History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Lower East Side,

‘needle trades’,

sweated labour?

also the great engine of upward mobility.

The average stay of Jewish immigrants in the Lower East Side was only fifteen years.

mail-order firms,

the world’s largest Yiddish press,

printed word in English

In the Bronx Jews were 38 per cent of the total population; in New York as a whole Jews made up 29 per cent, by far the largest ethnic group. With 1,640,000 Jews (1920), New York was easily the biggest Jewish (and Yiddish) city on earth.

In 1880 some 90 per cent of American’s 200-plus synagogues were Reform institutions. But their dominance was untenable as the new arrivals made their voice and power heard.

a threefold structure emerged, with the Conservatives in the lead, the Orthodox second and Reform a mere third.

it was becoming organized: in 1906 the American Jewish Committee was established. It was building up numerical, financial, economic and above all political strength, to constitute a huge supportive force once Jews throughout the world reached a majority consensus on their future.

It was as though history was slowly solving a great jigsaw puzzle, slipping the pieces into their place one after another. The American mass Jewry was one piece. The next piece was the Zionist idea.

Before the Russian pogroms, the great majority of Jews saw their future as assimilation in one form or another. After them, some Jews began to look for possible alternatives.

Moses Hess (1812-75)

his recovery of Judaism took the form of nationalism rather than religion. The nation-state, he began to see, was the natural unit of historical development.

In his great book Rome and Jerusalem Hess put the case for the Jewish nation-state.

It would avoid, on the one hand, the excesses of the maskils who wanted to assimilate themselves out of existence and, on the other, the Orthodox who really wished to ignore the world altogether. It would enable the Jews, by the state they created–repudiating both the superstitions of Christianity and the orientalism of Islam–to realize the Jewish idea in practice and so be a political light to the gentiles. At the same time it would allow them to achieve their own redemption not by Marx’s negative proposal to destroy their traditional economic functions, but by the positive act of creating an ideal state.130

Once Jews thought of colonization, they tended to turn to Britain.

George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda.

in terms of its practical effects it was probably the most influential novel of the nineteenth century. It was another important piece of the Zionist jigsaw puzzle fitted into place.

especially to hundreds of thousands of assimilated Jews, the story presented, for the first time, the possibility of a return to Zion.

The book was particularly widely read in political circles. To the generation of Arthur Balfour, who first met George Eliot in 1877, the year after publication, it was their introduction to the Jewish issue.

The Dreyfus case and the conversion of Herzl to Zionism both testify to significant developments in Jewish history. They are two more pieces of the jigsaw

the Dreyfus affair, and the dark emotions it revealed, brought to a decisive end an epoch of illusion in which assimilated western Jews had optimistically assumed that the process of their acceptance in European society was well under way and would shortly be completed.

The nineteenth century was the great age of pseudo-scientific racial theories and the French played their full part in it.

Comte Joseph de Gobineau (1816-82)

distinguished between Aryan virtue and Semitic (and Latin) degeneration.

This became the handbook of the German anti-Semites and had an enormous influence on, for example, Richard Wagner. The opinionated polymath Ernst Renan (1823-92) was doing the same for the French,

Renan’s theory of Jewish racial inferiority was skilfully married to Toussenel’s theory of Jewish financial skulduggery by Edouard Drumont to produce his massive two-volume La France juive (1886), the most brilliantly written and plausible of all anti-Semitic studies.

Hence the first layer of French anti-Semitism was pseudo-scientific. The second was envy. If the Jews were racially inferior, why were they so successful? Because they cheated and conspired.

There was a third, clerical, layer of French anti-Semitism. The official Roman Catholic hierarchy

Against this background of orchestrated hatred and slander, the events of 1881 in Russia, and their consequences, dealt a deadly blow to established French Jewry by giving ordinary Frenchmen, especially in Paris, vivid, ocular evidence of a ‘Jewish problem’. Over a generation, France took 120,000 Jewish refugees, more than doubling the size of French Jewry. These were poor, obvious, Ashkenazi Jews, of course, seemingly corresponding to the caricature Drumont and La Croix were peddling. Moreover, they were joined by a steady stream of Jews from the Alsace community, who could not abide the German occupation.

The Dreyfus affair convulsed France for an entire decade. It became an important event not just in Jewish history but in French, indeed in European, history. It saw the emergence, for the first time, of a distinct class of intellectuals–the word intelligentsia was now coined–as a major power in European society and among whom emancipated Jews were an important, sometimes a dominant, element. A new issue was raised, not just for France: who controls our culture? The French proletariat sat solidly on the sidelines. The mobs were students and petit bourgeois.

But behind the social veneer, real–and for the Jews ultimately tragic–issues were taking shape. The Dreyfus affair was a classic example of a fundamentally simple case of injustice being taken over by extremists on both sides. Drumont and the Assumptionists flourished Dreyfus’ conviction and used it to launch a campaign against the Jews. The young Jewish intellectuals, and their growing band of radical allies, began by asking for justice and ended by seeking total victory and revenge. In doing so, they gave their enemies an awesome demonstration of Jewish and philosemitic intellectual power.

From 1897, with the founding of papers like L’Aurore and the all-woman La Fronde, the Jews and their allies began to hit back. They had of course the inestimable benefit of an overwhelming case. But their skill at presenting it grew progressively. It was the first time secular Jews had worked together, as a class, to put their point of view.

Gradually, the Dreyfusards began to tilt the media balance in their favour,

Outside France, their capture of public opinion was decisive everywhere.

pursuit of the case

was increasing, solidifying and would end by institutionalizing anti-Semitism in France.

the new power of the written word in alliance with the radical left was now out of control. It pushed on for revenge and total victory. It got both. The Assumptionists were kicked out of France. The left won an overwhelming electoral success in 1906. Dreyfus was rehabilitated and made a general. Picquart ended up Minister for War. The state, now in Dreyfusard hands, waged a destructive campaign against the church. So the extremists won, both in creating the affair and in winning it.

But there was a price to pay, and in the end it was the Jews who paid it. Anti-Semitism was institutionalized. Charles Maurras’s League went on to become, after the 1914-18 war, a pro-fascist, anti-Semitic movement which formed the most vicious element in the Vichy regime, 1941-4, and helped to send hundreds of thousands of French Jews, native and refugee, to their deaths, as we shall see. The victory of the Dreyfusards established in the minds of many Frenchmen the Jewish conspiracy as an incontrovertible fact.

Yet the demonstration of Jewish intellectual power which the affair provided, the ease with which Jewish writers now strode the French intellectual scene, the fact that nine-tenths of the vast literature which accumulated around the affair was Dreyfusard, all this disturbed Frenchmen who in general sympathized with the Jewish point of view.

This was exactly the line of argument which Herzl was beginning to fear. In fact, concern at the resistance the Jews were building up against themselves by their massive and highly successful entrance into European culture was the force edging Herzl towards Zionism even before he watched Dreyfus degraded on that bitter January morning in 1895. For in Vienna, his home city, the Jewish ‘invasion’ of local culture was even more impressive than in France, and far more bitterly resented. He himself was part of it.

In the Germanic world, anti-Semitism still had a ferocious religious base, particularly in the south; at the popular level it was still symbolized by the Judensau. But the further you went up the social scale, the more secular, cultural and racial it became; so baptism did not work. In the nineteenth century, German hatred of the Jews acquired a völkisch basis. It started with the nationalist rising against Napoleon.

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.

The violence with which these views were presented was horrifying.

Wagner was particularly influential in intensifying anti-Semitism, especially among the middle and upper classes, not only because of his personal standing but because he repeatedly advanced the argument–with innumerable examples–that the Jews were progressively ‘taking over’ the citadel of German culture, especially its music.

The attack came from all sides: from the left, from the right; from aristocrats and populists; from industry, from the farms; from the academy and from the gutter; from music and literature and, not least, from science.

Leon Pinsker,