The Antisemite's Vade Mecum: Theodor Fritsch's Handbuch der Judenfrage

Abstract

Abstract:This article examines Theodor Fritsch (1852–1933), a leading figure among the radical antisemites in Germany during the 1880s, who promulgated a "scientific" and "racial" form of antisemitism radically different from traditional Christian Jew-hatred. From 1907 until his death, Fritsch edited the Handbook of the Jewish Question (Handbuch der Judenfrage), which was published by his publishing house Hammer-Verlag in 49 editions until 1944. The Handbook was a compendium of extremist antisemitic reflections on topics such as the Bible and the Talmud, the Jewish roots of Christianity with particular emphasis on the toxic Jewish influence on the Catholic Church, and the relationship between Judaism and Freemasonry. At the time, sundry financial crises from the Berlin stock exchange collapse in 1873 to the Great Depression were blamed on Jewish manipulation. Germany's defeat in the First World War and the subsequent peace agreements were seen as the result of a Franco-Jewish conspiracy. Germany is presented as the sole stronghold against a world Jewish conspiracy, thereby combining radical antisemitism with a virulent nationalism, which for all its threadbare scholarship and muddled thinking, was to provide the foundations of National Socialist "Racial Studies" (Rassenkunde).