Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Beller Steven

Author:Beller, Steven [Beller, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2007-11-21T16:00:00+00:00

9. ‘Do I look like I would eat Jews?’, Glühlichter, December 1892. Karl Lueger (1844–1910), Austrian Christian Social leader and mayor of Vienna, was notorious for his cynical opportunism and hypocrisy regarding antisemitism; he was one of Hitler’s role models, together with Georg von Schönerer, in Mein Kampf.

When Jewish material success had first become particularly evident, in the 1860s, it was generally accepted by the authorities and populace, because these were the prosperous ‘founders’ years’ of rapid economic growth. Behind Jewish acceptance was an implicit bargain: the assumption was that liberal economic policies, which enabled Jews to achieve their new status of prosperity, would also provide for the prosperity of non-Jews. Any latent resentment at a formerly oppressed, pariah group suddenly leapfrogging most of the populace to be both materially more successful and socially superior was kept in check by the rational calculation that everyone could gain from the new dispensation.

This began to change radically in 1873. The economic good times came to an end with the Crash of 9 May, when a run on the Viennese Stock Exchange spread to the financial centres of the rest of Europe and ushered in the long era of the (19th-century) Depression. The damage done by the Crash was more psychological than material. The economy recovered relatively quickly and the late 19th century was an era of remarkable technological progress. The Crash had, however, destroyed the populace’s faith in laissez faire economics, and the political liberalism that went with it, and the compromising of liberalism also had a negative influence on the standing in public opinion of its allies in Central European Jewry. There was a time lag between the Crash and political liberalism’s decline in both Germany and Austria, but it is striking that the end of liberal hegemony in Central Europe around 1879 was followed almost immediately by the emergence of political antisemitism.

There was a certain rational calculus that could explain this: Jews, viewed as a separate group, had been acceptable and welcome as entrepreneurs and ‘money-people’ who knew how to create prosperity. That is how they continued to be welcomed in Hungary as allies of the Magyar national cause. In Vienna, however, once the economic circumstances had tightened, and Jews, unlike those in the non-Jewish middle and lower middle classes, still appeared to have kept most of their gains, and even be increasing them, attitudes darkened. As long as Jews were still viewed as not ‘one of us’, as a competing ethnic group, who had been allowed to rise from their divinely ordained state of wretchedness to become full members of society precisely in order to help make the pie bigger for all, then it seemed reasonable to see their economic gains as a slice of the pie which should, by rights, be ‘ours’.

Much of German Central European antisemitism can thus be seen as an extreme attempt at wealth redistribution, on ethnic rather than class lines. Those on the democratic and socialist Left have concurred with the Viennese Democrat Ferdinand Kronawetter that antisemitism in this economic sense was an irrational ‘socialism of fools’.

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