Offenders or Victims? German Jews and the Causes of Modern Catholic Antisemitism (review)

Was modern German Catholic antisemitism wholly constructed, or did Jews somehow “cause”it? According to Olaf Blaschke, whereas Jewish authors have complained about the former view’s “dejudaization of Jew-hatred”(p. 26, citing Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin), historians who have seized this opening to investigate Jewish “causes” have tendentiously assumed that they must have existed. What is new about his book, he promises, is that it pioneers the study not of “Catholic Attitudes toward Jews” (reconnoitered in a postintroductory chapter of fifty-two pages), but “Jewish Attitudes toward Catholics” (chapter 2, eighty-eight pages) and “Jewish Views of Catholic Antisemitism” (chapter 3, thirty-three pages). Not Catholic but Jewish sources are to pave the way to the promised land of historical understanding. When Blaschke arrives there, his unremarkable conclusion, despite the book’s deliberately disconcerting title, is that there were no Jewish “causes”; Jews were entirely victims and in no way offenders.

What is a Jewish source? For Blaschke, the primary answer is seven imperial- era newspapers that called themselves Jewish. He shares little background information about these sources, except to say that they were distributed by Jewish societies or publicists and had low circulations. Unsystematically sampling them (he is hampered by spotty collections), Blaschke finds that Jews who encountered Catholic antisemitism responded tactically, expressing surprise and calling Catholics to their best selves. Nor did the Kulturkampf elicit these Jews’ approval: Despite occasional intemperance (which Blaschke justifies by referring to papal militancy and the continuing difficulties of Jews in Catholic-ruled countries), these commentators saw the Kulturkampf’s dangerous parallels to their own situation. Blaschke makes these additional points: During the Kaiserreich, only a handful of Jews sat in the Reichstag; none of those Jews voted for the law that expelled the Jesuits (even if they did vote for other discriminations, about which Blaschke seems unconcerned); and, contrary to the usage that continues to be insisted upon by some “Catholic” historians, prominent liberal newspapers under Jewish ownership were not “Jewish” newspapers and did not pursue a Jewish agenda, if only because there was none. Indeed, the contrasting obscurity of the explicitly Jewish periodicals underscores a significant point: Jews differed from Catholics in this period precisely in that they did not take “refuge” in a well-articulated subcultural “ghetto” (p. 109) but rather sought assimilation. In this circumstance, assertions regarding a tightly organized Jewish press and agenda—be it cultural or socioeconomic—could only have been, in Blaschke’s view, Catholic projections.

Blaschke’s intermittent use of Jewish community newspapers certainly underscores the need to seek out new types of Jewish sources on how Jews coped with antisemitism, especially practicing Jews and the less self-consciously assimilated. But Blaschke seems more interested here in answering critics of his controversial earlier publications on Catholic antisemitism. His chapter on “Jewish Attitudes toward Catholics” is mostly about the reverse. Employing a useful typology offered by Gavin Langmuir (p. 69), Blaschke examines those alleged Jewish provocations that were “chimerical” (wholly imagined), those that were “xenophobic” (generalized group attributes based on undesirable individual ones), and those that were “realistic” (based on genuinely clashing group interests). But most of this chapter’s sources are not Jewish: The endnotes refer mainly to Catholic antisemitic polemicists or to Blaschke’s belabored secondary targets. Blaschke concludes that there was no Freemason-Jewish plot for world domination (a chimera), no widespread Kulturkampf participation (a xenophobic suspicion), and—despite Jews’ “indisputable” (p. 104) social and economic rise—no genuine clash of interests. Instead, he again argues, Catholic religiosity and confessional fervor caused antisemitism. In that context, Catholic statements rejecting racialism only served to assert the crusading superiority of the Catholic milieu’s own aggressive antisemitic discourse. That discourse seems to Blaschke no less relentless than racialism in its...