History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

In the nineteenth century, German hatred of the Jews acquired a völkisch basis. It started with the nationalist rising against Napoleon. Its first significant event was a mass meeting of the German Burschenschaften (fraternity movement) at the Wartburg Castle in 1817 to burn ‘foreign’ books said to be ‘poisoning the Volk culture’.170 This ideology, which slowly became predominant in Germany and Austria during the nineteenth century, drew a crucial distinction between ‘culture’ (benign, organic, natural) and ‘civilization’ (corrupt, artificial, sterile). Every culture had a soul; and the soul was determined by the local landscape. German culture, then, was in perpetual enmity with civilization, which was cosmopolitan and alien. Who represented the civilization principle? Why, the one race which had no country, no landscape, no culture of their own: the Jews! The argument was typical of those which caught the Jews whatever they did. If they clung to ghetto Judaism, they were alien for that reason; if they secularized and ‘enlightened’ themselves, they became part of alien civilization.