Political anti-Semitism in Germany, 1871-1914 (5 of 5): the SPD and anti-Semitism

Paul Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany (1949)

SPD leader Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826-1900)

The combination of the SPD's view of contemporary anti-Semitism as an ugly side-product of capitalism, their notion that it would fade away with the growth of working-class solidarity and the eventual achievement of socialism, and the receding of anti-Semitic politics and activism after 1895 made them misjudge the potential political power of anti-Semitism. Massing notes that after the 1905 Revolution in Russia, pogroms against Jews took place there:

The brutality with which the government put down the revolution, and the white terror and pogroms that followed in its wake, were not taken as an object lesson by the German Socialists. They felt, like most Western Europeans, that terroristic anti-Semitism was inconceivable anywhere but in the barbarous world of Czarist reaction. Pogroms belonged to the dark Middle Ages which in Russia extended into the present but which had definitely become past history in Germany. The Social Democrats shared this conviction with the Liberals and with most Conservatives. In Germany, not even a professional anti-Semite would have dared any longer to instigate physical violence against Jews. The worst mob demonstrations in the eighties and nineties had not approximated anything like a Russian pogrom. Meanwhile ten years had passed which had extinguished even these memories. The use of physical violence against the Jews was only possible among "backward," "uncivilized," "ignorant" masses, spurred on by ruthless tyrants. (p. 196)

"Racial" anti-Semite Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg (1848-1911)

He quotes the Party's leader, August Bebel from 1906 condemning anti-Semitic outbreaks in Russia and affirming the view that such a problem was not to be expected in Germany:

The Russian government favors anti-Semitism because it is anxious to divert the hatred of the masses from its own foul and corrupt system of government and from the representatives of this system, the corrupt civil service. ... And since the Jews in Russia, intellectuals and proletarians, participated in extraordinary number in the revolutionary movement, the Russian government had an additional reason for having hatred of Jews incited by its agents and for provoking massacres and butcheries the like of which have happened so far only under oriental despotisms. Anti-Semitism which by its very nature can appeal only to the basest drives and instincts of a backward stratum of society, expresses the moral depravity of the groups that accept it. It is comforting [to know] that in Germany it will never have a chance to exert a decisive influence upon the life of state and society. [p. 197; Massing’s emphasis]

Massing then observes that even though that final sentence sounds "preposterous" after the experience of the Third Reich, at the time it "expressed the conviction of the German people at large."

In response to the pogroms in Russia and the generally unfavorable condition of Jews in eastern Europe, especially compared to their situation in Germany and Austria, the Zionist movement began to win adherents. Its popularity was greatest among eastern European Jews. But some Jews in the SPD’s reform wing expressed active sympathy for Zionism, doubting the Party’s official position that the development of capitalism would make class considerations override religious or pseudo-racial prejudices against Jews as Jews. The SPD’s official position was opposed to Zionism, regarding it as an unrealistic response to a problem they believed was fundamentally rooted in the social processes affecting peasants and the lower middle class under capitalist condition, and one that would disappear as a matter of course under socialism.

"Racial" anti-Semite Wilhelm Marr (1819-1904)

This approach meant that the SPD tended to downplay the manifestations of anti-Semitism in Germany during the 1895-1914 period. But he also argues that not only Party leades but rank-and-file supporters understood anti-Semitism as being an ideology hostile to the needs of the working class. And he notes:

Indeed, quite a number of Jews were attracted to the party despite the economic and cultural barrier of class. The Jewish Social Democrats were mostly intellectuals, businessmen, and salaried employees, with hardly any manual workers among them. The reasons that prompted middle-class Jews to expose themselves to additional hostility by joining the Social Democrats must have been strong. Material considerations, as a rule, cannot have entered into their decision. To be known as a voter, member, or even active supporter of the Social Democratic Party was in imperial Germany no boon to anyone's career, and less so to a Jew's. Besides, Jewish intellectuals who joined and worked for the revolutionary party often jeopardized their social relations and damaged their standing in the Jewish community, particularly in small towns. Apparently in the world of socialist labor individual Jews could experience the equality which German society denied to the Jewish group. (p. 202)

He sums up the strengths and the weaknesses in the SPD's approach to anti-Semitism this way:

In theory and practice socialist labor was opposed to anti-Semitism. The Socialists never wavered in their stand against all attempts to deprive Jews of their civil rights. They treated with contempt the anti-Semitic agitators and the groups behind them. They never gave in to the temptation - considerable at times - to gain followers by making concessions to anti-Jewish prejudice. From the rise of the socialist labor movement in the 1860's to the time of its defeat by National Socialism, the statements of the labor leaders, the resolutions carried in party conventions, the methods of coping with the situations created by political anti-Semitism, testify to its unswerving opposition to any kind of discrimination against Jews.

On the other hand, socialist labor was indifferent, if not actually hostile, toward all efforts to preserve and revitalize autonomous Jewish religious, cultural, or national traditions. Marxism, its guiding philosophy, had as little use for the Jewish religion as it did for the Christian. Eager to have the processes of industrial society do their work of obliterating cultural differences, socialist labor could see no more than an obsolete religious heritage in the beliefs of orthodox Jewry and had even less sympathy for conscious attempts to revive the Jewish nation.

Little attention has been paid in nonsocialist literature to the work of enlightenment and education which German socialism carried on among its followers. The Socialists, on the other hand, have done little in the way of critically reevaluating this work. [As of 1949.] (p. 151)

Massing's book doesn’t trace the historical threads of these anti-Semitic trends into the First World War and beyond. He occasionally makes reference to some similar development in the time of the Nazi movement. But he mostly concentrates on describing the events in the political context as the major players understood them at the time. His analysis does throw light on some of the psychological and sociological factors at work in anti-Semitic appeals. But its main value is in giving a clear definition of the most notable political anti-Semitism movements from the time of German unification in 1871 to the First World War and how they were situated in the social and political conflicts of the time.

Tags: anti-semitism, deutsche politik, frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, german politics, paul massing, rehearsal for destruction