of reforms based on the old traditions of the pre-Petrine epoch. This party gave a great impetus to Slav nationalism. Its final possibilities were sanguinarily illustrated by Muraviev’s campaign in Poland in 1863, and in the war against Turkey in 1877, which was exclusively its handiwork (Statement by General Kireiev: Schütz, Das heutige Russland, p. 104). After the assassination of Alexander II. the Slavophil teaching, as expounded by Ignatiev and Pobêdonostsev, became paramount in the government, and the new tsar was persuaded to cancel the constitutional project of his father. The more liberal views of a section of the Slavophils under Aksakov, who had been in favour of representative institutions on traditional lines, were displaced by the reactionary system of Pobêdonostsev, who took his stand on absolutism, orthodoxy and the racial unity of the Russian people. This was the situation on the eve of Easter 1881. The hardening nationalism above, the increasing discontent below, the economic activity of the Hebrew heretics and aliens, and the echoes of anti-Semitism from over the western border were combining for an explosion.
A scuffle in a tavern at Elisabethgrad in Kherson sufficed to ignite this combustible material. The scuffle grew into a riot, the tavern was sacked, and the drunken mob, hounded on by agitators who declared that the Jews were using Christian blood for the manufacture of their Easter bread, attacked and looted the Jewish quarter. The outbreak spread rapidly. On the 7th of May there was a similar riot at Smiela, near Cherkasy, and the following day there was a violent outbreak at Kiev, which left 2000 Jews homeless. Within a few weeks the whole of western Russia, from the Black Sea to the Baltic, was smoking with the ruins of Jewish homes. Scores of Jewish women were dishonoured, hundreds of men, women and children were slaughtered, and tens of thousands were reduced to beggary and left without a shelter. Murderous riots or incendiary outrages took place in no fewer than 167 towns and villages, including Warsaw, Odessa and Kiev. Europe had witnessed no such scenes of mob savagery since the Black Death massacres in the 14th century. As the facts gradually filtered through to the western capitals they caused a thrill of horror everywhere. An indignation meeting held at the Mansion House in London, under the presidency of the lord mayor, was the signal for a long series of popular demonstrations condemning the persecutions, held in most of the chief cities of England and the continent.
Except as stimulated by the Judeophobe revival in Germany the Russian outbreak in its earlier forms does not belong specifically to modern anti-Semitism. It was essentially a medieval uprising animated by the religious fanaticism, gross superstition and predatory instincts of a people still in the medieval stage of their development. This is proved by the fact that, although the Russian peasant was supposed to be a victim of unbearable Jewish “exploitation,” he was not moved to riot until he had been brutalized by drink and excited by the old fable of the Blood Accusation. The modern anti-Semitic element came from above and followed closely on the heels of the riots. It has been freely charged against the Russian government that it promoted the riots in 1881 in order to distract popular attention from the Nihilist propaganda and from the political disappointments involved in the cancellation of the previous tsar’s constitutional project (Lazare, L’Antisémitisme, p. 211). This seems to be true of General Ignatiev, then minister of the interior, and the secret police (Séménoff, The Russian Government and the Massacres, pp. 17, 32, 241). It is certain that the local authorities, both civil and military, favoured the outbreak, and took no steps to suppress it, and that the feudal bureaucracy who had just escaped a great danger were not sorry to see the discontented populace venting their passions on the Jews. In the higher circles of the government, however, other views prevailed. The tsar himself was at first persuaded that the riots were the work of Nihilists, and he publicly promised his protection to the Jews. On the other hand, his ministers, ardent Slavophils, thought they recognized in the outbreak an endorsement of the nationalist teaching of which they were the apostles, and, while reprobating the acts of violence, came to the conclusion that the most reasonable solution was to aggravate the legal disabilities of the persecuted aliens and heretics. To this view the tsar was won over, partly by the clamorous indignation of western Europe, which had wounded his national amour propre to the quick, and partly by the strongly partisan report of a commission appointed to inquire, not into the administrative complaisance which had allowed riot to run loose over the western and southern provinces, but into the “exploitation” alleged against the Jews, the reasons why “the former laws limiting the rights of the Jews” had been mitigated, and how these laws could be altered so as “to stop the pernicious conduct of the Jews” (Rescript of the 3rd of September 1881). The result of this report was the drafting of a “Temporary Order concerning the Jews” by the minister of the interior, which received the assent of the tsar on the 3rd of May 1882. This order, which was so little temporary that it has not yet been repealed, had the effect of creating a number of fresh ghettos within the pale of Jewish settlement. The Jews were cooped up within the towns, and their rural interests were arbitrarily confiscated. The doubtful incidence of the order gave rise to a number of judgments of the senate, by which all its persecuting possibilities were brought out, with the result that the activities of the Jews were completely paralysed, and they became a prey to unparalleled cruelty. As the gruesome effect of this legislation became known, a fresh outburst of horror and indignation swelled up from western Europe. It proved powerless. Count Ignatiev was dismissed owing to the protests of high-placed Russians, who were disgusted by the new Kulturkampf, but his work remained, and, under the influence of Pobêdonostsev, the procurator of the Holy Synod, the policy of the “May Laws,” as they were significantly called, was applied to every aspect of Jewish life with pitiless rigour. The temper of the tsar may be judged by the fact that when an appeal for mercy from an illustrious personage in England was conveyed to him at Fredensborg through the gracious medium of the tsaritsa, he angrily exclaimed within the hearing of an Englishman in the ante-room who was the bearer of the message, “Never let me hear you mention the name of that people again!”
The Russian May Laws are the most conspicuous legislative monument achieved by modern anti-Semitism. It is true that they re-enacted regulations which resemble the oppressive statutes introduced into Poland through the influence of the Jesuits in the 16th century (Sternberg, Gesch. d. Juden in Polen, pp. 141 et seq.), but their Orthodox authors were as little conscious of this irony of history as they were of the Teutonic origins of the whole Slavophil movement. These laws are an experimental application of the political principles extracted by Marr and his German disciples from the metaphysics of Hegel, and as such they afford a valuable means of testing the practical operation of modern anti-Semitism. Their result was a widespread commercial depression which was felt all over the empire. Even before the May Laws were definitely promulgated the passport registers showed that the anti-Semitic movement had driven 67,900 Jews across the frontier, and it was estimated that they had taken with them 13,000,000 roubles, representing a minimum loss of 60,000,000 roubles to the annual turnover of the country’s trade. Towards the end of 1882 it was calculated that the agitation had cost Russia as much as the whole Turkish war of 1877. Trade was everywhere paralysed. The enormous increase of bankruptcies, the transfer of investments to foreign funds, the consequent fall in the value of the rouble and the prices of Russian stocks, the suspension of farming operations owing to advances on growing crops being no longer available, the rise in the prices of the necessaries of life, and lastly, the ​appearance of famine, filled half the empire with gloom. Banks closed their doors, and the great provincial fairs proved failures. When it was proposed to expel the Jews from Moscow there was a loud outcry all over the sacred city, and even the Orthodox merchants, realizing that the measure would ruin their flourishing trade with the south and west, petitioned against it. The Moscow Exhibition proved a failure. Nevertheless the government persisted with its harsh policy, and Jewish refugees streamed by tens of thousands across the western frontier to seek an asylum in other lands. In 1891 the alarm caused by this emigration led to further protests from abroad. The citizens of London again assembled at Guildhall, and addressed a petition to the tsar on behalf of his Hebrew subjects. It was handed back to the lord mayor by the Russian ambassador, with a curt intimation that the emperor declined to receive it. At the same time orders were defiantly given that the May Laws should be strictly enforced. Meanwhile the Russian minister of finance was at his wits’ ends for money. Negotiations for a large loan had been entered upon with the house of Rothschild, and a preliminary contract had been signed, when, at the instance of the London firm, M. Wyshnigradski, the finance minister, was informed that unless the persecutions of the Jews were stopped the great banking-house would be compelled to withdraw from the operation. Deeply mortified by this attempt to deal with him de puissance à puissance, the tsar peremptorily broke off the negotiations, and ordered that overtures should be made to a non-Jewish French syndicate. In this way anti-Semitism, which had already so profoundly influenced the domestic politics of Europe, set its mark on the international relations of the powers, for it was the urgent need of the Russian treasury quite as much as the termination of Prince Bismarck’s secret treaty of mutual neutrality which brought about the Franco-Russian alliance (Daudet, Hist. Dipl. de l’Alliance Franco-Russe, pp. 259 et. seq.).
For nearly three years more the persecutions continued. Elated by the success of his crusade against the Jews, Pobêdonostsev extended his persecuting policy to other non-Orthodox denominations. The legislation against the Protestant Stundists became almost as unbearable as that imposed on the Jews. In the report of the Holy Synod, presented to the tsar towards the end of 1893, the procurator called for repressive measures against Roman Catholics, Moslems and Buddhists, and denounced the rationalist tendency of the whole system of secular education in the empire (Neue Freie Presse, 31st January 1894). A year later, however, the tsar died, and his successor, without repealing any of the persecuting laws, let it gradually be understood that their rigorous application might be mitigated. The country was tired and exhausted by the persecution, and the tolerant hints which came from high quarters were acted upon with significant alacrity.
A new era of conflict dawned with the great constitutional struggle towards the end of the century. The conditions, however, were very different from those which prevailed in the ’eighties. The May Laws had avenged themselves with singular fitness. By confining the Jews to the towns at the very moment that Count Witte’s policy of protection was creating an enormous industrial proletariat they placed at the disposal of the disaffected masses an ally powerful in numbers and intelligence, and especially in its bitter sense of wrong, its reckless despair and its cosmopolitan outlook and connexions. As early as 1885 the Jewish workmen assisted by Jewish university students led the way in the formation of trades unions. They also became the colporteurs of western European socialism, and they played an important part in the organization of the Russian Social Democratic Federation which their “Arbeiter Bund” joined in 1898 with no fewer than 30,000 members. The Jewish element in the new democratic movement excited the resentment of the government, and under the minister of the interior, M. Sipiaguine, the persecuting laws were once more rigorously enforced. The “Bund” replied in 1901 by proclaiming itself frankly political and revolutionary, and at once took a leading place in the revolutionary movement. The reactionaries were not slow to profit by this circumstance. With the support of M. Plehve, the new minister of the interior, and the whole of the bureaucratic class they denounced the revolution as a Jewish conspiracy, engineered for exclusively Jewish purposes and designed to establish a Jewish domination over the Russian people. The government and even the intimates of the tsar became persuaded that only by the terrorization of the Jews could the revolutionary movement be effectually dealt with. For this purpose a so-called League of True Russians was formed. Under high patronage, and with the assistance of the secret police and a large number of the local authorities, it set itself to stir up the populace, chiefly the fanatics and the hooligans, against the Jews. Incendiary proclamations were prepared and printed in the ministry of the interior itself, and were circulated by the provincial governors and the police (Prince Urussov’s speech in the Duma, June 8 (21), 1906). The result was another series of massacres which began at Kishinev in 1903 and culminated in wholesale butchery at Odessa and Bielostok in October 1905. An attempt was made to picture and excuse these outbreaks as a national upheaval against the Jew-made revolution but it failed. They only embittered the revolutionists and “intellectuals” throughout the country, and won for them a great deal of outspoken sympathy abroad. The artificiality of the anti-Jewish outbreak was illustrated by the first Duma elections. Thirteen Jews were elected and every constituency which had been the scene of a pogrom returned a liberal member. Unfortunately the Jews benefited little by the new parliamentary constitution. The privileges of voting for members of the Duma and of sitting in the new assembly were granted them, but all their civil and religious disabilities were maintained. Both the first and the second Duma proposed to emancipate them, but they were dissolved before any action could be taken. By the modification of the electoral law under which the third Duma was elected the voting power of the Jews was diminished and further restrictions were imposed upon them through official intimidation during the elections. The result was that only two Jews were elected, while the reactionary tendency of the new electorate virtually removed the question of their emancipation from the field of practical politics.
The only other country in Europe in which a legalized anti-Semitism exists is Rumania. The conditions are very similar to those which obtain in Russia, with the important difference that Rumania is a constitutional country, and that the Jewish persecutions are the work of the elected Rumania.deputies of the nation. Like the Bourgeois Gentilhomme who wrote prose all his life without knowing it, the Rumanians practised the nationalist doctrines of the Hegelian anti-Semites unconsciously long before they were formulated in Germany. In the old days of Turkish domination the lot of the Rumanian Jews was not conspicuously unhappy. It was only when the nation began to be emancipated, and the struggle in the East assumed the form of a crusade against Islam that the Jews were persecuted. Rumanian politicians preached a nationalism limited exclusively to indigenous Christians, and they were strongly supported by all who felt the commercial competition of the Jews. Thus, although the Jews had been settled in the land for many centuries, they were by law declared aliens. This was done in defiance of the treaty of Paris of 1856 and the convention of 1858 which declared all Rumans to be equal before the law. Under the influence of this distinction the Jews became persecuted, and sanguinary riots were of frequent occurrence. The realization of a Jewish question led to legislation imposing disabilities on the Jews. In 1878 the congress of Berlin agreed to recognize the independence of Rumania on condition that all religious disabilities were removed. Rumania agreed to this condition, but ultimately persuaded the powers to allow her to carry out the emancipation of the Jews gradually. Persecutions, however, continued, and in 1902 they led to a great exodus of Jews. The United States addressed a strong remonstrance to the Rumanian government, but the condition of the Jews was in no way improved. Their emancipation was in 1908 as far off as ever, and their disabilities heavier than those of their brethren in Russia. For this state of things the example of the anti-Semites in Germany, Russia, Austria and France was largely to blame, since it had justified the intolerance of the Rumans. Owing, also, to ​the fact that of late years Rumania had become a sort of annexe of the Triple Alliance, it was found impossible to induce the signatories of the treaty of Berlin to take action to compel the state to fulfil its obligations under that treaty.
In Austria-Hungary the anti-Semitic impulses came almost simultaneously from the North and East. Already in the ’seventies the doctrinaire anti-Semitism of Berlin had found an echo in Budapest. Two members of the diet, Victor Istoczy and Geza Onody, together with a Austria-Hungary.publicist named Georg Marczianyi, busied themselves in making known the doctrine of Marr in Hungary. Marczianyi, who translated the German Judeophobe pamphlets into Magyar, and the Magyar works of Onody into German, was the chief medium between the northern and southern schools. In 1880 Istoczy tried to establish a “Nichtjuden Bund” in Hungary, with statutes literally translated from those of the German anti-Semitic league. The movement, however, made no progress, owing to the stalwart Liberalism of the predominant political parties, and of the national principles inherited from the revolution of 1848. The large part played by the Jews in that struggle, and the fruitful patriotism with which they had worked for the political and economic progress of the country, had created, too, a strong claim on the gratitude of the best elements in the nation. Nevertheless, among the ultramontane clergy, the higher aristocracy, the ill-paid minor officials, and the ignorant peasantry, the seeds of a tacit anti-Semitism were latent. It was probably the aversion of the nobility from anything in the nature of a demagogic agitation which for a time prevented these seeds from germinating. The news of the uprising in Russia and the appearance of Jewish refugees on the frontier, had the effect of giving a certain prominence to the agitation of Istoczy and Onody and of exciting the rural communities, but it did not succeed in impressing the public with the pseudo-scientific doctrines of the new anti-Semitism. It was not until the agitators resorted to the Blood Accusation—that never-failing decoy of obscurantism and superstition—that Hungary took a definite place in the anti-Semitic movement. The outbreak was short and fortunately bloodless, but while it lasted its scandals shocked the whole of Europe.
Dr August Rohling, professor of Hebrew at the university of Prague, a Roman Catholic theologian of high position but dubious learning, had for some years assisted the Hungarian anti-Semites with réchauffés of Eisenmenger’s Entdecktes Judenthum (Frankfurt a/M. 1700). In 1881 he made a solemn deposition before the Supreme Court accusing the Jews of being bound by their law to work the moral and physical ruin of non-Jews. He followed this up with an offer to depose on oath that the murder of Christians for ritual purposes was a doctrine secretly taught among Jews. Professor Delitzsch and other eminent Hebraists, both Christian and Jewish, exposed and denounced the ignorance and malevolence of Rohling, but were unable to stem the mischief he was causing. In April 1882 a Christian girl named Esther Sobymossi was missed from the Hungarian village of Tisza Eszlar, where a small community of Jews were settled. The rumour got abroad that she had been kidnapped and murdered by the Jews, but it remained the burden of idle gossip, and gave rise to neither judicial complaint nor public disorders. At this moment the question of the Bosnian Pacification credits was before the diet. The unpopularity of the task assumed by Austria-Hungary, under the treaty of Berlin, which was calculated to strengthen the disaffected Croat element in the empire, had reduced the government majority to very small proportions, and all the reactionary factions in the country were accordingly in arms. The government was violently and unscrupulously attacked on all sides. On the 23rd of May there was a debate in the diet when M. Onody, in an incendiary harangue, told the story of the missing girl at Tisza Eszlar, and accused ministers of criminal indulgence to races alien to the national spirit. In the then excited state of the public mind on the Croat question, the manœuvre was adroitly conceived. The government fell into the trap, and treated the story with lofty disdain. Thereupon the anti-Semites set to work on the case, and M. Joseph Bary, the magistrate at Nyiregyhaza, and a noted anti-Semite, was induced to go to Tisza Eszlar and institute an inquiry. All the anti-liberal elements in the country now became banded together in this effort to discredit the liberal government, and for the first time the Hungarian anti-Semites found themselves at the head of a powerful party. Fifteen Jews were arrested and thrown into prison. No pains were spared in preparing the case for trial. Perjury and even forgery were freely resorted to. The son of one of the accused, a boy of fourteen, was taken into custody by the police, and by threats and cajoleries prevailed upon to give evidence for the prosecution. He was elaborately coached for the terrible rôle he was to play. The trial opened at Nyiregyhaza on the 19th of June, and lasted till the 3rd of August. It was one of the most dramatic causes célèbres of the century. Under the brilliant cross-examination of the advocates for the defence the whole of the shocking conspiracy was gradually exposed. The public prosecutor thereupon withdrew from the case, and the four judges—the chief of whom held strong anti-Semitic opinions—unanimously acquitted all the prisoners. The case proved the death-blow of Hungarian anti-Semitism. Although another phase of the Jewish question, which will be referred to presently, had still to occupy the public mind, the shame brought on the nation by the Tisza Eszlar conspiracy effectually prevented the anti-Semites from raising their voices with any effect again.
Meanwhile a more formidable and complicated outburst was preparing in Austria itself. Here the lines of the German agitation were closely followed, but with far more dramatic results. It was exclusively political—that is to say, it appealed to anti-Jewish prejudices for party purposes while it sought to rehabilitate them on a pseudo-scientific basis, racial and economic. At first it was confined to sporadic pamphleteers. By their side there gradually grew up a school of Christian Socialists, recruited from the ultra-Clericals, for the study and application of the doctrines preached at Mainz by Archbishop Ketteler. This constituted a complete Austrian analogue to the Evangelical-Socialist movement started in Germany by Herr Stöcker. For some years the two movements remained distinct, but signs of approximation were early visible. Thus one of the first complaints of the anti-Semites was that the Jews were becoming masters of the soil. This found an echo in the agrarian principles of the Christian Socialists, as expounded by Rudolph Meyer, in which individualism in landed property was admitted on the condition that the landowners were “the families of the nation” and not “cosmopolitan financiers.” A further indication of anti-Semitism is found in a speech delivered in 1878 by Prince Alois von Liechtenstein (b. 1846), the most prominent disciple of Rudolph Meyer, who denounced the national debt as a tribute paid by the state to cosmopolitan rentiers (Nitti, Catholic Socialism, pp. 200, 201, 211, 216). The growing disorder in parliament, due to the bitter struggle between the German and Czech parties, served to bring anti-Semitism into the field of practical politics. Since 1867 the German Liberals had been in power. They had made enemies of the Clericals by tampering with the concordat, and they had split up their own party by the federalist policy adopted by Count Taaffe. The Radical secessionists in their turn found it difficult to agree, and an ultra-national German wing formed itself into a separate party under the leadership of Ritter von Schönerer (b. 1842), a Radical nationalist of the most violent type. In 1882 two anti-Semitic leagues had been founded in Vienna, and to these the Radical nationalists now appealed for support. The growing importance of the party led the premier, Count Taaffe, to angle for the support of the Clericals by accepting a portion of the Christian Socialist programme. The hostility this excited in the liberal press, largely written by Jews, served to bring the feudal Christian Socialists and Radical anti-Semites together. In 1891 these strangely assorted factions became consolidated, and during the elections of that year Prince Liechtenstein came forward as an anti-Semitic candidate and the acknowledged leader of the party. The elections resulted in the return of fifteen anti-Semites to the Reichsrath, chiefly from Vienna.
Although Prince Liechtenstein and the bulk of the Christian ​Socialists had joined the anti-Semites with the support of the Clerical organ, the Vaterland, the Clerical party as a whole still held aloof from the Jew-baiters. The events of 1892–1895 put an end to their hesitation. The Hungarian government, in compliance with long-standing pledges to the liberal party, introduced into the diet a series of ecclesiastical reform bills providing for civil marriage, freedom of worship, and the legal recognition of Judasim on an equality with other denominations. These proposals, which synchronized with Ahlwardt’s turbulent agitation in Germany, gave a great impulse to anti-Semitism and served to drive into its ranks a large number of Clericals. The agitation was taken in hand by the Roman Catholic clergy, and the pulpits resounded with denunciations of the Jews. One clergyman, Father Deckert, was prosecuted for preaching the Blood Accusation and convicted (1894). Cardinal Schlauch, bishop of Grosswardein, declared in the Hungarian House of Magnates that the Liberals were in league with “cosmopolitans” for the ruin of the country. In October 1894 the magnates adopted two of the ecclesiastical bills with amendments, but threw out the Jewish bill by a majority of six. The crown sided with the magnates, and the ministry resigned, although it had a majority in the Lower House. An effort was made to form a Clerical cabinet, but it failed. Baron Banffy was then entrusted with the construction of a fresh Liberal ministry. The announcement that he would persist with the ecclesiastical bills lashed the Clericals and anti-Semites into a fury, and the agitation broke out afresh. The pope addressed a letter to Count Zichy encouraging the magnates to resist, and once more two of the bills were amended, and the third rejected. The papal nuncio, Mgr. Agliardi, now thought proper to pay a visit to Budapest, where he allowed himself to be interviewed on the crisis. This interference in the domestic concerns of Hungary was deeply resented by the Liberals, and Baron Banffy requested Count Kalnoky, the imperial minister of foreign affairs, to protest against it at the Vatican. Count Kalnoky refused and tendered his resignation to the emperor. Clerical sympathies were predominant in Vienna, and the emperor was induced for a moment to decline the count’s resignation. It soon became clear, however, that the Hungarians were resolved to see the crisis out, and that in the end Vienna would be compelled to give way. The emperor accordingly retraced his steps, Count Kalnoky’s resignation was accepted, the papal nuncio was recalled, a batch of new magnates were created, and the Hungarian ecclesiastical bills passed.
Simultaneously with this crisis another startling phase of the anti-Semitic drama was being enacted in Vienna itself. Encouraged by the support of the Clericals the anti-Semites resolved to make an effort to carry the Vienna municipal elections. So far the alliance of the Clericals with the anti-Semites had been unofficial, but on the eve of the elections (January 1895) the pope, influenced partly by the Hungarian crisis and partly by an idea of Cardinal Rampolla that the best antidote to democratic socialism would be a clerically controlled fusion of the Christian Socialists and anti-Semites, sent his blessing to Prince Liechtenstein and his followers. This action alarmed the government and a considerable body of the higher episcopate, who felt assured that any permanent encouragement given to the anti-Semites would in the end strengthen the parties of sedition and disorder. Cardinal Schönborn was despatched in haste to Rome to expostulate with the pontiff, and his representations were strongly supported by the French and Belgian bishops. The mischief was however, done, and although the pope sent a verbal message to Prince Liechtenstein excluding the anti-Semites from his blessing, the elections resulted in a great triumph for the Jew-haters. The municipal council was immediately dissolved by the government, and new elections were ordered, but these only strengthened the position of the anti-Semites, who carried 92 seats out of a total of 138. A cabinet crisis followed, and the premiership was entrusted to the Statthalter of Galicia, Count Badeni, who assumed office with a pledge of war to the knife against anti-Semitism. In October the new municipal council elected as burgomaster of Vienna Dr Karl Lueger (b. 1844), a vehement anti-Semite, who had displaced Prince Liechtenstein as leader of the party. The emperor declined to sanction the election, but the council repeated it in face of the imperial displeasure. Once more a dissolution was ordered, and for three months the city was governed by administrative commissioners. In February 1896 elections were again held, and the anti-Semites were returned with an increased majority. The emperor then capitulated, and after a temporary arrangement, by which for one year Dr Lueger acted as vice-burgomaster and handed over the burgomastership to an inoffensive nominee, permitted the municipal council to have its way. The growing anarchy in parliament at this moment served still further to strengthen the anti-Semites, and their conquest of Vienna was speedily followed by a not less striking conquest of the Landtag of Lower Austria (November 1896).
Since then a reaction of sanity has slowly but surely asserted itself. In 1908 the anti-Semites had governed Vienna twelve years, and, although they had accomplished much mischief, the millennium of which they were supposed to be the heralds had not dawned. On the contrary, the commercial interests of the city had suffered and the rates had been enormously increased (Neue Freie Presse, 29th March 1901), while the predatory hopes which secured them office had only been realized on a small and select scale. The spectacle of a Clerico-anti-Semitic tammany in Vienna had strengthened the resistance of the better elements in the country. Time had also shown that Christian Socialism is only a disguise for high Toryism, and that the German Radicals who were originally induced to join the anti-Semites had been victimized by the Clericals. The fruits of this disillusion began to show themselves in the general elections of 1900–1901, when the anti-Semites lost six seats in the Reichsrath. The elections were followed (26th January 1901) by a papal encyclical on Christian democracy, in which Christian Socialism was declared to be a term unacceptable to the Church, and the faithful were adjured to abstain from agitation of a demagogic and revolutionary character, and “to respect the rights of others.” Nevertheless, in 1907 the Christian Socialists trebled their representation in the Reichsrath. This, however, was due more to their alliance with the German national parties than to any large increase of anti-Semitism in the electorate.
The last country in Europe to make use of the teachings of German anti-Semitism in its party politics was France. The fact that the movement should have struck root in a republican country, where the ideals of democratic freedom have been so passionately cultivated, has been regarded France.as one of the paradoxes of our latter-day history. As a matter of fact, it is more surprising that it was not adopted earlier. All the social and political conditions which produced anti-Semitism in Germany were present in France, but in an aggravated form due primarily to the very republican régime which at first sight seemed to be a guarantee against it. In the monarchical states the dominance of the bourgeoisie was tempered in a measure by the power of the crown and the political activity of the aristocracy, which carried with them a very real restraining influence in the matter of political honour and morality. In France these restraining influences were driven out of public life by the republic. The nobility both of the ancien régime and the empire stood aloof, and politics were abandoned for the most part to professional adventurers, while the bourgeoisie assumed the form of an omnipotent plutocracy. This naturally attracted to France all the financial adventurers in Europe, and in the train of the immigration came not a few German Jews, alienated from their own country by the agitation of Marr and Stöcker. Thus the bourgeoisie was not only more powerful in France than in other countries, but the obnoxiousness of its Jewish element was accentuated by a tinge of the national enemy. The anti-clericalism of the bourgeois republic and its unexampled series of financial scandals, culminating in the Panama “Krach,” thus sufficed to give anti-Semitism a strong hold on the public mind.
Nevertheless, it was not until 1882 that the anti-Jewish movement was seriously heard of in France. Paul Bontoux (b. 1820), who had formerly been in the employ of the Rothschilds, ​but had been obliged to leave the firm in consequence of his disastrous speculations, had joined the Legitimist party, and had started the Union Générale with funds obtained from his new allies. Bontoux promised to break up the alleged financial monopoly of the Jews and Protestants and to found a new plutocracy in its stead, which should be mainly Roman Catholic and aristocratic. The bait was eagerly swallowed. For five years the Union Générale, with the blessing of the pope, pursued an apparently prosperous career. Immense schemes were undertaken, and the 125-fr. shares rose gradually to 3200 francs. The whole structure, however, rested on a basis of audacious speculation, and in January 1882 the Union Générale failed, with liabilities amounting to 212,000,000 francs. The cry was at once raised that the collapse was due to the manœuvres of the Jews, and a strong anti-Semitic feeling manifested itself in clerical and aristocratic circles. In 1886 violent expression was given to this feeling in a book since become famous, La France juive, by Edouard Drumont (b. 1844). The author illustrated the theories of German anti-Semitism with a chronique scandaleuse full of piquant personalities, in which the corruption of French national life under Jewish influences was painted in alarming colours. The book was read with avidity by the public, who welcomed its explanations of the obviously growing debauchery. The Wilson scandals and the suspension of the Panama Company in the following year, while not bearing out Drumont’s anti-Semitism, fully justified his view of the prevailing corruption. Out of this condition of things rose the Boulangist movement, which rallied all the disaffected elements in the country, including Drumont’s following of anti-Semites. It was not, however, until the flight of General Boulanger and the ruin of his party that anti-Semitism came forward as a political movement.
The chief author of the rout of Boulangism was a Jewish politician and journalist, Joseph Reinach (b. 1856), formerly private secretary to Gambetta, and one of the ablest men in France. He was a Frenchman by birth and education, but his father and uncles were Germans, who had founded an important banking establishment in Paris. Hence he was held to personify the alien Jewish domination in France, and the ex-Boulangists turned against him and his co-religionists with fury. The Boulangist agitation had for a second time involved the Legitimists in heavy pecuniary losses, and under the leadership of the marquis de Morès they now threw all their influence on the side of Drumont. An anti-Semitic league was established, and with Royalist assistance branches were organized all over the country. The Franco-Russian alliance in 1891, when the persecutions of the Jews by Pobêdonostsev were attracting the attention of Europe, served to invest Drumont’s agitation with a fashionable and patriotic character. It was a sign of the spiritual approximation of the two peoples. In 1892 Drumont founded a daily anti-Semitic newspaper, La Libre Parole. With the organization of this journal a regular campaign for the discovery of scandals was instituted. At the same time a body of aristocratic swashbucklers, with the marquis de Morès and the comte de Lamase at their head, set themselves to terrorize the Jews and provoke them to duels. At a meeting held at Neuilly in 1891, Jules Guérin, one of the marquis de Morès’s lieutenants, had demanded rhetorically un cadavre de Juif. He had not long to wait. Anti-Semitism was most powerful in the army, which was the only branch of the public service in which the reactionary classes were fully represented. The republican law compelling the seminarists to serve their term in the army had strengthened its Clerical and Royalist elements, and the result was a movement against the Jewish officers, of whom 500 held commissions. A series of articles in the Libre Parole attacking these officers led to a number of ferocious duels, and these culminated in 1892 in the death of an amiable and popular Jewish officer, Captain Armand Mayer, of the Engineers, who fell, pierced through the lungs by the marquis de Morès. This tragedy, rendered all the more painful by the discovery that Captain Mayer had chivalrously fought to shield a friend, aroused a great deal of popular indignation against the anti-Semites, and for a moment it was believed that the agitation had been killed with its victim.
Towards the end of 1892, the discovery of the widespread corruption practised by the Panama Company gave a fresh impulse to anti-Semitism. The revelations were in a large measure due to the industry of the Libre Parole; and they were all the more welcome to the readers of that journal since it was discovered that three Jews were implicated in the scandals, one of whom, baron de Reinach, was uncle and father-in-law to the hated destroyer of Boulangism. The escape of the other two, Dr Cornelius Herz and M. Arton, and the difficulties experienced in obtaining their extradition, deepened the popular conviction that the authorities were implicated in the scandals, and kept the public eye for a long time absorbed by the otherwise restricted Jewish aspects of the scandals. In 1894 the military side of the agitation was revived by the arrest of a prominent Jewish staff officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, on a charge of treason. From the beginning the hand of the anti-Semite was flagrant in the new sensation. The first hint of the arrest appeared in the Libre Parole; and before the facts had been officially communicated to the public that journal was busy with a campaign against the war minister, based on the apprehension that, in conspiracy with the Juiverie and his republican colleagues, he might exert himself to shield the traitor. Anti-Semitic feeling was now thoroughly aroused. Panama had prepared the people to believe anything; and when it was announced that a court-martial, sitting in secret, had convicted Dreyfus, there was a howl of execration against the Jews from one end of the country to the other, although the alleged crime of the convict and the evidence by which it was supported were quite unknown. Dreyfus was degraded and transported for life amid unparalleled scenes of public excitement.
The Dreyfus Case registers the climax not only of French, but of European anti-Semitism. It was the most ambitious and most unscrupulous attempt yet made to prove the nationalist hypothesis of the anti-Semites, and in its failure it afforded the most striking illustration of the dangers of the whole movement by bringing France to the verge of revolution. For a few months after the Dreyfus court-martial there was a comparative lull; but the highly strung condition of popular passion was illustrated by a violent debate on “The Jewish Peril” in the Chamber of Deputies (25th April 1895), and by two outrages with explosives at the Rothschild bank in Paris. Meanwhile the family of Dreyfus, absolutely convinced of his innocence, were casting about for the means of clearing his character and securing his liberation. They were wealthy, and their activity unsettled the public mind and aroused the apprehensions of the conspirators. Had the latter known how to preserve silence, the mystery would perhaps have been yet unsolved; but in their anxiety to allay all suspicions they made one false step, which proved the beginning of their ruin. Through their friends in the press they secured the publication of a facsimile of a document known as the Bordereau—a list of documents supposed to be in Dreyfus’s handwriting and addressed apparently to the military attaché of a foreign power, which was alleged to constitute the chief evidence against the convict. It was hoped by this publication to put an end to the doubts of the so-called Dreyfusards. The result, however, was only to give them a clue on which they worked with remarkable ingenuity. To prove that the Bordereau was not in Dreyfus’s handwriting was not difficult. Indeed, its authorship was recognized almost on the day of publication; but the Dreyfusards held their hands in order to make assurance doubly sure by further evidence. Meanwhile one of the officers of the general staff, Colonel Picquart, had convinced himself by an examination of the dossier of the trial that a gross miscarriage of justice had taken place. On mentioning his doubts to his superiors, who were animated partly by anti-Semitic feeling and partly by reluctance to confess to a mistake, he was ordered to the Tunisian hinterland on a dangerous expedition. Before leaving Paris, however, he took the precaution to confide his discovery to his legal adviser. Harassed by their anxieties, the conspirators made further communications to the newspapers; and the government, questioned and badgered in parliament, added to the revelations. The new disclosures, so far from ​stopping the Dreyfusards, proved to them, among other things, that the conviction had been partially based on documents which had not been communicated to the counsel for the defence, and hence that the judges had been tampered with by the ministry of war behind the prisoner’s back. So far, too, as these documents related to correspondence with foreign military attachés, it was soon ascertained that they were forgeries. In this way a terrible indictment was gradually drawn up against the ministry of war. The first step was taken towards the end of 1897 by a brother of Captain Dreyfus, who, in a letter to the minister of war, denounced Major Esterhazy as the real author of the Bordereau. The authorities, supported by parliament, declined to reopen the Dreyfus Case, but they ordered a court-martial on Esterhazy, which was held with closed doors and resulted in his acquittal. It now became clear that nothing short of an appeal to public opinion and a full exposure of all the iniquities that had been perpetrated would secure justice at the hands of the military chiefs. On behalf of Dreyfus, Émile Zola, the eminent novelist, formulated the case against the general staff of the army in an open letter to the president of the republic, which by its dramatic accusations startled the whole world. The letter was denounced as wild and fantastic even by those who were in favour of revision. Zola was prosecuted for libel and convicted, and had to fly the country; but the agitation he had started was taken in hand by others, notably M. Clemenceau, M. Reinach and M. Yves Guyot. In August 1898 their efforts found their first reward. A re-examination of the documents in the case by M. Cavaignac, then minister of war, showed that one was undoubtedly forged. Colonel Henry, of the intelligence department of the war office, then confessed that he had fabricated the document, and, on being sent to Mont Valérien under arrest, cut his throat.
In spite of this damaging discovery the war office still persisted in believing Dreyfus guilty, and opposed a fresh inquiry. It was supported by three successive ministers of war, and apparently an overwhelming body of public opinion. By this time the question of the guilt or innocence of Dreyfus had become an altogether subsidiary issue. As in Germany and Austria, the anti-Semitic crusade had passed into the hands of the political parties. On the one hand the Radicals and Socialists, recognizing the anti-republican aims of the agitators and alarmed by the clerical predominance in the army, had thrown in their lot with the Dreyfusards; on the other the reactionaries, anxious to secure the support of the army, took the opposite view, denounced their opponents as sans patrie, and declared that they were conspiring to weaken and degrade the army in the face of the national enemy. The controversy was, consequently, no longer for or against Dreyfus, but for or against the army, and behind it was a life-or-death struggle between the republic and its enemies. The situation became alarming. Rumours of military plots filled the air. Powerful leagues for working up public feeling were formed and organized; attempts to discredit the republic and intimidate the government were made. The president was insulted; there were tumults in the streets, and an attempt was made by M. Déroulède to induce the military to march on the Elysée and upset the republic. In this critical situation France, to her eternal honour, found men with sufficient courage to do the right. The Socialists, by rallying to the Radicals against the reactionaries, secured a majority for the defence of the republic in parliament. Brisson’s cabinet transmitted to the court of cassation an application for the revision of the case against Dreyfus; and that tribunal, after an elaborate inquiry, which fully justified Zola’s famous letter, quashed and annulled the proceedings of the court-martial, and remitted the accused to another court-martial, to be held at Rennes. Throughout these proceedings the military party fought tooth and nail to impede the course of justice; and although the innocence of Dreyfus had been completely established, it concentrated all its efforts to secure a fresh condemnation of the prisoner at Rennes. Popular passion was at fever heat, and it manifested itself in an attack on M. Labori, one of the counsel for the defence, who was shot and wounded on the eve of his cross-examination of the witnesses for the prosecution. To the amazement and indignation of the whole world outside France, the Rennes court-martial again found the prisoner guilty; but all reliance on the conscientiousness of the verdict was removed by a rider, which found “extenuating circumstances,” and by a reduction of the punishment to ten years’ imprisonment, to which was added a recommendation to mercy. The verdict was evidently an attempt at a compromise, and the government resolved to advise the president of the republic to pardon Dreyfus. This lame conclusion did not satisfy the accused; but his innocence had been so clearly proved, and on political grounds there were such urgent reasons for desiring a termination of the affair, that it was accepted without protest by the majority of moderate men.
The rehabilitation of Dreyfus, however, did not pass without another effort on the part of the reactionaries to turn the popular passions excited by the case to their own advantage. After the failure of Déroulède’s attempt to overturn the republic, the various Royalist and Boulangist leagues, with the assistance of the anti-Semites, organized another plot. This was discovered by the government, and the leaders were arrested. Jules Guérin, secretary of the anti-Semitic league, shut himself up in the league offices in the rue Chabrol, Paris, which had been fortified and garrisoned by a number of his friends, armed with rifles. For more than a month these anti-Semites held the authorities at bay, and some 5000 troops were employed in the siege. The conspirators were all tried by the senate, sitting as a high court, and Guérin was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. The evidence showed that the anti-Semitic organization had taken an active part in the anti-republican plot (see the report of the Commission d’Instruction in the Petit Temps, 1st November 1899).
The government now resolved to strike at the root of the mischief by limiting the power of the religious orders, and with this view a drastic Association bill was introduced into the chambers. This anti-clerical move provoked the wildest passions of the reactionaries, but it found an overwhelming support in the elections of 1902 and the bill became law. The war thus definitely reopened soon led to a revival of the Dreyfus controversy. The nationalists flooded the country with incendiary defamations of “the government of national treason,” and Dreyfus on his part loudly demanded a fresh trial. It was clear that conciliation and compromise were useless. Early in 1905 M. Jaurès urged upon the chamber that the demand of the Jewish officer should be granted if only to tranquillize the country. The necessary faits nouveaux were speedily found by the minister of war, General André, and having been examined by a special commission of revision were ordered to be transmitted to the court of cassation for final adjudication. On the 12th of July 1906, the court, all chambers united, gave its judgment. After a lengthy review of the case it declared unanimously that the whole accusation against Dreyfus had been disproved, and it quashed the judgment of the Rennes court-martial sans renvoi. The explanation of the whole case is that Esterhazy and Henry were the real culprits; that they had made a trade of supplying the German government with military documents; and that once the Bordereau was discovered they availed themselves of the anti-Jewish agitation to throw suspicion on Dreyfus.
Thus ended this famous case, to the relief of the whole country and with the approval of the great majority of French citizens. Except a knot of anti-Semitic monomaniacs all parties bowed loyally to the judgment of the court of cassation. The government gave the fullest effect to the judgment. Dreyfus and Picquart were restored to the active list of the army with the ranks respectively of major and general of brigade. Dreyfus was also created a knight of the Legion of Honour, and received the decoration in public in the artillery pavilion of the military school. Zola, to whose efforts the triumph of truth was chiefly due, had not been spared to witness the final scene, but the chambers decided to give his remains a last resting-place in the Pantheon. When three months later M. Clémenceau formed his first cabinet he appointed General Picquart minister of war. Nothing indeed was left undone to repair the terrible series of wrongs which had grown out of the Dreyfus case. Nevertheless its destructive work could not be wholly healed. For over ten years it had been ​a nightmare to France, and it now modified the whole course of French history. In the ruin of the French Church, which owed its disestablishment very largely to the Dreyfus conspiracy, may be read the most eloquent warning against the demoralizing madness of anti-Semitism.
In sympathy with the agitation in France there has been a similar movement in Algeria, where the European population have long resented the admission of the native Jews to the rights of French citizenship. The agitation has been marked by much violence, and most of the anti-Semitic deputies in the French parliament, including M. Drumont, have found constituencies in Algeria. As the local anti-Semites are largely Spaniards and Levantine riff-raff, the agitation has not the peculiar nationalist bias which characterizes continental anti-Semitism. Before the energy of the authorities it has lately shown signs of subsiding.
While the main activity of anti-Semitism has manifested itself in Germany, Russia, Rumania, Austria-Hungary and France, its vibratory influences have been felt in other countries when conditions favourable to its extension have presented themselves. In England more than one Great Britain, &c.attempt to acclimatize the doctrines of Marr and Treitschke has been made. The circumstance that at the time of the rise of German anti-Semitism a premier of Hebrew race, Lord Beaconsfield, was in power first suggested the Jewish bogey to English political extremists. The Eastern crisis of 1876–1878, which was regarded by the Liberal party as primarily a struggle between Christianity, as represented by Russia, and a degrading Semitism, as represented by Turkey, accentuated the anti-Jewish feeling, owing to the anti-Russian attitude adopted by the government. Violent expression to the ancient prejudices against the Jews was given by Sir J. G. Tollemache Sinclair (A Defence of Russia, 1877). Mr T. P. O’Connor, in a life of Lord Beaconsfield (1878), pictured him as the instrument of the Jewish people, “moulding the whole policy of Christendom to Jewish aims.” Professor Goldwin Smith, in several articles in the Nineteenth Century (1878, 1881 and 1882), sought to synthesize the growing anti-Jewish feeling by adopting the nationalist theories of the German anti-Semites. This movement did not fail to find an equivocal response in the speeches of some of the leading Liberal statesmen; but on the country generally it produced no effect. It was revived when the persecutions in Russia threatened England with a great influx of Polish Jews, whose mode of life was calculated to lower the standard of living in the industries in which they were employed, and it has left its trace in the anti-alien legislation of 1905. In 1883 Stöcker visited London, but received a very unflattering reception. Abortive attempts to acclimatize anti-Semitism have also been made in Switzerland, Belgium, Greece and the United States.
Anti-Semitism made a great deal of history during the thirty years up to 1908, but has left no permanent mark of a constructive kind on the social and political evolution of Europe. It is the fruit of a great ethnographic and political error, and it has spent itself in political intrigues of transparent dishonesty. Its racial doctrine is at best a crude hypothesis: its nationalist theory has only served to throw into striking relief the essentially economic bases of modern society, while its political activity has revealed the vulgarity and ignorance which constitute its main sources of strength. So far from injuring the Jews, it has really given Jewish racial separatism a new lease of life. Its extravagant accusations, as in the Tisza Eszlar and Dreyfus cases, have resulted in the vindication of the Jewish character. Its agitation generally, coinciding with the revival of interest in Jewish history, has helped to transfer Jewish solidarity from a religious to a racial basis. The bond of a common race, vitalized by a new pride in Hebrew history and spurred on to resistance by the insults of the anti-Semites, has given a new spirit and a new source of strength to Judaism at a moment when the approximation of ethical systems and the revolt against dogma were sapping its essentially religious foundations. In the whole history of Judaism, perhaps, there have been no more numerous or remarkable instances of reversions to the faith than in the period in question. The reply of the Jews to anti-Semitism has taken two interesting practical forms. In the first place there is the so-called Zionist movement, which is a kind of Jewish nationalism and is vitiated by the same errors that distinguish its anti-Semitic analogue (see Zionism). In the second place, there is a movement represented by the Maccabaeans’ Society in London, which seeks to unite the Jewish people in an effort to raise the Jewish character and to promote a higher consciousness of the dignity of the race. It lays no stress on orthodoxy, but welcomes all who strive to render Jewish conduct an adequate reply to the theories of the anti-Semites. Both these movements are elements of fresh vitality to Judaism, and they are probably destined to produce important fruit in future years. A splendid spirit of generosity has also been displayed by the Jewish community in assisting and relieving the victims of the Jew-haters. Besides countless funds raised by public subscription, Baron de Hirsch founded a colossal scheme for transplanting persecuted Jews to new countries under new conditions of life, and endowed it with no less a sum than £9,000,000 (see Hirsch, Maurice de).
Though anti-Semitism has been unmasked and discredited, it is to be feared that its history is not yet at an end. While there remain in Russia and Rumania over six millions of Jews who are being systematically degraded, and who periodically overflow the western frontier, there must continue to be a Jewish question in Europe; and while there are weak governments, and ignorant and superstitious elements in the enfranchized classes of the countries affected, that question will seek to play a part in politics.
Literature.—No impartial history of modern anti-Semitism has yet been written. The most comprehensive works on the subject, Israel among the Nations, by A. Leroy-Beaulieu (1895), and L’Antisémitisme, son histoire et ses causes, by Bernard Lazare (1894), are collections of studies rather than histories. M. Lazare’s work will be found most useful by the student on account of its detached standpoint and its valuable bibliographical notes. A good list of works relating to Jewish ethnography will be found at the end of M. Isidor Loeb’s valuable article, “Juifs,” in the Dictionnaire universel de géographie (1884). To these should be added, Adolf Jellinek, Der Jüdische Stamm (1869); Chwolson, Die semitischen Völker (1872); Nossig, Materialien zur Statistik (1887); Jacobs, Jewish Statistics (1891); and Andree, Zur Volkskunde der Juden (1881). A bibliography of the Jewish question from 1875 to 1884 has been published by Mr Joseph Jacobs (1885). Useful additions and rectifications will be found in the Jewish World, 11th September 1885. During the period since 1885 the anti-Semitic movement has produced an immense pamphlet literature. Some of these productions have already been referred to; others will be found in current bibliographies under the names of the personages mentioned, such as Stöcker, Ahlwardt, &c. On the Russian persecutions, besides the works quoted by Jacobs, see the pamphlet issued by the Russo-Jewish Committee in 1890, and the annual reports of the Russo-Jewish Mansion House Fund; Les Juifs de Russie (Paris, 1891); Report of the Commissioners of Immigration upon the Causes which incite Immigration to the United States (Washington, 1892); The New Exodus, by Harold Frederic (1892); Les Juifs russes, by Leo Errera (Brussels, 1893). The most valuable collection of facts relating to the persecutions of 1881–1882 are to be found in the Feuilles Jaunes (52 nos.), compiled and circulated for the information of the European press by the Alliance Israélite of Paris. Complete collections are very scarce. For the struggle during the past decade the Russische Correspondenz of Berlin should be consulted, together with its French and English editions. See also the publications of the Bund (Geneva; Imprimerie Israélite); Séménoff, The Russian Government and the Massacres, and Quarterly Review, October 1906. On the Rumanian question, see Bluntschli, Roumania and the Legal Status of the Jews (London, 1879); Wir Juden (Zürich, 1883); Schloss, The Persecution of the Jews in Roumania (London, 1885); Schloss, Notes of Information (1886); Sincerus, Juifs en Roumanie (London, 1901); Plotke, Die rumänischen Juden unter dem Fürsten u. König Karl (1901); Dehn, Diplomatie u. Hochfinanz in der rumänischen Judenfrage (1901); Conybeare, “Roumania as a Persecuting Power,” Nat. Rev., February 1901. On Hungary and the Tisza Eszlar Case, see (besides the references in Jacobs) Nathan, Der Prozess von Tisza Eszlar (Berlin, 1892). On this case and the Blood Accusation generally, see Wright, “The Jews and the Malicious Charge of Human Sacrifice,” Nineteenth Century, 1883. The origins of the Austrian agitation are dealt with by Nitti, Catholic Socialism (1895). This work, though inclining to anti-Semitism, should be consulted for the Christian Socialist elements in the whole continental agitation. The most valuable source of information on the Austrian movement is the Österreichische Wochenschrift, edited by Dr Bloch. See also pamphlets and speeches by the anti-Semitic leaders, Liechtenstein, Lueger, Schoenerer, &c. The case of the French anti-Semites is stated by E. Drumont in his France juive, ​and other works; the other side by Isidor Loeb, Bernard Lazare, Leonce Reynaud, &c. Of the Dreyfus Case there is an enormous literature: see especially the reports of the Zola and Picquart trials, the revision case before the Court of Cassation, the proceedings of the Rennes court-martial, and the final judgment of the Court of Cassation printed in full in the Figaro, July 15, 1906; also Reinach, Histoire de l’affaire Dreyfus (Paris, 1908, 6 vols.), and the valuable series of volumes by Captain Paul Marin, MM. Clémenceau, Lazare, Yves Guyot, Paschal Grousset, Urbain Gohier, de Haime, de Pressensé, and the remarkable letters of Dreyfus (Lettres d’un innocent). An English history of the case was published by F. C. Conybeare (1898), whose articles and those of Sir Godfrey Lushington and L. J. Maxse in the National Review, 1897–1900, will be found invaluable by the student. On the Algerian question, see M. Wahl in the Revue des études juives; L. Forest, Naturalisation des Israélites algériens; and E. Audinet in the Revue générale de droit international publique, 1897, No. 4. On the history of the anti-Semitic movement generally, see the annual reports of the Alliance Israélite of Paris and the Anglo-Jewish Association of London, also the annual summaries published at the end of the Jewish year by the Jewish Chronicle of London. The connexion of the movement with general party politics must be followed in the newspapers. The present writer has worked with a collection of newspaper cuttings numbering several thousands and ranging over thirty years. (L. W.)