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Introduction to the Theme

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

James F. Harris
James F. Harris
Affiliation:
University of Maryland at Collage park
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Extract

Considering all that is known about the place of anti-Semitism in German society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there are relatively few studies of anti-Semitism within a religious context. This is surprising given that Germany was and is more evenly divided numerically between Catholics and Protestants than almost any other large European nation, (about 60 percent Protestant to 40 percent Catholic). Most studies of anti-Semitism in the last two centuries have focused on various secular motivations. When scholars do choose to investigate religious anti-Semitism, almost all concentrate on Evangelical Lutherans or on Catholics, but not on both. Likewise, many historians consider religious anti-Semitism to be anachronistic. Yet many study the incidence of secular or modern anti-Semitism within a religious context whether institutional or popular, seldom paying equal attention to that context. Additionally, studies of anti-Semitism emphasized Protestantism and the Protestant north of Germany in particular, because, after 1870, that was where anti-Semitic political parties, movements, and groups appeared to thrive.

Type
Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , September 1994 , pp. 261 - 266
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1994

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References

1. In his excellent Deutsche Geschichte, 1800–1866. Bürgerwelt und starker Staat (Munich, 1983), 251Google Scholar, Thomas Nipperdey describes the anti-Semitic riots of 1848 in just this way.

2. Katz, Jacob, From Prejudice to Destruction. Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933 (Cambridge, MA, 1980), v.Google Scholar

3. In contrast to Mosse, George, The Crisis of German Ideology. Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, 1964), esp. 3f, 35–16.Google Scholar

4. Katz, From Prejudice, 3–4.

5. Pulzer, Peter, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (Cambridge, MA, 1988), xxiiGoogle Scholar, citing Greive, Hermann, Geschichte des modernen Antisemitismus in Deutschland (Darmstadt, 1983)Google Scholar. Religion plays very little role in Pulzer's account.

6. “Antisemitismus,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Brunner, O., et al. , (Stuttgart, 1972), 129–53.Google Scholar

7. Sorkin, David, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York, 1987).Google Scholar

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9. Ibid., 302–5.

10. Langmuir, Gavin I., “Anti-Judaism as the Necessary Preparation for Antisemitism”, in idem, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990), 61.Google Scholar

11. Langmuir, Gavin I., History, Religion, and Antisemitism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990), 5.Google Scholar

12. See, for example, Jochmann, Werner, “Antijüdische Traditionen im deutschen Protestanismus und nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung,” in idem, Gesellschaftskrise und Judenfeindschaft in Deutschland, 1870–1945 (Hamburg, 1988), 268.Google Scholar

13. Levy, Richard, The Downfall of the Antisemitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany (New Haven and London, 1975).Google Scholar