A History of Zionism by Walter Laqueur Page B

level, publicly ate pork on the Sabbath, promenading noisily in the city streets, reciting aloud Kiesewetter’s ‘Logic’ and singing arias from ‘Herodias before Bethlehem’ (a contemporary opera). Grattenauer much regretted that honest Christians were no longer permitted to kill Jews; Hundt-Radowski, his most widely read successor, argued in 1816 that the murder of Jews was neither a sin nor a crime but at most a disturbance of public order. Since, however, public order was not to be disturbed, he proposed the castration of all male Jews, the sale of females to bordellos, and the disposal of the rest as slaves to the British for work in their overseas plantations.
    These were extreme voices but they were by no means uninfluential, and some of these pamphlets were frequently reprinted. A slightly more moderate form of antisemitism found expression in the writings of university professors such as Rühs and Fries. They argued that Judaism was odium generis humani , a pest that should be exterminated though not necessarily by fire and sword; it was not just a confession but a nation and a state within the state. Jews should not be given equal rights; on the contrary, they should be compelled to wear certain distinguishing marks so that the unsuspecting gentile would be able to recognise the enemy without difficulty. These writers usually struck a note of alarm: half of the wealth of Frankfurt was already in Jewish hands; in another forty years the children of the leading Christian families would be reduced to the status of servants in Jewish houses unless drastic measures were taken in time.
    These attacks created deep consternation among German Jewry and produced a sizable counter-literature. The Jews had been oppressed for many centuries, the apologists argued; but given a few decades of unfettered development they would be indistinguishable from the rest of the people - honest, industrious, good citizens making their full contribution to society. They explained that the antisemitic pamphleteers were wholly ignorant of the facts of Jewish history; Spain had not been ruined by the Jews, but on the contrary by their expulsion. They also stressed that the recent antisemitic writings were simply a rehash of the literature of bygone centuries which had been frequently and conclusively refuted. Such well-meaning defence of Judaism and the Jews was bound to be ineffective because it ignored the irrational origin of the attacks. Rational arguments, however logically marshalled, were bound to make no impact in these conditions. How could Fries be refuted when he said: ‘Go out and ask anyone, peasants as well as townspeople, whether they do not hate the Jews who take away their livelihood and corrupt the German people’. With all the exaggeration in statements of this kind there was this kernel of truth: Jews were disliked. Individual Jews could pass and were occasionally accepted and respected, but there was a deep-seated feeling that as a whole they were undesirable, a danger to the German people and its development.
    On the intellectual level this backlash against the Enlightenment has to be viewed in the general context of the times. The Romantic Movement rediscovered the beauty of the Middle Ages and preached the ideal of a Christian-German state; the war against Napoleon produced a wave of xenophobia and gave a powerful impetus to Teutomania (Teutschtümelei). The new patriotism, the precursor of the völkisch -racial movement of the latter part of the century, was a reaction to the humanitarian-cosmopolitan movement of the century before; it stressed national exclusivity and was soon to insist on the inferiority of other races.
    The Romantic fashion passed but it was not followed by a return to the ideals of Lessing. Antisemitic attacks did not cease, and they came from the left as well as the right: Bruno Bauer’s pamphlet on the Jewish question is now remembered mainly because it provoked Marx’s reply. Jewry could