Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany

Conclusion

Conclusion Modern antisemitism has been described, correctly, as a reaction to the loss of distinction between “Jewishness” and “Germanness” that resulted from the Jewish acculturation to German ways that began in the eighteenth century.1 Antisemites attempted to substitute certainty for confusion about what separated “Jews” from “Germans” by asserting a binary (though not equal) opposition between the two. In the early and mid-nineteenth century, antisemites focused on character, contrasting “Jewish”with “German” notions of morality, among many other things. By the century’s end, racial antisemites claimed that the oppositions were biologically determined , making Jewish characteristics an unchanging fact of nature. All of this roughly coincided with an expansion in how most Europeans imagined the communal self: as something more national than local by de‹nition . As Helmut Walser Smith has convincingly argued, this reimagining of the community gave rise to a new antisemitic stereotype that had a particular potential for inciting violence: the idea that Jews were traitors to the nation.2 Colonialism during the Kaiserreich era worked against antisemitism by confusing the divide, breaking down the alleged divisions between “Jew” and “German.” The newness of colonial empire meant the absence of an entrenched elite in the colonial bureaucracy, something that, if in existence , would have prevented full participation by individuals identi‹ed as Jewish by their peers. As it stood, men like Paul Kayser and Bernhard Dernburg were able to rise to the highest levels of administrative power in what became the most patriotic of nationalist projects: overseas colonialism . Other Germans of Jewish descent also distinguished themselves 246 1. Uffa Jensen, “Into the Spiral of Problematic Perceptions: Modern Anti-Semitism and gebildetes Bürgertum in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” German History 25 (2007): 348–71. 2. Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). through their service to the colonial cause. Bernhard Dernburg and Emin Pasha even became popular public heroes, something hitherto unheard of for men whose Jewish backgrounds brought the barbs of racial antisemitism . An admiring procolonial public attributed Dernburg and Emin with exactly what the antisemites claimed that Jews could not possess, which supposedly distinguished them from right-thinking German Gentiles: true German patriotism. At the height of their popularity, Dernburg and Emin were perceived by many within the procolonial public as ‹ghting champions of colonialism, as loyal defenders of German interests abroad, as honest patriots, and these sentiments even spread to large sections of the antisemitic movement. From this, it is clear that colonialism cannot only be seen as having encouraged more exclusive notions of Germanness in ways that furthered antisemitic aims. Rather, through the public examples of German-Jewish actors working on behalf of overseas empire, colonialism helped weaken the imagined racial divide within the German body politic that mattered most to antisemites, showing that certain “Jews” could act like “Germans” and that the two could work together for Germany’s bene‹t. It did so even as it hardened racial attitudes toward colonized peoples , especially black Africans. The positive public reception of Dernburg and Emin Pasha that came despite knowledge of their Jewish ancestry would seem to support the contention of some scholars that the success of antisemitism in imperial Germany has been overstated. Samuel Moyn argued in 1996 that historians of German-Jewish history need to stop “con‹guring as dusk everything prior to the night that eventually fell,”3 while Till van Rahden contends that the historiography of German antisemitism neglects “dissenting voices and ambivalent positions.”4 The fact that the thousands of postcards, telegrams, and letters sent to Dernburg at the height of his popularity contained virtually nothing antisemitic and few references to his Jewish heritage testi‹es to the limits of Wilhelmian antisemitism. So too do the dissent and confusion that Dernburg and Emin Pasha caused within antisemitic ranks, where some defended them not just from the critics of colonial empire but also from fellow antisemites. All this provides perhaps Conclusion 247 3. Samuel Moyn, “German Jewry and the Question of Identity: Historiography and Theory ,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 41 (1996): 293. 4. Till van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860–1925, trans. Marcus Brainard (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 15. the strongest evidence yet that the antisemitic milieu of imperial Germany was not that of the Weimar era. It seems...