Make money doing the work you believe in
“What is the great task of our age?” asked Heinrich Heine, German Jewish poet, in 1828.
His answer sets the stage for the rise of antisemitism, in chapter two of Mark Mazower, On Antisemitism: A Word in History.
“It is emancipation. Not only of the Irish, the Greeks, the Jews of Frankfurt, the blacks of the West Indies and similarly oppressed peoples but of the entire world.”
—Heinrich Heine 1828
The 19th Emancipation of the Jews - establishment of basic legal equalities and social participation rights - was the fundamental transition in modern Jewish history, writes Mazower. Alongside other emancipations - e.g. slaves, serfs, religious communities, and women - it changed, inspired and unsettled societies. It created a feedback loop that is still with us, antisemitism, even though it and its world have mutated many times since.
Indeed, Mazower quotes the judgment of David Sorkin, in Jewish Emancipation:
“[The Holocaust and the creation of Israel] were reactions to, indeed developments from, emancipation. In philosophical parlance, they were epiphenomena. Emancipation was, and remains, the principal event.”
What happens next takes us to
the first Antisemitic Leagues in Europe formed by eccentric haters and desperadoes
the internationalisation of action against antisemitism including at the 1884 Berlin conference,
the regrets of the lexicographer William Murray that he did not include “antisemitism” in the first edition of the OED and that Christianity was so cruel,
the ‘Russian’ pogrom in Kishinev (Chisinau, Moldova, strange how nationality is read back for some things and not others) that brought the then small New York Jewish community to the diplomatic stage (see picture),
the baleful influence of Kaiser Wilhelm II and an Austrian mayor who did not go hard enough on race in the mind of Hitler, and
that infamous text that echoes in memes still today, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published by a journalist who called for antisemitic blood revenge at Kishinev (because ‘journalism’ has mostly allowed many sins)
Intrigued?
All that and more in chapter two, Emancipation and Its Enemies in chapter 2 of Mazower, On Antisemitism.
Join me for my World History Book Club readings in posts and Notes of Mazower, On Antisemitism this month.
