A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (31 page)

A contemporary drawing of the
Hep! Hep!
riots in Frankfurt am Main in 1819. Notice that both men and women participated in the violence.

When the
Hep! Hep!
riots in Wurzburg finally ended, two people were dead and more than 20 were wounded. By then the violence had spread to other parts of Bavaria and, from there, to other German states. One Christian wrote that he felt as if he had stepped back in time and the year was 1419 rather than 1819.

Most Germans did not join the rioters. Instead they locked their doors and shut their windows to keep out the noise. In only a few cities did ordinary citizens try to help the victims. In Heidelberg, a city in southwestern Germany, two professors and their students contained the mob
until the police arrived. They even placed a few people under “citizen’s arrest.”

Soon after soldiers came to restore order in Karlsruhe, a city in Baden near the French border, anonymous flyers blanketed the city. They were written in response to an earlier flyer that had called for the massacre of Jews. The new message read, “Emperors, kings, dukes, beggars, Catholics, and Jews are all human and as such our equals.” To emphasize that idea, the grand-duke of Baden showed his solidarity with the city’s Jews by spending the night at the home of a prominent Jew. The gesture helped restore calm to the city.

The riots stopped as suddenly as they began. No one ever took responsibility for the violence. But many Jews noted that for at least a decade before the riots, a number of professors had been preaching a form of nationalism that imagined the Germans as a “pure” people or “race” struggling for freedom from “the Jews,” whom they saw as a “race” of dangerous outsiders. Jakob Friedrich Fries, a professor at the University of Heidelberg, insisted that “the Jews” were so great a threat that they ought to be exterminated “root and branch.” After the riots, some people accused Fries of sparking the violence. He denied the charge, claiming that he had “only” called for the extermination “root and branch” of Judaism, not of Jews.

Fries and those who shared his views romanticized their history by picturing their ancestors as heroic, self-reliant, brave, and loyal. It was a vision of the past that appealed to many young Germans, humiliated by losses to France. These German nationalists did not believe that Jews could ever be “true Germans.” They saw Jews as “a race apart.” Others insisted that Jews could become Germans if they were “properly” educated and converted to Christianity.

Many Jews questioned the sincerity of such views. During the Napoleonic wars, Jews had joined their German neighbors in fighting the French. In Prussia alone, 71 Jewish soldiers had earned the Iron Cross, a medal given for bravery in battle. Jewish women had volunteered to work in hospitals, raise funds for the war, and organize aid for needy soldiers and their families. Despite such patriotism, once Napoleon had been defeated, one German state after another revoked the rights Jews had received under French rule. Prussia’s minister of justice justified the move by noting that the Jews’ “temporary bravery did not preclude a lower degree of morality.”
¹⁴

In Mendelssohn’s day, Germans were only willing to accept Jews they considered geniuses or Jews who were exceptional. By the early 1800s, even Jews who were geniuses found it almost impossible to win acceptance. During these years, there was no repetition of the
Hep! Hep!
riots.
Instead, in small ways and large, Jews were made to feel they did not belong. Assimilation did not turn Jews into Germans, nor did conversion—as Heinrich Heine, one of Germany’s greatest writers, discovered.

Unlike Mendelssohn, Heine grew up in an assimilated Jewish family. He thought of himself as more of a German than a Jew. Indeed, many Germans believed that his poems and essays expressed not only their own innermost feelings but also the soul of the German people. Prince Metternich of Austria, one of the most powerful men in Europe, once said that Heine’s poems were so beautiful that he wept while reading them.
¹⁵
Some of the world’s greatest composers, including Richard Wagner, Robert Schumann, and Johannes Brahms, set those poems to music. And yet in 1831, Eduard Meyer, a German historian, wrote of Heine and other Jewish converts:

Baptized or not, it’s all the same. We don’t hate the religion of the Jews but the many hateful characteristics of these Asiatics, among them their so frequent impudence and presumption, their immorality and frivolity, their noisy behavior, and their so frequently base approach to life…. They belong to no people, no State, no community; they rove about the world as adventurers, sniffing around… and they stay where they find lots of opportunity for speculation. Where things go quietly and in accordance with the law, there they find it uncomfortable.
¹⁶

In other words, Heine was not a “true German,” and conversion could not alter his “race.” A growing number of Germans—particularly German leaders—shared that view. They were uncomfortable with Heine’s sharp criticism of German society, even though other critical German writers (including Kant, Lessing, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) were forgiven for their views. After all, they were “Germans,” and, according to Meyer, Heine was not. In 1831, Prussian leaders posted warrants for Heine’s arrest at every border crossing. Heine went into exile. He lived in Paris for the rest of his life but continued to define himself as a “German poet.” In 1844, Heine addressed his critics in the introduction to
A Winter’s Tale
:

Plant the black-red-gold flag on the height of German thought, make it a standard of a free humanity and I will give my heart’s blood for it. Calm yourselves! I love the fatherland as much as you do. Because of that love, I spent thirteen years in exile, and because of this love I return to exile perhaps forever.
¹⁷

Heine was not the only Jew to demand acceptance as both a German and a Jew. One of the most prominent was Gabriel Riesser of Hamburg. At a time when only a few Jews were permitted to study at a university, he earned a doctorate degree in law from the University of Heidelberg. Although Riesser graduated in 1826 with the highest honors, he quickly discovered that no German was willing to hire a Jew as a lawyer or a professor of law.

In 1831, Riesser wrote an article demanding equal rights for Jews as a matter of “honor and justice.” Heinrich Paulus, a professor of languages and theology at the University of Heidelberg, responded to Riesser by arguing that Jews were “Ausländer”—foreigners incapable of understanding the German soul.
¹⁸
Riesser replied, “Whoever disputes my claim to this my German fatherland disputes my right to my own thoughts, my feelings, my language—the very air I breathe. Therefore I must defend myself against him as I would against a murderer.”
¹⁹

Riesser took pride in being both a German and a Jew at a time when the word
Jew
was considered so offensive that many Jews preferred to think of themselves as “Germans of the Israelite or Mosaic persuasion.”
²⁰
Riesser saw no contradiction between his religion and his right to German citizenship. He argued:

There is only one baptism that can initiate one into a nationality and that is the baptism of the blood in the common struggle for a fatherland and for freedom. “Your blood was mixed with ours on the battlefield,” this was that cry which put an end to the last feeble stirrings of intolerance and antipathy in France. The German Jews also have earned this valid claim to nationality…. They have fought both as conscripts and volunteers in proportionate numbers within the ranks of the German forces.
²¹

Riesser challenged discriminatory laws on a regular basis. He made a point of going to cafés where Jews were not welcome. If he did not get served, he sued the owners and sometimes won. His uncompromising stand served as a model for other young Jewish activists. As Jews, they sought equal rights, and as Germans, they struggled to unite their country and make it more democratic.

In 1848, Riesser and other Jewish activists joined their Christian counterparts in a revolution that rocked much of Europe, including Germany. Their goal was democracy and unification of Germany. In February, an assembly in Baden called for a bill of rights. Assemblies in other German
states supported that demand. The idea was so popular that many rulers felt that they had no choice but to accept it. By March, a number of German states had formed governments that favored both democracy and a united Germany. Even Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia gave in to many of the rebels’ demands.

Riesser played an active role in these events. He was one of nine Jews elected to a National German Parliament in Frankfurt; he also served as a vice president. Among the first acts of the parliament was a proclamation that stated: “Every German has full freedom of conscience. Nobody shall be forced to disclose his religious creed.” The document also stated that “enjoyment of civil or political rights shall be neither conditioned nor limited by [disclosure of one’s religion.]”

At one point in their deliberations, a number of delegates called for a law that would correct “the peculiar condition of the Israelitisch race.” Riesser and the other Jewish delegates objected, insisting that Jews were not a separate “race” but “Germans of the Jewish faith.” The other lawmakers disagreed and passed the bill into law. Yet even as the delegates were planning for a united Germany under a democratic government, the mood in Europe was changing—particularly the mood of the educated and well-to-do. Within a few months, most of Europe’s kings and princes, including those in Germany, had regained their power, and the old order was restored. Still, not all of the gains made in 1848 were lost.

C
IVIC
E
QUALITY FOR
E
UROPEAN
J
EWS
(1789–1918)

The map shows the year in which Jews achieved full political and legal rights in various European nations. In places like Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Spain, Jews had few rights until well into the twentieth century.

In 1859, Riesser, the man who was not allowed to practice law because he was a Jew, became the first Jew to serve as a judge. He died in 1863, however, so he did not live to see the unification of Germany in 1871 or the emancipation of the Jews soon after. Changes are rarely easy, and many take more than a lifetime to achieve.

The “age of enlightenment” ended some of the isolation, discrimination, and humiliation Jews had experienced in earlier times in Europe. Jews now had more freedom than in the past. Yet these changes did not end antisemitism. Instead this new age, with its emerging nationalism, promoted dangerous new stereotypes that would haunt Jews in years to come. They were increasingly seen as a hostile “nation within a nation”—one whose loyalty was almost always in question.

(1840–1878)

On the evening of February 5, 1840, a monk known as Father Thomas and his servant, Ibrahim Amara, disappeared without a trace in Damascus, Syria. Within weeks, Christians in the city were accusing Jews of murdering the two men. Newspapers around the world carried the story. In March, the editor of a Paris newspaper proclaimed, “Rightly or wrongly, the Jews… have the terrifying and inconceivable reputation of sacrificing a Christian on their Passover and distributing the blood to their coreligionists in the region.”
¹
“And all of this is happening in 1840,” wrote the editor of another paper, horrified at the idea of ritual murder in his own time.