The Transformation of the World (186 page)

This Pacific exclusionism, concentrated on the West Coast in the case of the United States, was the most drastic concretization of global racism (along with racial discrimination in the American South and various colonial practices) around the turn of the century. Behind it lay ideas of white superiority and of a need to protect its valuable substance from alien hordes. A further problem in the United States was that the Anglo-Irish-German majority among the population was challenged by new arrivals from southern and eastern Europe whom established citizens regarded with suspicion. This gave rise to endless debate on gradations of skin color and cultural competence.
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A contradiction in America's perception of itself, still visible today, became apparent for the first time. The United States—which sees itself as superior in every respect and therefore as a savior for the peoples of the world—also has a pervasive fear of being infected and ruined by those same peoples.
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Non-Western Racism: China

Of course, according to the conceptions of the time, every sovereign nation-state had the right to decide who lived within its borders. If thousands took to the streets in China to protest against strict US immigration policies, one reason why they did so was that China had no way of giving tit for tat. In 1860
the country had been forced to allow free entry to nonnationals. It therefore had abundant grounds for a restrictive attitude to foreigners, but not for racist protectionism. There was no ethnic minority that had previously been enslaved. Small numbers of Jews had for centuries been well-integrated subjects of the emperor, and no Chinese Judeophobia existed to fuel anti-Semitism. And yet there too, it is not difficult to find a “discourse of race.”
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China thus exemplifies the fact that racism was not limited to the West in the nineteenth century. Racial prejudices, which in a world marked by postcolonial guilt feelings are seen as a special defect of white Westerners, can certainly be identified in non-Western civilizations. The traditional weakness of racial prejudice in China makes the nineteenth-century experience there all the more interesting.

Imperial China knew all manner of “barbarian” stereotypes and recorded physical peculiarities of the most diverse peoples at its frontiers. Without exception, however, the barbarian was considered a culturally deficient being through no fault of his own, and therefore as a candidate for benevolent civilizing. The path from a culturally to a biologically alien status was blocked in traditional Chinese thinking. This changed in the late nineteenth century, as a result of new contacts with the West. The greater physical and cultural foreignness of Europeans and North Americans (in comparison with neighboring Asiatic peoples with which the Chinese had had dealings over the millennia), as well as their unusually aggressive behavior, were the reasons why elements of an ancient religious demonology were now grafted onto older images of barbarians. There was talk of foreign devils (
yang guizi
) and red-haired barbarians (
hongmaofan
), for example. This negative stereotyping applied indirectly to Africans too, although scarcely any Chinese had an opportunity to meet a visitor from Africa. It was comforting to some to think that other victims of European imperialism stood even lower in the eyes of the colonial masters.

China's growing acquaintance with Western racial theories toward the end of the nineteenth century was one condition for the development of Chinese racism; the other was the catastrophic military defeat at the hands of Japan in 1895, the last nail in the coffin for a Sinocentric view of the world. In their question for an alternative conception of China's place in the international order, a number of leading intellectuals were attracted by the vision of a struggle between the races (
zong
) and eagerly began to assemble the kind of ranking tables that had existed in Europe for hundreds of years. Africans inevitably found themselves in bottom place, reproducing the worst “white” prejudices toward them. The “yellow race”—a term that did the rounds until the end of a temporary Sino-Japanese rapprochement in 1915—was by no means permanently inferior to the white; rather, the two were locked in a struggle for world supremacy. Such notions, found in Europe at the Rightist end of the political spectrum, were characteristic of reform currents in turn-of-the-century China. Political liberalization and social modernization were supposed to serve the purpose of steeling China for the coming battle between races—an objective that would require overthrowing the
Qing dynasty. The fact that the imperial house was formed by a non-Han ethnic group had not featured prominently in earlier criticisms of the Qing political order, but new racial theories made the Manchu appear as an inferior alien race against which all means were justified. During the revolution of 1911, threats on the part of literary pamphletists gave way to massacres not only of defeated Manchu troops but also of their families—although not everywhere in the country, and not as a strategic aim of the revolutionaries.
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A further racial theme was the conversion of the ancestral figure of the Yellow Emperor from a mythical cult hero into a biological precursor of the “Chinese race”—although this never acquired the same significance as in Japan, where parallel genealogical moves created one of the main pillars of the emperor cult from the Meiji period on. The Chinese example shows that European racial thinking could not be easily introduced into societies that had not developed something similar of their own, and that it did not spontaneously find its way there. Particular groups outside Europe, mostly small circles of intellectuals, first had to become familiar with such theories and then recast them for their own ends. Discourses of race became internationally mobile only when they were formulated in the universalist idiom of (natural) science, acquiring an aura of robust objectivity. Such mobility presupposed, in turn, the special climate of opinion that existed at the turn of the century, when even black Americans campaigning for civil rights and incipient pan-Africanists automatically thought in categories of racial difference and invoked the unity of the “negro race” in support of their political projects.

4 Anti-Semitism

Jewish Emancipation

The prototypical outsiders in European societies of the early modern period had been the Jews. Their history in the nineteenth century can be narrated and explained in various ways, with the necessary distinctions of time and place. One possible perspective is that of civilization and exclusion. The nineteenth century was a time of successes without precedent in the history of the Jewish religious community. Between roughly 1770 and 1870, as the great historian Jacob Katz showed, the Jewish communities of Western Europe experienced deeper changes in their whole way of life than any other population group of comparable size: it was a transmutation of “the very nature of their entire social existence,” in short, a “social revolution.”
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In this period an Enlightenment reform movement among the Jews, beginning with Moses Mendelssohn and some of his younger contemporaries in the 1770s, radically transformed the Jewish understanding of religion, community practices, cultural relations with the non-Jewish world, and attitudes toward social changes in Europe. This self-reform, seen by many of its protagonists as a self-civilizing process, brought measured adjustment to the surrounding world, while also preserving a core Jewish identity.

It led to emancipation, to an improved or even equal position of Jews in the eyes of the law, since enlightened liberal forces in West European governments supported such aspirations of their own accord. Especially in Germany and France, emancipation was seen as a state-led process for “civilizing” and integrating Jews. This congruence of internal and external impulses placed growing numbers of people of the Jewish faith in a position where they could profit from the new economic opportunities in a modernizing Europe.
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The ghetto walls behind which Jews had lived until then came down everywhere to the west of the Tsarist Empire. Career paths opened up in business and the liberal professions, although access to the civil service remained much more difficult for a long time. An active, successful minority in the rising European bourgeoisies belonged to the Jewish faith. Benjamin Disraeli, a Jew baptized in childhood, went on to become prime minister of the foremost world power and the Earl of Beaconsfield. His older contemporary, the financier and philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore, has been described as “one of the first truly global celebrities.”
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Men of Jewish origin, some of them baptized Christians, rose to leading positions in the cultural life of the continent: Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was a composer, pianist, and conductor of European reknown; Giacomo Meyerbeer dominated opera stages between Rossini's falling silent and Verdi's rise to preeminence; Jacques Offenbach created the art form of the satirical operetta and brought it to its highest point.

An old hostility, mainly based on religion, did not disappear overnight. Even prominent artists ran up against aversion and rejection. Poor Jews in the country were the most vulnerable. There continued to be attacks on Jews. But in Germany, for example, these died down after the first third of the century. Never before had Jews in Western Europe felt as safe as they did in the middle decades. They were no longer, like early modern “court Jews,” under the personal protection of whimsical princes but under the protection of the law.

The Rise of Anti-Semitism

After 1870, anti-Jewish polemics began to regain momentum almost everywhere in Europe. Enemies of the Jews went onto the offensive.
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In France and Germany, the old theological image of Jews was not discarded but supplemented with secular-rationalist arguments. Accusations that Jews were both protagonists and profiteers of a disconcerting modernity escalated into full-blown conspiracy theories; nationalist reproaches of disloyalty compounded prejudices concerning the supposed moral inferiority of Jews. Under the impact of new biological thinking, Jews were increasingly constructed as a “race” apart. Those who thought and wrote along such lines implied that Jewish assimilation was no more than a maneuver, that individual conversion to Christianity had no significance, that Jews would never change. Before the First World War, however, the racist aspect was not dominant among the numerous facets of European anti-Semitism.

It was not just a question of books and pamphlets by intellectuals such as Richard Wagner (whose
Jewishness in Music
, first published in 1850, really made an impact only in a second and more vociferous edition of 1869). Anti-Semitic associations and political parties also came into existence. Accusations of ritual murder gathered fresh momentum, especially in rural areas, having been on the wane for decades. In France, Britain, Italy, and Germany, Jews still did not have to fear for their lives or property; more typical were the insults and rejection that one routinely came across in certain German spas, for example, which advertised themselves as
judenfrei
. But anti-Semitism also met with social and political resistance. In Germany it was more virulent in the late 1870s than a decade later, while in France it suffered a major setback at the end of the century in the Dreyfus Affair, when the Left and the bourgeois Center successfully exposed a military plot driven by hatred of the Jews.
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Anti-Semitic agitation also intensified in Austria and Hungary, where it followed the German example but mainly reflected local circumstances. It was more violent in the Tsarist Empire than anywhere else. A majority of European Jewry lived in its Polish part and faced a particularly contradictory situation there. On the one hand, a large number of eastern European Jews had not been affected by Reform Judaism and—except in Austrian Galicia—received no help from an emancipation-minded government. The tsars had even practiced a discrimination bordering on apartheid, and the material position of the
Ostjuden
was in most cases quite desperate. On the other hand, the Tsarist Empire housed some very successful Jewish entrepreneurs who corresponded to the clichéd figure of the “plutocrat,” and Jews were also prominent in the leadership of the newly emerging revolutionary groups. This made eastern Europe fertile ground for a rabid anti-Semitism more social and antimodernist than biological-racist in its foundations. In several waves of pogroms, especially those of 1881–84 and 1903–6, a considerable number of Jews lost their lives (more than three thousand in the disastrous year 1905 alone) or were injured or deprived of their property. These mainly urban riots had a spontaneous form, but they were usually covered up, or at least not punished, by the authorities. They triggered hasty emigration and a belief that (eastern) European Jews had to create a homeland of their own in Palestine: that is, Zionism. The key text of that movement,
Der Judenstaat
(1896), was written by the Austrian journalist and foreign correspondent Theodor Herzl, though mainly under the impact of the Dreyfus Affair and anti-Semitic disturbances in France.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the West of the Tsarist Empire was the most dangerous area in the world for Jews. Anti-Semitism there was not simply copied from Germany or Austria but had a real ideological autonomy. The years 1902–3 saw the appearance of an ominous document,
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, which conjured up plans for Jewish world domination. They were later shown to be a forgery, but especially after the First World War this product of Russia's highly paranoid anti-Semitism aroused discussion all around the
world.
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Two readers who helped it on its way were the Austro-German rabblerouser Adolf Hitler and the American car tycoon Henry Ford—by no means the only anti-Semite in a country where social discrimination against Jews was widespread and physical violence not uncommon.
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