The Story of the Jews Volume 2: When Words Fail: 1492--Present

by Simon Schama

The Jews of the cities had taken a bet on modernity, but now they were faced with a self-consciously archaic, rural-Teutonic and mythic attack in which the part they were assigned was that of subhuman goblins whose elimination, one way or the other, was the precondition not just of a flourishing German future but of its very survival. Only one side could win this war to the end, Marr made clear, and the purpose of his work was to sound the battle cry and ensure it would not be Aryan Germans who would be the vanquished race. Not long before his death in 1904 Marr had a sudden and complete change of heart, publishing his Testament of an Anti-Semite and publicly asking forgiveness from the Jews. It was too late. His League of Anti-Semites had created a new kind of political party and the toxin had been released into the bloodstream of German nationalism. Paul de Lagarde, Germany’s most eminent scholar of oriental languages, described anti-Semitism as ‘the mainstay of our national movement . . . the most essential expression of genuine popular conviction’. It was this equation of anti-Semitism with political engagement, a tonic against bourgeois complacency, which would be so deadly to the people most associated with middle-class urban materialism. Put another way, anti-Semitism was the way to restore national health. To be vigorously German, then, rather than just paying lip service to the national ideal, meant being robustly, forthrightly anti-Semitic.