How the German Jews failed

THE EMERGENCE of antisemitic political parties in the 19th century followed increased enfranchisement and free elections: in a democracy, an antisemitic electorate will elect antisemites. By the end of the 19th century there were about 50 antisemitic European parties, and antisemitism as a vote-getter could help win elections.

The German Jews, being the most thoroughly assimilated in the 19th century, were among the most troubled by the rise of antisemitism as it threatened their newly-won emancipation and rights as Germans in the newly-unified state (as of 1871).

To deal with the problem, they founded in 1893 the official communal representative of German Jewry, the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (known as the C.V.).

This became one of the most important Jewish organisations of the preHolocaust age (by 1933 the C.V. had about 50,000 members in a community of about 600,000). The C.V. aimed to defend the German Jews against antisemitism – or, as its charter put it, to achieve “the protection of the civil and social rights of the German Jews”. So, why did the C.V. fail?

Part of the difficulty involved selfimage: the C.V. presented itself as a German organisation representing a fiercely patriotic community that saw itself as German first and imagined itself German by nature and could not be anything else. The problem was that most Germans disagreed. Maximilian Horwitz, first president of the C.V., summed up the reality of a hostile society in which Jews were unwanted: “Stepchildren must behave themselves.”

With a highly professional legal team, the C.V. set out to fight antisemitism, rationally, systematically, legally, as Germans, in German interests, out of ‘patriotic duty’ - for anti-Semitism gave Germany a “bad name”.

The C.V. aimed to educate Germans to overcome the “misunderstandings” behind their aversion to Jews. It used all possible legal means to bring anti- semites to justice and supported Liberal, Progressive and Social-Democratic parties against the antisemitic German conservatives and nationalists.

To avoid the antisemitic charge of dual loyalty, the C.V., breaking with other Jewish organisations, abandoned the age-old Jewish solidarity world-wide, stating in its 1893 charter that it would give no aid to non-German Jews.

Decades later, Hannah Arendt accused the C.V. of betraying the Jewish people: ‘“When one is attacked as a Jew,” she wrote, “one must defend oneself as a Jew.” In the 1890s, however, when the C.V. was founded, most Jews who fought antisemitism as Jews were Zionists, a tiny minority. The C.V., committed as it was to a “symbiosis” of Jews and Germans, could never accept a Jewish national ideology separating them from their self-perceived German identity.

Until 1933, the C.V. opposed Zionism more strongly than most Arabs in the early 20th century.

It attacked Herzl, founder of political Zionism, not for the “toxic infection” of his Jewish selfhatred, as Ernst Pawel called it, but as a dangerous utopian dreamer, effectively serving the interests of antisemites, for he allegedly aimed to give up Jewish emancipation and return to the ghetto. Herzl’s view (expressed in the JC in 1896) that anti-Semitism was ‘the force we need’ for a Jewish national revival was anathema to the assimilated German Jews represented by the C.V.

Perhaps the most important lesson learned by the C.V. is that legal opposition to antisemitism, however successful, is of limited use in an antisemitic society, especially in periods of crisis, military and economic. Prejudice is stronger than facts and reason and cannot easily be defeated by either.

The poison of political antisemitism, writes the historian David Blackbourn, entered the middle classes and nationalist movements, and prepared the way for the Holocaust long before Hitler. Antisemitic language was so widespread, and had been for so many centuries, that it was impossible to classify it as hate-speak.

Subject to the law and protected by the liberal principle of freedom of expression, antisemitic publications were published freely and widely read.

The powerlessness of the C.V. against German antisemitism became especially clear during the 1914-1918 war.

German Jews, over 10 per cent of whom were front-line soldiers, were libelled as malingerers. The C.V. produced irrefutable evidence to the contrary: in a community of 600,000, about 100,000 had served in the German army, 12,000 died and more than 30,000 won the Iron Cross. Once the German public understood that German Jews were staunch patriots and had given everything “in property and blood” - an Gut und Blut - the “misunderstanding” would be cleared up.

The leading C.V. spokesman for “symbiosis” of German and Jewish identity was Eugen Fuchs (1856-1923), who, typically of German Jews, believed that the German side in his make-up was stronger than the Jewish side and that he had more in common with Germans than with Jews. Fuchs was repelled by Zionism and by the taint of a Jewish national identity which might give antisemites ammunition for the expulsion of the German Jews.

The correct response to antisemitism, in Fuchs’ view, was not flight but greater patriotism, more uncompromising deutscher Gesinnung, and suppression of everything that made Jews different. To assimilated Jews like Fuchs, antisemitism was practically justified in relation to the Ostjuden, the Eastern European Jews with their odious Jewish loyalties, described by Zygmunt Bauman as “a large refuse bin of human characteristics into which all that nagged the conscience of the Western Jew and filled him with shame was dumped”.

Factual proof that antisemitic beliefs were based on lies and error could not uproot prejudice. There was also little point in arguing with a racial antisemite that Jews are not a race.

Racists will not hate Jews less if they are shown irrefutable proof that many have blond hair and blue eyes or that their level of criminality is lower than that of the general population; or that they pay more tax, or give more to charity than average; or that most Jews are neither capitalists nor socialists.

It was also futile to prove that the German Jews fought bravely in large num-

The C.V. used all legal means possible to bring antisemites to justice ’ Racists will not hate Jews less if there’s proof that they have blond hair and blue eyes ’