History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

The focus of French anti-Semitism switched from the Jews as ‘money power’ to Jews as social subversives.

It was in the United States, however, that the Bolshevik takeover, and its association with radical Jews, had the most serious consequences.

the Bolshevik scare effectively ended the policy of unrestricted immigration which had been the salvation of east European Jewry in the period 1881-1914, and which had enabled the great American Jewry to come into existence.

Much of the material circulated by Mitchell and his allies was anti-Semitic.

The Broadway musical, radio and TV were all examples of a fundamental principle in Jewish diaspora history: Jews opening up a completely new field in business and culture, a tabula rasa on which to set their mark, before other interests had a chance to take possession, erect guild or professional fortifications and deny them entry.

The outstanding example, however, was the movie industry, which was almost entirely put together by Jews.

As with the Broadway musical and the Hollywood movie, crime and especially new and expanding kinds of crime were areas where enterprising Jews could get in at the beginning without meeting formal gentile barriers.

A surprising number of notorious Jewish criminals had Orthodox funerals, but organized Jewish crime, unlike the Mafia in Sicily, was not a response to specific social conditions and never enjoyed the slightest communal sanction. Hence it has proved to be a temporary phenomenon.

there were many American Jews who disliked the idea of any Jewish propensities, good or bad, and did their best to reject Jewish particularism completely.

conscious effort to stop thinking oneself Jewish.

But such efforts, as in Brandeis’ case, tended to collapse under the sudden impact of an anti-Semitic experience.

Even in America, a Jew, however rich, influential and well connected he might be, could be pushed back into line; and it was this more than anything else which kept the community together.

Perhaps the most tragic aspect of those Jews who denied their identity, or suppressed the feelings which naturally arose from it, was the almost wilful blindness they thereby inflicted upon themselves.

For half a century, Lippmann was perhaps the wisest of all American commentators–on everything except issues affecting Jews. Like Blum in France, he dismissed the anti-Semitic side of Hitler as unimportant and classified him as a German nationalist.

never mentioned the death camps at all.

Lillian Hellman

would not allow her love of justice to find its natural expression in outraged protest at the fate of her race. So it was perverted into a hard-faced ideological orthodoxy

These confusions, divisions and opacities in the American Jewish community, not least among its intellectuals, help to explain why American Jews, despite the enormous position of power they were beginning to acquire for themselves, were so curiously incapable of affecting events in inter-war Europe, or even of steering opinion in America itself. American anti-Semitism, as revealed by opinion polls, rose steadily throughout the 1930s, peaking in 1944;

The greatest crime in history remains, to some extent, baffling. All the same, the chief components can be summarized. The most important, probably, was the First World War.

The grief and fury were unhinging; the need for a scapegoat imperative.

second effect.

The war

accustomed men to violence everywhere, but in Germany it induced a violence of despair.

Adolf Hitler

His personal passion, and still more his colossal willpower, were central to Germany’s war against the Jews. It could not have taken place without him. On the other hand, he could have done little damage without the destructive elements within Germany which he found to hand.

he brought together the two consequences of the war, the need for a scapegoat and the cult of violence, focussing the result on the Jews:

Hitler’s anti-Semitism was composed of all the conventional elements, from the Christian Judensau to pseudo-scientific race theory. But it was distinctive in two respects. First, it was to him a complete explanation of the world, a Weltanschauung, a world outlook.

Second,

his anti-Semitism was a marriage of the German and Austrian models. From Germany, he took the huge and growing fear of ‘Jewish-Bolshevist Russia’ and the proliferating mythology of the Protocols of Zion.

Post-war Germany swarmed with Russian refugees of German origin,

All of them stressed the Jewish-Bolshevist connection, which became a central part of Hitler’s ideology.

But he blended it with the kind of anti-Semitism he had absorbed in Vienna. This concentrated on fear of the Ostjuden, a dark and inferior race corrupting the Germanic blood.

Hitler believed and taught that there was not only a direct political and military threat to Germany from Jewish Bolshevism but a deeper, biological threat from any contact, but especially sexual congress, with members of the Jewish race.

The sexual-medical aspect of Hitler’s anti-Semitism was probably the most important, especially among his own followers. It turned the merely prejudiced into fanatics, capable of any course of action, however irrational and cruel.

Rather as the medieval anti-Semite saw the Jew as non-human, a devil or a sort of animal (hence the Judensau), the Nazi extremist absorbed Hitler’s sub-scientific phraseology and came to regard Jews as bacilli or a particularly dangerous kind of vermin. Apart from anything else, this approach enabled all Jews to be lumped together, irrespective of their circumstances or views.

A Jew who held a professorial chair, who wrote impeccable German, who had served throughout the war and won the Iron Cross, was just as dangerous a racia...

Hitler never found any difficulty in acquiring intellectual backing, albeit sometimes oblique, for his views.

the German academy, taken as a whole, far from acting as a barrier to Hitlerism, assisted its progress to power.

Above all, Hitler achieved his greatest success among university students. They were his vanguard. At each stage in the growth of the Nazis, student support preceded general electoral support.

The students were among the first to organize boycotts and mass petitions to force Jews out of government jobs and the professions, especially teaching, and these forms of action soon developed into actual violence.

the threat of a student riot led to Berlin University cancelling a memorial service for the murdered Walther Rathenau. This would have been inconceivable before the war, and what was most sinister was not just the threat of violence but the pusillanimity of the university authorities in bowing to it.

The climate of actual violence which nourished Nazism was itself sustained by growing verbal and pictorial violence in the media. It is sometimes argued that satire, even of the most savage kind, is a sign of health in a free society and that no restrictions should be placed on it. Jewish history does not lend support to this view. The Jews have been more frequently the target of such attacks than any other group and they know from long and bitter experience that the violence of print is often the prelude to the violence of blood.

Der Stürmer,

helped to spread and intensify one of the chief, perennial sources of anti-Semitic violence: the notion that Jews are not part of humanity and therefore not entitled to the protection we instinctively accord a human being.

media violence from the left played into the hands of anti-Semites.

The insuperable difficulty any patriotic German Jew had to contend with was the Weimar Republic itself. It was born of defeat, indissolubly linked with defeat, and, in the minds of most Germans, associated with Jews, the Judenrepublik. From beginning to end it was a millstone round the Jewish neck.

With the creation of Weimar, Jews became more prominent in German cultural life, chiefly for the reason that the advanced ideas with which they had been associated were now beginning to achieve acceptance.

Yet the notion that Weimar witnessed a Jewish takeover of German culture is false. The fact is that, during the 1920s, Germany was richer in talent than at any time before or since.

The only Weimar manifestation which to some extent fitted the anti-Semitic stereotype of Jewish Kulturbolschewismus was the Frankfurt Institution for Social Research (1923). Its theorists, led by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm and Franz Neuman, preached a humanist version of Marxism in which culture assumed greater importance than practical politics. Jewish attitudes and concepts undoubtedly played a role in their work.

They also tried, by using Marxist methods, to demonstrate how socio-economic assumptions determined what most people thought of as cultural absolutes.