The State, the Nation, and the Jews: Liberalism and the Antisemitism Dispute in Bismarck's Germany

6. The Riddle of Treitschke's Intentions

One asks oneself: What does Herr von Treitschke want?—manuel joël, “Open Letter to Herrn Professor Heinrich von Treitschke” The preceding chapters have been concerned with how Treitschke and his respondents used a number of crucial political,social,and historical concepts in differing (or not so differing) ways. This final chapter of textual analysis looks at what Treitschke explicitly wrote about how he wanted to see the “Jewish question”resolved, and what some of his respondents thought his intentions were. In the final section of his first contribution,“Our Prospects,” Treitschke makes specific suggestions as to how the Jews should behave in the face of Germany’s developing into a proper nation-state.He points toward examples such as “Jewish societies against usury which silently do much good” and the“work of intelligent Israelites who have recognized that their tribal fellows [ihre Stammgenossen] must adjust to the customs and ideas of their Christian fellow-citizens”(to whom, by implication, such things as“usury” are completely alien); he concludes: “Much remains to be done in this direction . It is not of course possible to change the hard German heads into Jewish heads; the only way out therefore is for our Jewish fellow citizens to make up their minds without reservations to be Germans, as many of them have done already long ago, to their advantage and ours.”1 Treitschke considers it self-evident that “German heads” and “Jewish heads” cannot Six.TheRiddleofTreitschke’sIntentions 156 The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute coexist next to each other without the latter adapting to the former. He sounds confident here that this process is under way and merely needs to be continued consistently. His tone changes slightly when he discusses the remaining obstacles: the Jews “who talk so much about tolerance” should “become truly tolerant themselves and show some respect for the faith, the customs and the feelings of the German people which has long ago atoned for old injustice and given them the gift of human and civil rights.”The lack of this “respect” on the side of “a section of our commercial and literary Jewry”is the“ultimate reason”for the present anger. This anger, Treitschke concludes,might not be“a pleasant sight”but is merely the accompaniment of “boiling-up unfinished ideas”and thus not a bad thing:“May God grant that we come out of the ferment and unrest of these restless years with a stricter concept of the state and its obligations and with a more vigorous national consciousness.” The antisemitic movement is a phenomenon of the more general process of bringing about the maturing of Germany into a modern nation-state, to which it is necessary but merely instrumental. This implies that antisemitism will disappear once this process is successfully completed. In the concluding section of his third contribution (his response to Breßlau, Lazarus, and Cassel), Treitschke develops the one point in his original contribution that he claims has been“strangely ignored”by all commentators, although he had intended it to be the main issue: his (self-)criticism of the “complicity of the Germans in the power of Jewry”:“We have allowed ourselves to be misguided by the great words of tolerance and Enlightenment toward some mistaken decisions on schooling that now threaten to damage the Christian education of our youth. . . . Tolerance is a wonderful thing but it presupposes that one already has a firm religious conviction oneself. . . . It is the duty of the state to take utmost care that our school pupils are not taught indifference toward religion under the cover of tolerance.”2 Since Treitschke sees toleration and legal emancipation as benevolence that the victorious party can afford to show only after a decisive and final victory, any doubts about the finality of the victory would be reason enough to call toleration and emancipation into question. For Treitschke, such doubts TheRiddleofTreitschke’sIntentions 157 seem to be raised by the lack of religious enthusiasm on the part of “our youth.”It seems that Treitschke would be happy to“grant”all liberal rights to the Jews (“a wonderful thing”) were it not for a lack of “firm religious conviction”on the Christian side.According to Treitschke,society can afford tolerance only on the condition of general“firm religious conviction.”It is difficult to imagine,though,how religious conviction,if it is“firm”as well as in power (which is the only place from...