Why the Jews? by Dennis Prager

Author:Dennis Prager
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

GERMANY

In Germany the situation was basically the same as in France. With the exception of the philo-semite Gotthold Lessing, leaders of the German Enlightenment were divided between those who favored granting civil rights to assimilated Jews and those who opposed civil rights for any Jews.

An example of the latter was Johann Fichte, who pointed to Jewish values as the source of his antisemitism. “Give them civil rights?” asked Fichte in a book published in 1793. “I see no other way of doing this except to cut off all their heads one night and substitute other heads without a single Jewish thought in them. How shall we defend ourselves against them? I see no alternative but to conquer their promised land for them and to dispatch them all there. If they were granted civil rights they would trample on other citizens.”17 Reading Fichte’s fears of the Jews’ danger to Germany, one must recall that Jews numbered only about 1 percent of Germany’s population.

But most important is to understand the link between Fichte’s thinking and Hitler’s racial antisemitism. Fichte helped paved the intellectual way to Hitler by theorizing that Jews are unchangeable, inassimilable, and incapable of conversion. That is why the only way to solve the “Jewish Problem” is to “cut off all their heads,” since those heads hold all those Jewish thoughts. Thus, for Fichte and, as we shall see, for Hitler, it is Jewish thoughts, not Jewish genes, that make the Jews irredeemably Jewish.

Even Immanuel Kant, the most influential German thinker of the eighteenth century, though never advocating the persecution of Jews, called for the end of Judaism and its laws: “The euthanasia of Judaism can only be achieved by means of a pure, moral religion, and the abandonment of all [its] old legal regulations.”18

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