The Defense against Antisemitism: Minor Victories, Major Defeats, 1890–1939

Abstract

Since I wrote this paper in the summer of 2018, I have found myself wondering if its title constitutes a just judgment on nearly 130 years of struggle by Jews and non-Jews to eliminate organized antisemitism. Surely, if I had subtitled it “Major Victories, Minor Defeats,” we would have to ask ourselves about the purpose of this great conference. Antisemitism, ever-changing, ever-threatening, is still very much with us. What I was wondering about instead was whether we can speak of even minor victories, and, more generally, whether the history of the fight against organized antisemitism during many decades has anything useful to teach us today. I believe that this history and both the victories and defeats are still instructive. First some clarifications, beginning with the coining of the term: I have not been able to find the use of the word antisemitism before 1860, when it was employed in a cultural rather than a political sense. By late 1879, the German journalist and political activist Wilhelm Marr seized upon the word antisemite as a way of distinguishing his political agenda from traditional Christian Judeophobia and from the commonplace prejudices of his day, thus hoping to give his views the aura of a scientifically derived truth, the product of his personal experience and historical research. Important to note about the early history of antisemitism is how rapidly what was essentially a neologism achieved the broadest currency. There must have existed a perceived need for a new word to describe the resurgence of conflicts between Jews and the peoples among whom they lived, fondly thought to be nearly overcome in this age of progress but which in fact were becoming ever more openly expressed. The need for a new word affected not just self-identified antisemites but Jews, non-Jewish critics, and neutral bystanders throughout Europe and wherever Europeans settled in the world. The word appeared in titles of books and pamphlets and on the mastheads of newspapers in English, French, Italian, Hungarian, Dutch, and Russian—all by 1894 and in places where no organized antisemitism existed, as well as where it was developing into fullfledged political movements. Even to outsiders, something new seemed to be agitating the vexed relations between Jews and others.1