Table Of ContentPATHS TO GENOCIDE
Also by Lionel B. Steiman
FRANZ WERFEL: The Faith of an Exile, from Prague to Beverly Hills
Paths to Genocide
Antisemitism in Western History
Lionel B. Steiman
Professor ofH istory
The University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, Canada
* © Lionel B. Steiman 1998
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Contents
Preface viii
Introduction xi
1. Christianity and Crusades: The Saviour and the Jews
2. Segregation and Expulsion: The Devil and the Jews 27
3. The Age of the Refonnation: Luther and the Jews 52
4. The Great Divide: West and East in the Seventeenth Century 71
5. The Eighteenth Century: Enlightenment, Revolution .. Emancipation 93
6. The Nineteenth Century: Liberalism, Nationalism, Racism 117
7. Imperial Gennany and Habsburg Austria: Ideology, Politics, Culture 143
8. Russia and France: Antisemitism, Zionism, the New World 179
9. Nazi Gennany: The Final Solution 212
Epilogue 238
Notes 245
Select Bibliography 267
Index 277
Preface
There is a vast literature on antisemitism and its history. The phenomenon itself
attracted observers long before its awful culmination, but the Holocaust prompted
a much deeper and more sophisticated interest in the subject. Recently that interest
has turned from the historic Western heartland of antisemitism to the former
Soviet Union, to the resurgence of antisemitism in Eastern Europe after the fall of
communism, to Arab antisemitism in the Middle East after the establishment of
the state of Israel, to black antisemitism in the United States since the civil rights
movement of the 1960s, and to the vogue of antisemitism in contemporary Japan
and other places where one might not have expected to find it. The focus of the
present work remains on Western antisemitism, tracing it from its ancient origins
to the murder of Jewry in the twentieth century.
Existing academic literature has documented this development of antisemitism
and has analysed its complex role in Western society and culture. Intensive research .
by historians, sociologists, psychologists, theologians and philosophers has been
sustained by the simple question, how could the Holocaust have occurred? There
are wide-ranging collections of articles (such as The Persisting Question (l987)
edited by Helen Fein, and Antisemitism Through the Ages (1988) edited by Shmuel
Almog), and there are numerous general histories. Semites and Anti-Semites
(1986), by Bernard Lewis; and Antisemitism. The Longest Hatred (1991), by
Robert S. Wistrich, concentrate on Europe but both also emphasize the penetration
of European antisemitism into the body of Islam and its significance for
contemporary Middle East politics.
The historian of antisemitism to whom all others are most indebted is Leon
Poliakov. His four-volume history and numerous specialized studies are
indispensable. Poliakov began his own work more as historical sociology, focusing
on the interactions between Jewish and non-Jewish communities, but the famous
History of Anti-Semitism became an extended account of anti-Jewish ideas and
actions, interspersed with psychological and political interpretations. Poliakov's
underlying convictions still dominate much of the writing on antisemitism. He found
little explanatory value in the ever popular 'scapegoat' theory, and for similar reasons
dismissed the idea of 'economic' antisemitism. Jew-hatred in his view was an almost
indestructible psychological reality, a compound of enduring primordial fears, for
whose persistence Christian theology was primarily responsible.
This indictment of Christian teaching was begun in the 1930s by James Parkes,
an Anglican priest and Church historian whose pioneering study of The Conflict
of Church and Synagogue (1934) and numerous subsequent works delineated the
role of the Church in the persecution of Jewry. More accusatory, polemical a.::counts
began to appear after the war, most notably Europe and the Jews (1950), by
Malcolm Hay, a Catholic Scot shocked by revelations of German barbarism. Hay
viii
Preface ix
was convinced that the murder of Jewry was not just a Gennan crime but was the
inevitable culmination of centuries of antisemidc persecution rooted in Christian
doctrine, a charge he documented in his passionate account of over a thousand years
of anti-lew ish teachings by leading churchmen.
Rosemary Ruether's Faith and Fralricitk (I 974J defined the tenns of a continuing
or
scholarly debate on tbe Christian origins antisemitism. John Gager's The Origins
ofA nti-Semitism (1983) k'ICflled those origins squarely in the New Testament. while
Jeremy Cohen •. in The Friars and the Jews (1982). indicted the medieval friars for
giving a practical twist to the more abstract snti·Judaism of the theologians. There
also appeared important genera' studies of Christianity and antisemitism. The
Anguish of c/u: Jews (1965; 1985) is a survey of twenty-three centuries of
antisemllism by an American Catholic priest, Edward H. Flannery; and God's First
Love (1970), presents a more passionate and more darnning account. of Christian
persecution, by a liberal Catholic historian and prominent figure in Austrian
cultural life, Friedrich Heer. More recently, Benzien Netanyahu (The Origins of
the Inquisition in Fifteenth Ceruury Spain (1995)) has insisted tbat !he fOOts of
modem antisemitism lay not in Christian religious belief but in popular pre
Christian racial attitudes which acquired a religious expression, and that the
antisemitism of Chrislianity grew not from its theology but from efforts by the early
Church to accommodate the racist masses it sought to convert.
Popularcultl.lfe and intellectual life in genera! cannot be separated from the role
of Christian teaching and practice in the history of antisemitism" The classic
ac{:ount of medieval culture from this perspective is Joshua Trachtenberg's The
Devil and the Jews (1943), which documented the widespread presumed association
of Jews with various forms of devilry including ritual murder. This book: appeared
before historians had exposed the theological underpinnings of Christian
antisemitism, but when they had. it became possible to analyse Ihe role ofthrology
in relation to the major developments in other areas of cultural and intellectual life.
with a view to establishing a more holistic conception altne nature of antisemitism.
Gavin 1. Langmuir, a leading historian of medieval antisemitism, did so in IWO
important works published in 1990: Toward a Definition of Antisemitism. and
History, Religion, and Antisemitism,
The challenge for historians of post&medievai antisemitism was to account for
the persistence of a hatred rooted in religion when religion itself seemed to be in
decline. In From Prejudice to Destruction (1980), Jacob Katz showed how
traditiona1 prejudices were brought up to date and clothed in dress more suited 10
a secular age .. Katz also focused on the role of nationalism. showing how religion
was Iransfonned into a component of national identity , and how both contributed
to the rise of political antisemitism, which Peter Pulzer had analysed against its
political and economic background ofliberaJism and industrial expansion (The Rise
of Political A,uj·Semitism (1964»). Pulzer saw political antisemitism as a reaction
against these and other aspects of modernity with which Jews were identified.
