Semites and Aryans

After the expulsions from England in 1290 and from France from 1306 to 1394, Germany and Austria became the intellectual Jewish heartland. It was here that Jewish — German or Yiddish evolved. It became the popular language of Jews throughout most of continental Europe replacing popular Hebrew.

Germany was also the centre of Jewish literature, theology and philosophy. It is from here that commentaries on the Psalms or on the Talmud spread to Britain and Spain. From Germany in the 15th century came The ways of the Just which would become the reference book for Jewish popular morality throughout much of Western Europe. By the 20th century, we can think of this ferment of Jewish culture with its constant renewal of religious Judaism, as consisting of Austria, France, Poland and Germany but it is primarily, but not only, to Germany that waves of new Jewish immigrants came, pushed out by persecution in Russia and pogroms in Central Europe.

Unlike what is popularly believed, few Jews were wealthy. By the 20th century, the medieval Jew pushed into a money lending considered the sin of usury for Christians but needed in the society of the time, no longer existed. Banking had replaced money lending.

Although some prominent Jewish families were in banking — the Rothschilds being the most famous — most Jews were like the rest of society with an important working class and with an intellectual middle class. The number of Jewish intellectuals, who fleeing Germany and Austria, because the backbone of science and literature in the United States, are witness to the integration of Jews into all levels of German society. Their flight abroad so impoverished German science that it has been argued that it is to this impoverishment that Germany owed its Second World War defeat. How then Kristal Nacht? For it was this which was for German Jews, the beginning of the Shoah or Holocaust.

Racist Stereotypes

One of the first problems in looking at anti-Semitism is that a crucial factor in racism seems to be absent. We are accustomed to racial stereotypes of the lazy African who has a string of children whom he neither knows or supports and who drop our of school. Jews however are credited with working harder than everyone else, saving more than anyone else, seeing after their family more than anyone else and doing better at school and at University than everyone else. Jews, we may be forgiven for thinking, are the model British, French, German. On the contrary. This stereotype of Jews works exactly like the lazy and shiftless stereotype of Africans. It indicates Jews as not being part of “normal” society and as having a competitive advantage over other groups. Hitler’s complaint that as a young man with pretensions to being an artist, he couldn’t get a job and was a flop of an artist while Jews easily got everything, refers to this stereotype of Jews. Incidentally Hitler was not the most brilliant or creative of artists. The period was that of post World War I where Germany was defeated, had lost that sign of status and wealth: her colonies, were saddled with an enormous war debt and would be hit particularly hard by the economic depression of the end of the 1920’s and the 1930’s.

The German People

When we examine the period closely we discover that it was not only Jews who were seen as different and were therefore in trouble. So were the Travelling People or Gypsies. So was what we could vaguely call “The Left” ie German communists and socialists or Social Democrats. Members of these last were the only group in the Weimar Republic to oppose Hitler’s demand for a united vote or his “Enabling” Resolution.

This was designed to enable Hitler to proceed without a return to Parliament. Liberal Democrats including Germany’s Feminist leader, voted with the Nazi. Social Democrats or Socialists if you like, joined Communists as enemies of the German State.

It was Jews and Gypsies however, who were considered not only enemies but fundamentally un-German. Un-German meant not being part of the German People and therefore not part of the Greater Germany of Austria and with its proposed expansion into Central Europe. This policy outside of Europe would be called a settler colony or in the Americas, called Internal Colonisation.

This expansion was not necessarily opposed by the majority of Germans. After all that national boundaries should be ethnic boundaries, was as much Woodrow Wilson and the Treaty of Versailles as it was German ethnic nationalism. It was not only the question of Jews. There was the reaction to the modernism of the culture of jazz and left bank Paris. Jews were the most visible sign of an edifice that was not only constructed by Hitler and Nazis, as non-German and fundamentally immoral.

Language as Race

It is easy to suppose that Nazi anti-Semitism was only a continuation of the anti-Judaism which was a part of European history and particularly so since the Crusades and the plague call the Black Death. That anti-Judaism was however, more closely associated with the consolidation of Christian Europe. It was directed against Jews who refused conversion and bolstered by a fear of divine retribution in the form of misfortune and plague. It was not true of all Catholic countries.

There is no history of the persecution of Jews in Ireland. The one clearly anti-Jewish incident happens in Limerick in 1930’s. That there were elements of old fashioned racism in Germany of the 1930’s is true. It was not the dominant element. While Jews in mediaeval Europe could convert, Jews in Nazi Germany were not persecuted for religion. They were persecuted as a Race.

The question of “Race” places the Nazi era firmly within modern scientific racism as it does the anti-Semitism in the second half of the 19th century and on wards. For Africans “race” was situated in biology and argued through evolution. It was these which provided the mechanism for racial classification and gave the explanation of origin. For Jews, and incidentally for Arabs and Chinese, this was situated in linguistics and argued through the origin of language.

It was these which provided the mechanism for racial classification and which abolished Judaism as the ancestral origin of European civilisation and Greek as its finest flowering. His the origin of language which becomes the “races” of Aryans and Semites ie. The superior “noble” races, and the inferior races who can be eliminated from a German “Homeland.”