The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred by Niall Ferguson Page A

Jewish blood is indestructible and forms body and soul in the Jewish way for all future generations.’ ‘Guard against the Jew within you,’ warned another, for no German could be certain that all his ancestors had resisted Jewish contamination. One of the defining works of German racial thought –
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
(1899) – was in fact written by an Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who had emigrated to Germany in his twenties and married one of Wagner’s daughters. Chamberlain too argued that Germany faced a choice between racial homogeneity or ‘chaos’. The leader of the Pan-German League, Hein-rich Class, was another who regarded ‘half-bloods’ as playing a malign role in German society.
    Some German anti-Semitic literature was crudely sensationalist. As in England, there were lurid allegations that Jews played a leading part in the organization of prostitution. In a tract entitled
Brothel Jews
, it was alleged that Jews considered ‘the corruption of our virgins, the trade in girls, the seduction of women as no sin, but a sacrifice that they make to their Jehovah; the same applies to the spread of degenerative diseases and plagues that they thereby facilitate’. In vain did German-Jewish feminists like Bertha Pappenheim point out that many of the victims of the ‘white slave trade’ were themselves Jewish girls from Eastern Europe. The stereotype of the lecherous Jew seducing or raping non-Jewish females also made its first appearances in German caricatures at around this time. Sensational in a rather different way were those works that sought to expose the Jewish ancestry of supposedly blue-blooded families. The authors of the volume known as the
Semi-Gotha
, a parody of the aristocratic handbook the
Almanach de Gotha
, alleged that there were more than a thousand old aristocratic and recently ennobled Gentile families now partly or wholly Jewish through marriage. Yet interwoven with such muckraking were more sinister intimations of radical ‘solutions’ to the so-called ‘Jewish question’. In
Jews and Indo-Germans
(1887), the Orientalist Paul de Lagarde characterized Jews as ‘bearers of decay’, comparing them with ‘trichinae and bacilli’. The best remedy in such cases was ‘annihilation’ by means of ‘surgical intervention and medication’. In a Reichstag debate in 1895, the anti-Semitic deputy Hermann Ahlwardt referred to Jews as ‘cholera bacilli’ and called for the authorities to ‘exterminate’ them as the British had exterminated the ‘Thugs’ in India. As early as 1899 the anti-Semitic German Social Reform Party called for a ‘final solution’ of the ‘Jewish question’ to take the form of ‘complete separation and (if self-defence requires it) ultimately the annihilation of the Jewish people’. The racial hygienist Alfred Ploetz’s German Society for Racial Hygiene also called for the ‘extermination of less valuable elements from the population’.
    From such declarations it is all too tempting to draw a more or less straight line to Hitler’s death camps. It should nevertheless be stressed that there were also strong countervailing tendencies at the turn of the century. As has often been remarked, someone in 1901 trying to predict a future Holocaust would have been unlikely to pick Germanyas the country responsible. Jews accounted for less than 1 per cent of the German population, and that proportion had been declining for two decades. In absolute and relative terms, there were far larger Jewish communities in the Western provinces of Russia (see Chapter 2 ) and the eastern parts of Austria-Hungary – notably Galicia, Bukovina and Hungary itself – to say nothing of Romania and, it should be noted, the United States, which already had the biggest Jewish population in the world. Of the fifty-eight European cities with Jewish populations in excess of 10,000 in around 1900, just three – Berlin, Posen and Breslau – were in