Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction (review)

Steven Beller seeks to explain how anti-Semitism arose and was incorporated into European society, and how its central European variant resulted in Nazi genocide. He examines the ideology of anti-Semitism and the historical context that gave birth to it, which must include the actions of Jews as well as anti-Semites. He rejects the notion that Jews are outside of history, and argues that ignoring Jews when studying how and why anti-Semitism developed also "denie[s them] any positive responsibility in Western history" (4). The author laments the scholarly overemphasis on the discourse of anti-Semitism and the notion that it was a kind of madness or disease, which in a way absolves anti-Semites of responsibility for their own actions. He emphasizes instead the "instrumental rationality…and moral culpability of those involved" (6). Both Jews and anti-Semites were independent actors, each with agency who, while influencing each other, bear responsibility for their own actions. Beller identifies two key interactions at the heart of what emerged as anti-Semitism in German Central Europe. First was the interaction between European thought and culture and the actual socio-economic conditions created by industrialization and modernization. Second was the contrast between how Jews actually lived and what Europeans imagined about them.

As a title in Oxford's Very Short Introduction series, the book is far too short for any kind of comprehensive narrative. Beller focuses on the postenlightenment process of integration in Europe. While noting the exceptions to his generalizations of each region, he contrasts the process in Western Europe, which relied on the enlightenment foundation of individual human rights, with the continuation of the corporatist model of separate Jewish communities in Russia and the East, and, finally, with the most contentious and ambivalent site of integration, German Central Europe. In that region Jews received legal emancipation not because everyone inherently deserved equal rights, but rather only after they had "earned them…by giving up their 'Jewish' ways" (32).

The result was that by attempting to shed their Jewishness and become fully German, they continued to remain separate. This otherness resulted from continued obstacles placed on integration, but also because of Jewish attitudes and traditions (such as the focus on education) that differentiated them. Complete assimilation did not occur in the West, either, but emancipation was not predicated on it there. In Central Europe, the continuation of Jewish 'separateness' of any kind allowed critics of emancipation (who were by extension criticizing liberal and enlightenment ideas on which it was based) to condemn the process as a failure, paving the way for modern anti-Semitism.

Jewish acceptance of the enlightenment rationalist worldview occurred in Central Europe just as mainstream German society turned away from it to embrace a Wagnerian 'irrationalism' that appealed to them as organic German. Enlightenment rationalism itself now became linked to Jews, branding them as foreign, alien and corrupting the true German spirit. By denying rationalism, irrationalist thought denied the basis for Jewish equality and their ability to join, by rational choice, the German community because membership was inherited and spiritual, not voluntary and rational. Furthermore, the critique somewhat reflected reality, in that emancipated Jews did subscribe to rationalism, and were disproportionately prominent in the modern industrial capitalist economy (always linked to enlightenment rationalism) and modern culture that irrationalism condemned.

In addition to the 'othering' of Jews that irrationalist ideology ingrained in Central European society, Beller also discusses the 'rationalism' of anti-Semitism, seen in the desire to confiscate Jewish property and eliminate Jewish competition for positions. The author describes this as "evil, cynical and selfish – but instrumentally rational" (69).

With all this, however, Beller reminds us that on the eve of the First World War, European Jews continued to enjoy greater equality and security than they had ever before. It was the crisis provoked by that war, felt most harshly in German Central Europe because of Germany's defeat and the subsequent political/social and economic disruption, that exacerbated the antisemitic...