Der Antisemitismus und Rassismus des Adolf Bartels (German Edition)

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Don't already have an Oxford Academic account? Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Sign In or Create an Account. Close mobile search navigation Article navigation. Reference Works, Bibliographies, and Catalogues. Holocaust and Other Nazi-Era Crimes. Other Genocides and Crimes against Humanity. Everybody who can contribute to this collection is very welcome.

Please send me your pieces of evidence in the form documented below. I will add them to this repository with the name of the respective correspondent , which, bit by bit, will perhaps morph into a sort of thesaurus. References in this direction are eminently welcome. Lake Mohonk Conference , p. Four Decades with the American Indian, Yale University Press , p. His example sets a precedent concerning the further development of the category… [Cf. Removing Classrooms from the Battlefield. Paternalism, and the Redemptive Promise of Educational Choice. Brigham Young University Law Review, 34, , 2, pp.

Armand Colin , p. His research resulted in the allegation that races were a meaningful category describing unequal groups of human beings, that they differ from each other somatically as well as mentally — because, for example, the cranial capacity of the black race would be 20 percent lower than that of the white race and its intelligence would 80 percent in relation to whites. Analytical thinking and reasoning would be limited to that effect. Presses Universitaires de France , pp. Maurras et la notion de race. Le Maurassisme et la culture.

Presses Universitaires de Septentrion , pp. Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture. Princeton University Press , pp. Versuch einer geisteswissenschaftlichen Anthropologie. Werner Sombarts Weg vom Kathedersozialismus zum Faschismus. In he published an anti-Semitic bestseller [cf.

Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben. Die Anwendung des Schlagwortes im urspr. The implementation of the catchword in its original sense was facilitated by an occasionally fanatic and unrealistic exaggeration of the race idea. Bibliographisches Institut , S. Die Politik des Wissens. Akademie Verlag , p. The Color of Fascism. New York [et al. New York University Press , p. The Coming American Fascism. Updated and expanded edition. Oxford University Press , p. But Dennis applied the term even earlier.

As an adolescent, Dennis made a career as a revivalist preacher. According to the one drop rule he was labelled black. Later he passed for white and acted as a banker and a diplomat in Central America. Afterwards he pressed for a fascist revolution in the United States, which was intended to reject racism and get along without race discrimination… [Cf.

New York University Press ]. A Challenge to Humanity. Sunday Times Perth , 14 May , p. The Meaning of Hitlerism. The reprint of the text in an Australian newspaper shows an early diffusion of the word in this specific meaning. The Antisemitism of Henry Wickham Steed.

Patterns of Prejudice, 46, , 2, pp. It, however, has been ascertained that it is largely intended as a protest against the inflammatory appeals made by Surrendra Nath Bannerjee, who was lately crowned by his followers at Calcutta, to the Hindu religious fanaticism and racism.

It deals with the conflicts between the British, Hindus and Muslims after the first partition of Bengal in Surendranath Banerjee was one of the most important public proponents of the new ideology of Indian Nationalism and architect of the Indian National Congress… [Cf. Communal Attitudes to British Policy. The Case of the Partition of Bengal Social Scientist, 6, , 5, pp. The Antisemitic Revival in France in the s. The Socioeconomic Dimension Reconsidered. The Journal of Modern History, 70, , 1, pp. Jetzt aber, wo seine Dummheit die Einheit des deutschen Volkes zu sprengen droht, [ Sozialistische Bildung, , 1, pp.

The precise reason for this comment was a dispute between two fascist scholars concerning the racial character of the German people. Race and the Third Reich. Polity Press , pp. Iltis, a botanist and well-known biographer of Gregor Mendel [cf. Springer ; English translation: Der Rassismus im Mantel der Wissenschaft.

Rasse in Wissenschaft und Politik. On the other side, he wrote with reference to anti-black racism in the United States: Der Mythos von Blut und Rasse. Marginalie zur Kritik des Rassismus durch Hugo Iltis. One reason for that might have been due to the engagement of the US Communist Party in support of the Scottsboro Boys Black Communists Speak on Scottsboro. Temple University Press ].

But nothing is less likely. In , he got the first Pulitzer Editorial Prize. His books on World War I and on international affairs reached a wide readership… [Cf. Heinz-Dietrich Fischer, Erika J. The Pulitzer Prize Archive. From War-related Conflicts to Metropolitan Disputes. It imparted the French discourse to Australia. Le patriotisme raciste des Allemands. From White Australia to Woomera. The Story of Australian Immigration. The Referendum Campaign and After. Ryan as Secretary of Railways until 2 October , when he withdrew in protest at the unequivocally negative stand his fellow Cabinet members were maintaining against the proposed military conscription of young men for the Great War.

Unlike other Labor parties and governments in Australia that would split acrimoniously over the issue, in Queensland, Adamson was the sole pro-conscription dissident in the parliamentary party. Adamson was a strong Empire loyalist and a former clergyman with the Presbyterian and Primitive Methodist churches. Social Conflict on the Queensland Homefront. Allen and Unwin , pp. Anarchy, constituted after two or three generations [ As to that, Vincent Dubuc who runs http: Born in , Malato went with his family to the French penal colony New Caledonia, where they had to live in exile because his father supported the Paris Commune.

Back in Europe, he became engaged in the anarchist movement, founded several journals and worked as a journalist. Albin Michel , p. The High Cost of Racism. Already prior to this, he began to write a weekly column for the Associated Negro Press in It appeared in more than a hundred black newspapers and reached a broad readership.

After the beginning of World War II, Hancock spoke out in favour of joining the army because Nazi racism would be worse than that in the United States… It seems that the category racism was not intensely used in the African American discourse during the first half of the 20th century. But Hancock repeatedly used the term in his newspaper articles. Gordon Blaine Hancock, Duke University Press for the quote see ibid, p. Paris, 23 - 26 Juin Edition du Secours Populaire de France et des Colonies ].

Levin came from Warsaw to Paris in , was classified a Russian refugee after and was not naturalized until La LICA, The Review of Politics, 6, , 1, pp. The meaning of this derivation was exemplified in Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism. Hartcourt, Brace and Company Racism in the Theory Canon.

Millennium, 45, , 3, pp. The Growth of the Race Idea. The Review of Politics, 2, , 3, pp. Initially, Voegelin tried to find out whether a theory of the state could make use of the category race. With the help of his two books on this question [see Erich Voegelin: Mohr Siebeck and id.: Die Rassenidee in der Geistesgeschichte. Von Ray bis Carus. Once this intention failed, he resorted to the legitimation of the authoritarian Austrian state corporatism whereby the race question was only a minor issue [see Erich Voegelin: Voegelin could flee to the USA where he had already studied earlier.

There, he interpreted German racism within the framework of a theory of totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt, who has investigated the role of anti-Semitism in the Third Republic thoroughly, points to two factors that contributed to its development: She emphasises that it " was never clarified ", " if the officers of the General Staff arranged for Bordereau's forgery the document that led to the conviction of Dreyfus , with the sole purpose of finally being able to compromise a Jew as a traitor of the mother country " 71 , or if it was not a case of miscarriage of justice after all.

She also points out that in August , after the trial of appeal in Rennes, the German Social Democrat Wilhelm Liebknecht, in contrast to Steiner, still believed in Dreyfus' guilt, " as he could not imagine that a member of the upper classes could be convicted unjustifiably. Steiner's Discussion of Zionism. How did Steiner view Zionism? To begin with, it must be noted that the emancipatory and liberal tendencies of the 19 th and increasingly in the 20 th century in all of Europe made it, at least in principle, ever more easy for Jewish citizens to become assimilated.

This invitation from the enlightened European bourgeoisie was answered by the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment, which also facilitated emancipation and assimilation. Nevertheless, deeply rooted prejudices from the past lived on, and repeated violent pogroms against the Jewish section of the population had been taking place, especially in the Russian Empire, but also in Rumania since the s. Thus at the same time a longing for a protected homeland arose among the Jews who were victimised.

In particular Theodor Herzl, a Jewish Viennese journalist, proclaimed the goal of founding a state of their own for the Jews in Palestine. Nourished by the very real hardship caused by these pogroms, but also by religious motives, the idea of a Jewish state met with increasing support. The term "Zionism" comes from the Hebrew word "Zion", referring to the highest, southwest hill in the old Jerusalem, the still controversial Temple Mount.

The name is used in a figurative sense for Jerusalem, as well as for the community of orthodox Jews. The Zionists aspired to found a national Jewish state in Palestine. But a large proportion of the Jewish bourgeoisie, especially those who were emancipated and whose bonds to orthodoxy had loosened, decisively rejected Zionism.

Most of the Western- and Middle-European Jews were not willing to leave their well-appreciated environment. One only has to think of the many Jews who during the First World War volunteered enthusiastically for military service in their respective nations. This deeply felt double experience is classically expressed in a book by Jakob Wassermann , a writer very much respected in his time. In it, he professes what is important for him: Many German Jews did not take the horrible anti-Jewish diatribes of an Adolf Hitler in his programmatic work My Struggle Mein Kampf seriously, if they knew about them at all.

They were mostly seen as the obscure rantings of an inferior minority. Only the ever more acute and tangible wave of hatred in the Third Reich brought many Jews to a distressful awakening. And only the horrors of the previously unimaginable Holocaust finally instilled, in almost all surviving Jews, a positive attitude towards Zionism. Even such an important poet as Paul Celan , who had grown up in the German-speaking formerly Austro-Hungarian Bukovina and bitterly experienced the atrocities of Nazi rule, failed in his attempt to settle in Palestine at the end of his life.

This was the conflict that destroyed him. The Jewish writer Elias Canetti 74 also tells us in his impressive memoirs of a stay in Bulgaria in , where he had spent a part of his childhood. On several occasions he was astonished and even indignant about the rapturous state which some enthusiasts sought to evoke in their listeners in order to motivate them to emigrate to Palestine.

He asked himself why they did such a thing, as they were respected and acknowledged citizens in their homeland Bulgaria , where they could practice their profession and lived comfortably. How strange the basic idea of Zionism appeared to assimilated Jews at the end of the 19 th and the beginning of the 20 th century can be seen in thoughts that Stefan Zweig wrote in his memoirs mentioned above.

After his emigration, he had a number of conversations with Sigmund Freud in England shortly before the latter's death , in which both expressed their profound difficulty in understanding the latest development in the destiny of the Jewish people. All those who had been expelled during the Middle Ages, all their ancestors, at least they had known what they suffered for: They had no common faith, they felt their Jewish identity to be more of a burden than anything to be proud of and they were not conscious of any mission [ In this way, one Jew no longer understood the another, melted as they were into the other peoples, the French, the Germans, the English, the Russians, just no longer Jews [ All this must be taken into consideration if one wants to come to an appropriate evaluation of the opinions expressed before the Holocaust by many Jews, as also by others who saw themselves as friends of the Jews.

This is also the case for Rudolf Steiner, for whom all one-sided national forms of thinking were foreign to his endorsement of ideals for all of humanity. He was a strict advocate of the conviction that Jewish creativity, like any other creativity, was an integral part of the respective society and respective community in which the individual Jew lived.

He also unreservedly supported the thought of a continuing assimilation of the Jews. If he had had even the slightest critical reservation, he would have had to speak out against the integration and assimilation of Jewry, which he never did. Steiner's view stood in stark contrast to the racism of National Socialism, which fiercely rejected any form of assimilation, arguing that the so-called Aryan blood must not be polluted and that "The Jew" should be radically expelled and even eliminated.

Steiner's Essay on Hamerling's "Homunculus". But Jewry as such has outlived itself and has no justification within the modern life of nations. The fact that it nevertheless has been preserved is a mistake of world history which could not fail to have consequences. The tone of these remarks was not untypical for the Steiner of that time, who was then 27 years old. In the same year he had depicted the rule of the pope in his time as obsolete and unjustified, because it wanted to force forms of believing from the "darkest Middle Ages" on mankind see p.

Steiner's remarks are contained in an essay that aspires to defend Hamerling from being "adopted" by the anti-Semites. These remarks appear to be very disconcerting at first, when taken out of context. The review also met with the clear disapproval of the Jewish master of the house, Ladislaus Specht, in whose family Steiner lived as a tutor at the time. This is quite understandable. The quoted words can give the impression that he had fundamental reservations about Jewry.

But that is definitely too short-sighted an interpretation. Only a more comprehensive look at the context in which the quoted sentences stand shows that the formulation expresses the exact opposite. The misunderstanding that Steiner himself tells us about in his autobiography My Life arose because Specht was not able to properly evaluate what actually was a polemical remark by Steiner in the light of his own basic attitude to life.

He took the comment personally that Steiner hat written from the perspective of philosophy and the history of ideas.

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The purely human side, the complete recognition of his Jewish fellow men was totally self-evident for Steiner. The warm personal understanding between the Specht family and Steiner was in no way marred by this misunderstanding. The whole incident is a concrete example of what is described in subchapter 4 in the introduction to this study.

We especially see what is meant by the sometimes pronounced or even polemical tone of the young Steiner. We must also consider another very important criterion in assessing Steiner's writings that warrants a fundamental statement here. There is possibly no other topic besides that of Judaism and Jewry where it is so important to take into consideration the difference in time when an event takes place and when it is evaluated. For example, it is only fair, and should go without saying, to assume that Steiner, if he were to comment on these issues today, would not express himself in the same way or with the same words as in the s.

The following episode can serve to illustrate this problem. The above mentioned Jewish writer Jakob Wassermann, who was highly regarded especially in the s, wrote a letter to a German philosopher in February He later published it in his book Lebensdienst Serving Life The Inertia of the Heart. But he had also asked him to use his great influence to induce the Jews living in Germany to emigrate to Palestine. In this request, a continuing prejudice articulated itself: It arose because the Jews with their highly developed talents could rise to leading positions in all cultural and political fields; and there also existed a subliminal resentment against the affluence of Jews in influential economic positions.

This subliminal, and sometimes open aversion against people of Jewish origin completely ignored the fact that many of the reservations had their roots in the ghetto situation into which the Jews had been forced through many centuries, which prevented them from integrating into society, thereby causing them to be perceived as Jews in the first place. With great bitterness Wassermann rejected the demand of this unknown philosopher, also on behalf of his friend Walther Rathenau ; at the end of his life Minister of Foreign Affairs of the German Empire , who had been murdered the year before by nationalist and anti-Jewish fanatics.

He reproached the personality in question for obviously not having read his Wassermann's writings closely enough:. And also Walther Rathenau would have had to disappoint you [ Just as I, he saw himself as a German, and just as I he felt rejected by the Germans, misunderstood and unrewarded for all his dedication and readiness for sacrifice. We do not need to talk about his death; it is a part of German history [ As to what you write [ That the Jews have not succeeded in incorporating themselves deeper into the body of the nation is not the fault of the Jews [ This context helps us to understand what Steiner meant with his remark that Jewry had long outlived itself, and that it was a mistake of world history that it had been preserved.

These words strongly express Steiner's sincerely positive appreciation of Jewry. They also contain the same bitterness that was expressed by Wassermann about that fact that the assimilation which was desired by many Jews, especially the culturally active ones, still had not progressed further, due to a purely emotional aversion in the German-speaking countries.

Steiner opposes the fixation of contemporary thinking on national and racist categories and strives to promote the liberation of the individual Jew from the confinement of the collective, into which one again wishes to force him, in disregard of all emancipation and assimilation. Later, in - around the time that Wassermann was also writing on the subject - Steiner spoke again, similarly to , in one of the lectures to construction workers of the Goetheanum in an extemporised speech the lecture will be more closely discussed later in this study:.

That is something which could be an ideal. These words, rightly understood, express a deep recognition of what until then had emanated from Judaism in a cultural sense. Steiner's speaking in the above-mentioned "Homunculus" review of unfavourable interventions of the Jewish religion and way of thinking with regard to Western cultural ideas does not contradict this recognition. The one is just as true as the other: Now the rest of humanity has also become as advanced as the Jews, who have fulfilled their task for world history precisely by overcoming the principle of nationality.

After advocating the integration and assimilation of the Jews in Europe, Steiner continued in the quoted lecture:. That is exactly what must be overcome. These sentences show that Steiner saw Anti-Semitism and the hatred that it incited against the Jews as the basic hindrance for the peaceful coexistence of Jews and non-Jews and that he held it necessary to overcome this hatred. Steiner's essay of on Hamerling's Homunculus not only contains the passages in which he speaks against a Jewish nationalism, as it later appeared in Zionism, but it also contains a clear rejection of anti-Semitism and the "racial struggle".

To Hamerling he attributes the attitude of a "sage", who takes a stance of superior objectivity in relation to both the " Jews as well as the anti-Semites " He accuses Hamerling's critics of not having the right to immediately accuse " everyone who does not expressly stress that he sides with the Jews as being against them " According to Steiner, the critics had drawn Hamerling's work into the "party struggle", in its most obnoxious form, that of the "racial struggle".

And about the anti-Semites, who wanted to include the poet in their camp, he says that, apart from their " talent for ranting and raving ", they had nothing more characteristic to offer […] " than a complete lack of any thought whatsoever ". Steiner did not advocate the separation, but the integration and emancipation of the Jews in Europe. It would be completely absurd to insinuate that with the "absorption Aufgehen of Jewry into the rest of humanity" he was referring to a physical extermination.

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Laqueur writes on Hess in his History of Zionism:. In his first book The Sacred History of Mankind he said that the people chosen by their God must disappear for ever , [ No one would come on the idea of investigating Hess for a suspected anti-Semitism because of his unreserved declaration of his belief in the assimilation of the Jews.

And just as little would one accuse the Russian Zionist Leo Pinsker of anti-Semitism, who in in his book Autoemanzipation Autoemancipation wrote that in the Jews, the world could observe a people , who resembled a living dead. For this reason, Moses Hess in no way belongs to "the forgotten Jews". His importance for the history of Jewry, for Socialism and for Zionism is still appreciated today.

Rosenberg points out the dimension of religious and cultural history in the problem, which was also relevant for Steiner's views on Jewry that he expressed in his essays on Hamerling's Homunculus and The Longing of the Jews for Palestine. Judaism was just as much a thing of the past as was Christianity.

For a young Jewish intellectual, who within a decade had made his way from the disputes over interpretations in the Talmud school to the barricades of the social revolution, the world stood open and full of promises. He still investigated Jewry, but only in order to overcome its limitations, to demonstrate how unnecessary it was.

Adolf Bartels

Rosenberg writes about the time following the "edict of tolerance" of the Holy Roman Austrian Emperor Joseph, from until the middle of the 19 th century:. Out of the Jewish masses which until shortly before had been so impoverished, an intellectual, bourgeois middle class rapidly liberated itself and it soon did not see any essential difference between Judaism as explicated by Mendelssohn and Christianity in its declarations of enlightenment and tolerance. Both could be viewed as collections of similar ethical principles to which everyone could reasonably subscribe. The characteristics peculiar to Judaism had to give way to the universal efforts in support of human and civil rights, just as some saw the spreading of ideas such as tolerance and equality as an expression of a specific Jewish mission.

Steiner is completely in accordance with this enlightened perspective that was also professed by Jews, when he says that "Jewry" has "outlived itself". That this comment from was not all he had to say about Jewry is sufficiently documented by the present study. In the passage following the quoted sentences on p.

An impartial observer would now have thought that the best judges of the poetic form that Hamerling has given to the fact we have just touched on would be Jews themselves.

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Jews who now feel at home in the spirit of the western cultural process should best be able to recognise the faults of an ethical ideal which has been transplanted from grey antiquity into modern times and is here quite useless. The Jews must be the first to recognise that any isolated ambitions of theirs must be absorbed by the spirit of the modern times.

Obviously the "Jewish way of thinking" means here for Steiner Jewish religion, but not this alone; it also means the ethical ideals that this way of thinking has transplanted "from grey antiquity" into modern times. Condensed to a formula, this concept of "Jewish thinking" aims at a criticism of abstract monotheism and the Jewish canon of ethical laws.

Steiner does not mean in this passage a Jewish way of thinking that is Jewish because of some form of determination by race, but he defines Jewish thinking substantially in accordance with the Haskala Jewish Enlightenment as advocated by Moses Mendelssohn and the Reformed Jews of the 19 th century. Steiner could just as well have written "Kantian" thinking or "Catholic" thinking, because, from the perspective of his radically enlightened standpoint, all three schools of thought have the same character insofar as they give up their innate emancipatory elements in favour of normative or collectivist moral ideals.

Steiner's standpoint before the turn of the century was that of Enlightenment, as was the standpoint of many European Jews as well. This dimension of cultural history must be taken into account when judging his views. One could just as well accuse Steiner's criticism of Christianity of having given up the Christian spiritual traditions and call him an "anti-Christian". Bierl and other leftwing pamphleteers of course have no interest in doing that, as Christianity is not important for them. If you take all religion to be mythical, you must seek an interpretation of this mythology that is compatible with enlightened rationality.

You have to ask yourself - as Steiner did in regard to Christianity and the Jewish religion - why humanity needs a Law revealed by God if it can give its moral law to itself. If the " primary foundation of the world " has " completely " " poured itself out into the world ", " in order to allow everything to depend on Man's will " , as Steiner writes in the Theory of Knowledge [ That means that the earlier forms of understanding God are, from Steiner's point of view, obsolete stages in cultural history of the consciousness of God.

Steiner's standpoint itself does not lack a spiritual perspective, on the contrary, it is open for such a perspective, as can be seen in his later development. In his Hamerling essay Steiner saw in Homunculus a "representative of modern man", who had as his most outstanding characteristic a complete lack of individuality.

It is therefore not surprising that he preceded it with a contrast: In contemporary society, he saw a dangerous mechanising tendency penetrating into all fields of life. He characterised it as hostile to the individual and soulless. This diagnosis can be read as a criticism of superficial rationalism and the optimistic belief in materialistic progress.

In the increase of spiritual and social coldness that was connected with this development Steiner obviously perceived the counterpart to the "stale feelings" and "instincts" that he saw striving for power in anti-Semitism. In , he writes in his essay on Homunculus:. A pronounced individuality is not something which is foreseeable; because not matter how many ways it has manifested itself to us, it impossible to create an image of it from which we could predict the sum of its future activities. Every new action always receives a new impulse out of the depths of our being, which shows us new aspects of the individuality.

That is what distinguishes the individuality from a mechanism, which is only the result of the combined effects of its components. If we know these, then we also know the boundaries within which its activity is enclosed. The life of modern man is now becoming ever more machine-like. Education, forms of society, professional life, everything is developing in such a way that it eradicates in man what one would like to call individual life. He is becoming more and more a product of the social conditions which form him.

This soulless, un-individual man, exaggerated to a caricature, is Hamerling's Homunculus. Hamerling's Homunculus figure thus is also the prototype of the racist or extreme nationalist, who is characterised by his complete lack of understanding for the individual essence that lives in every human - albeit in varying degrees of consciousness.

For Steiner, however, upholding spiritually anachronistic ethical ideals is an expression of "retardation", leading to "decadence": It becomes conservative and reactionary. Thereby it works in an "undermining, decomposing" way on the social order. Thus, all reactionary spiritual movements can be seen as a "decomposing ferment" of the social order. In reality, it is not only revolutionary currents which work in an undermining way, because they aspire to realise new ethical ideals and new social forms, but also the conservative and reactionary ones, as they endanger the peaceful transformation through their resistance to the new.

Nordau, the heartless leaders of all the Jews who are tired of Europe. They turn an unpleasant childishness into a movement of world historic dimensions, they give a harmless skirmish out as horrible artillery fire. They are seducers and tempters of their people. He came to a similar conclusion in this essay as most of the Jewish critics of Herzl and Nordau: At this time, anti-Semitism had lost political influence and importance. It still existed, but it was limited to small, political sects, at odds with each other. In the question of which was worse, Zionism or anti-Semitism, Steiner - with his decisive support for a positive assimilation, which did not simply allow the Jewish contribution to be swept away or disappear, but included it as a productive cultural factor for the different peoples - stood for an individualistic humanism, beyond "for" and "against".

To him, this concern seemed endangered by the Zionism of Herzl and his sympathisers, which declared assimilation to have failed. Someone not familiar with the context and concrete situation of the time may be taken aback by some of the formulations in the essay on Palestine. But when Steiner, with reference to the first Zionist Congress in Basle, spoke of the "impotence of anti-Semitism" and described it as an "unpleasant childishness", he expressed a generally held conviction and repeated arguments also used by Jewish authors.

In Steiner's comments one can even recognise a direct reference to the opening speech by Max Nordau during the first Zionist Congress in Basle. In his essay on Palestine published shortly afterwards, Steiner speaks of. So for Steiner, "the best among the anti-Semites" belong to the first of Nordau's categories, the "children". This accords with Steiner's opinion expressed elsewhere, which maintains that anti-Semitism, apart from its "talent" for ranting and raving, is characterised by a complete lack of thoughts.

Thus when Steiner describes Zionism as worse than anti-Semitism, that does not constitute a contradiction to or reduction of his express rejection of anti-Semitism since As before, his criticism was directed against the enemies of Liberalism and against the "reactionaries", amongst whom he counted the anti-Semites. In an essay on Zola's Letter to the Young Generation , written only some months before the essay on Palestine, Steiner sees in Zola's appeal the ideals of Liberalism the ideals of freedom and equality expressed in "sentences of monumental magnitude". According to Steiner, the worst people were not even those called the "young generation".

The greatest confusion could be found in those who in were in their thirties, and who expressed their sympathies for reactionary concepts and supported the ambitious cliques of "junkers" Prussian landed aristocracy , who viewed the liberal thoughts of the 19 th century as "children's diseases", finding that "abstract freedom" contradicted the "necessities of the state". Steiner here refers to Maximilian Harden, quoting him in the following.

When Steiner condemned Zionism, he was also aiming at anti-Semitism. To him Zionism - in spite of its utopian character - stood out as a relapse into the time before emancipation, that distracted people from their self-realisation as humans by reducing them to their national or generic characteristics. And Zionism, in turn, needed anti-Semitism as a counterpart. Herzl himself stressed that repeatedly. And not only that, Zionism even needed a certain exaggeration of the dangers of anti-Semitism.

He needed a dramatisation of the Jewish problem. The promise of a country like all other countries was not enough to let the masses flow in. The countries in which they lived had to become uninhabitable. Herzl's Zionism lived in symbiosis with anti-Semitism and European nationalism. Zionism encountered a public mood that did not correspond to this need.

Walter Laqueur, the historian of Zionism, writes about this time:. The reaction against Enlightenment and liberalism, the new cult of violence, and anti-humanism, were thought to be transient cultural maladies [ Nor was there any reason why the German and Austrian Jews should regard their own position with any special concern. In Russia and Rumania the situation was incomparably worse; from onwards eastern Europe was plagued by a series of pogroms.

Even in France, which had a smaller Jewish community than Germany, their position was much more precarious. It was, in fact, the pioneer of modern anti-Jewish ideology; the German and the Russian anti-Semites frequently imported their ideas from Paris. Zionism also faced an assimilation of Jews that was already well advanced, at least in Central Europe.

In the process of assimilation Laqueur sees a "natural process" and not simply a result of feelings of inferiority or "Jewish self-hatred" that had their roots in anti-Semitism. It started later in other parts of Europe, but went further than in Germany. This was the case in England and Italy. Even in Eastern Europe, before the pogroms of the s, there were advocates of assimilation, like the leading Jewish commentator in Russia, I. Orschansky, who demanded " the complete absorption Aufgehen of the Jews into the Russian nation ".

Finally, he also points out to the inherent anti-racist impulse in the ideal of assimilation:. No one anticipated a relapse into barbarism, and most Jews continued their struggle for full civil rights as patriotic citizens of their respective countries of birth. A retreat from assimilation seemed altogether unthinkable [ This is exactly what also seemed unthinkable to Steiner. Beyond that, he also rejected Zionism as the idea of a Jewish national state, as such an ideal threatened to draw European Jewry into imperialistic, and nationalistic, and possibly even racist entanglements.

Similarly to Steiner and Laqueur, Rosenberg also sees in Herzl's Zionism a reflection of European nationalism and imperialism. Consequently, it was an idea that closely followed the military strategist's way of regarding nations, borders and territories that was typical for colonialism and imperialism. In a pamphlet he described Herzl's idea as "a cuckoo's egg that is, a "dangerous present"; translator's note for national Jewry" and declared that the Jews were not a nation; that the only thing they had in common was their belief in God, and that Zionism was incompatible with the teachings of Judaism.

Other Jews expressed their rejection of Zionism much more radically than Steiner. Gabriel Riesser, for example, a Liberal Jewish politician, voiced his opinion in the middle of the 19 th century that a Jew who preferred a non-existing state and a non-existing nation Israel to Germany should be taken into police custody, not because his opinions were dangerous, but because he was evidently insane. Instead he expressed his dedication to his German homeland in the spirit of assimilation:. When Herzl, the well-known feuilletonist of the Viennese New Free Press Neue Freie Presse drafted his ideas for Der Judenstaat in , a friend believed that his mind had become unhinged as a result of overwork and that he was in need of rest and medical treatment.

Laqueur writes about the reaction of most of the Jews at the time to Herzl's book:. How could an assimilated Jew make such a patently absurd claim? We have not been allowed to do it. As can be seen, Herzl uses almost the same words as Steiner to describe the ideal that the Jews had tried to achieve up to then.

Handbuch zur "Völkischen Bewegung" 1871-1918

But he declares the project of assimilation to have failed and comes to the opposite opinion of Steiner's, who continues to uphold this ideal. One can criticise Steiner for that. But one must then also criticise the greater part of his Jewish contemporaries, who also rejected Herzl's view.

As long as he did not lose faith in this ability for improvement, in the increase of freedom and the growth of knowledge through reason, he continued to champion its realisation. To Steiner, Herzl's denial of progress had to present itself as reactionary and even nihilistic. That is why he saw in Herzl and the like-minded Nordau "seducers" and "tempters" of their people.

Also the cultural Zionist Achad Haam, who was to play an important role in Zionism after the turn of the century, criticised Herzl by asking the question of what was specifically Jewish about Herzl's state. Laqueur writes on the reaction of the Russian and Polish Zionists:. On the attitude of the Middle and Western European Jews, who identified themselves with Liberal and Socialist world views, Laqueur writes that many of them thought.

Steinschneider, an outstanding representative of the science of Judaism during the 19 th century, took the view, in the face of the growing Zionist movement, that the only remained task was to separate oneself from the remnants of Judaism in an honourable way. We cannot here recount the whole history of Jewish anti-Zionism, but one more personality would be mentioned. The President of the Anglo-Jewish Association , Lucien Wolf, in expressed the opinion also held by other Anglo-Jewish organisations and their members, that Zionism was damaging and endangered what had been achieved through emancipation, in the following way:.

Herzl and his like-minded followers are traitors to the history of the Jews, which they understand and interpret falsely. According to Wolf, the Zionists not only provoked anti-Semitism, their plans were also doomed to failure; they had commercialised a spiritual idea and made a profit out of a prophecy. Herzl had with " brilliant shamelessness " given out his evasion of the task of the exile and his flight from the responsibility towards the countries of the Diaspora as the fulfilment of the old prophecies. In conclusion he said, referring to a contemporary critic of Herzl, that Zionism's programme was the " most disdainful and ridiculous perversion of idealism ", and that Zionism was nothing but a " travesty of Judaism ".

Like Wolf, Steiner feared that Zionism could increase the existing anti-Semitism even more.

Handbuch zur "Völkischen Bewegung"

Since Zionism, as has been shown above, also declared assimilation to have failed and invoked nationalistic ideals, it is quite understandable - even if it may not be easy to do so from today's perspective - to see why in Steiner viewed Zionism as a greater danger to the Jewish existence in Europe than anti-Semitism, at a time when Zionism was beginning to have an increasing effect on public opinion. It also shows that it is a misconception to criticise him for having "underestimated" anti-Semitism or even "belittled its danger"; he had, after all, fought against it since Perhaps the most convincing confirmation of Steiner's judgement on Zionism is contained in the recently discovered diaries of the Jewish scholar Victor Klemperer, written during the Nazi period.

These diaries are an excellent and deeply moving document from the time of the persecution of the Jews. Even in the s Klemperer, who was himself persecuted, placed Zionism on the same level as National Socialism as a whole. This evaluation also shows that the standards of judgement before the Holocaust were different from those afterwards.

In a lecture to the Goetheanum workers from 8 May , Steiner once more summarised his rejection of Zionism, motivated by his basic anti-racist and anti-nationalist attitude:. To establish a Jewish state is to act in a most dissolutely reactionary way [ Steiner also spoke of the decomposing or "dissolving" effect of reactionary spiritual currents, which has been touched on already while dealing with the Homunculus figure see p.

The letter contains a remarkable analysis of the history of human consciousness, and it would be short-sighted to only perceive anti-Semitic catch-words therein. Steiner sees it as centrally important that medical studies become permeated by a theosophical spirit.