The History of Anti-Semitism 4: Suicidal Europe 1870-1933

The History of Anti-Semitism #4

by Léon Poliakov, George Klin (Translator)

Covering the story of prejudice against Jews from the time of Christ through the rise of Nazi Germany, The History of Anti-Semitism presents in elegant and thoughtful language a balanced, careful assessment of this egregious human failing that is nearly ubiquitous in the history of Europe. Suicidal Europe, 1870-1933 traces the development of a belief among Europe's educated classes in an eventual Jewish domination of the West. Revealing the embedded myths about Jewish bankers and Jewish Bolsheviks in European rhetoric and histories, Poliakov demonstrates that the steady rise in anti-Semitism and suspicion of Jews in the late nineteenth century--highlighted by the Dreyfus affair--and its eventual eruption in the rise of the Nazi party in Germany in the 1920s are part of the same thread of fear and hatred that reaches back to the beginning of the first millennium.

Genres: History, Judaism, Israel, Antisemitism

440 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Léon Poliakov (Russian: Лев Поляков) was a French historian, cofounder of the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, and director of research at the National Centre for Scientific Research (Centre national de la recherche scientifique).

Reviews

[Douglas Kim]

This volume is about the anti-Semitism that leads up to WW2, specifically to what started the Nazi movement. What I found most interesting in this volume is the origins of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Knowing what we now know about Zionism today, it seems that this document, while a fabricated propaganda piece by Russian monarchists against Jewish revolutionaries, seems to also have drawn some very real concerns about Herzl's burgeoning movement in the late 1890s, as the PotEoZ was inspired not only by a French ironic polemic against Napoleon III, but notes of the beginning of the Zionist movement in 1897.

This document was then first popularized in Russia during the 1905 revolutions, while being publicized to the entire world during the 1917 October Revolutions by Great Britain, who wanted to destroy the revolution in a bid to keep Russia in the war to prevent the disaster of losing British India, the crown jewel of their imperialism. Until the end of the Soviet Civil War, Great Britain, being the center of the western imperialist world, was the origination of the Judeo Bolshevik theory, that would later spread to Americans, as while the Times in the UK would find it to be a fabrication after the civil war was over, Americans bought it whole sale, particularly Henry Ford, who wrote his own conspiracy theories based on the Protocols himself, called the International Jew, in 1920. This would later be the document that Adolf Hitler would use to write Mein Kampf in 1925.

Same kind of note on 4 stars as the last volume I reviewed, the book leans pro-Zionist and anti-Soviet and liberal, which reduces its scientific vigor.

[James S.]

400 pages of this:

Thus, if one arbitrarily decides that the influence exerted by Moses or Karl Marx (or Jesus or Einstein) is nefarious, does not the delusion that affected Ludendorff (who, after all, had correctly observed that "the Bible written by and for Jews was the key to Western history" or that the Masons wanted to rebuild Solomon's Temple on ideal lines) acquire a heuristic value? The coincidenta oppositorum illustrates how any position taken toward the Jewish people consists first of a fascination with the invisible power or the immortality attributed to them, and second of the adoption of a value system.

Maybe useful as a starting point for serious research, but for the casual reader, it's a slog. Needlessly convoluted writing.