I am reading excerpts from collected Jewish diaries in Germany in the 18th-20th Centuries. I was struck forcibly with who it was who had the longstanding prejudices, versus who accepted them into German society as integral parts, or even equals. The university students and professors were the worst and most consistent excluders, decade after decade. The peasants were usually prejudiced, though there were towns and regions where the peoples got along reasonably well for a century or more. Merchants, craftsmen, suppliers, builders, and especially the factory workers were the most accepting. Prejudice ebbed and flowed, and increased fairly steadily after the economic volatility of the 1870's through 90's, and then thereafter.
The Nazis, remember, were drawn from the artists, philosophers, and university populations. They stirred up the others, and there was a longstanding simmer of antisemitism to draw on. Eventually, it was nearly everyone, as we know. But the idea that the Holocaust happened because of some acute madness of the crowd, driven by the stupid and uneducated, is false.
7 comments:
Heidegger never recanted. And the anti-Semitism in Germany goes back to the Middle Ages and the Crusades.
You might want to read Israel Shahak's "Jewish History, Jewish Religion." Shahak was born an Polish Jew and survived Belen as a teenager. After the war he emigrated to Israel and fought in the liberation army.
Shahak points out that throughout much of their history in Europe, Jews were urban and middle class or upper working class. The few Jews in the countryside were estate managers, "Fiddler on the Roof" mythology notwithstanding. So most of them competed with urban Germans and Poles and Russian for professional positions, and the few rural Jews were hated for their collaboration with the local nobility.
There is apparently a correlation between the occurrence of medieval pogroms in various German localities and support for the Nazi Party in those locations 600 years later:
https://blog.oup.com/2012/07/medieval-pogrom-origin-20th-century-anti-semitism-germany/
Fascinating study. As it was fear of outsiders, the value could remain even when the Jews were gone, only to reemerge when they returned and times turned bad. In the first decade after the breakup of Yugoslavia, antisemitic parties reemerged, even though there were no Jews left in the countries.
As from Fiddler on the Roof -- Jews excommunicate those born Jewish who don't marry Jews, at least they had been for hundreds of years in Europe. (It's changing now in the USA).
"I'm not prejudiced ... but I wouldn't want my daughter to marry one of them." Whether the "them" is blacks, non-Jews, non-Chinese, non-Catholics.
Jewish relatively slightly greater success, plus their own exclusivity (racism?), were both reasons for the normal majority to dislike them. This doesn't excuse the inhumane pogroms, but like explanations for most war, is a perspective on the problems.
Today, many US Dems want to treat all Republicans like the Nazis treated Jews.
I would say, as they treated the Jews 50-100 years earlier: keeping them out of the universities, excluding them socially, allowing them to engage in trade only with restrictions, with some people being otherwise decent but others being publicly insulting and threatening.
Any time nationalism becomes more pronounced, the Jews get more flak, as do Catholics and Masons. Besides individual reasons for the antagonism, they all have in common that they are trans-national, which makes nationalists suspicious.
Good pickup. It's exactly the sort of thing paranoids look for - people who aren't "really" us.
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