Hitler and his God

“The Jew”

“‘The Jew’ was invariably referred to in Nazi discourse as a type to which all Jews conformed, whether western or eastern, men or women, secular or religious, assimilated or unassimilated, bourgeois or proletarian. Even baptized Jews were irrevocably tainted in Nazi ideology by the stigma of degenerate blood. Jews as a ‘counter-race’ were perceived as the polar opposite to the German ‘Aryans’, being inherently destructive, parasitical, and agents of decomposition.” 591 We find this statement by Robert Wistrich confirmed by Léon Poliakov, who writes: “‘Jews’ and ‘Judaism’ – and this cannot be repeated too often – were only words, covering very diverse matters of which the status of being non-Christians may have been the only common denominator”. 592

By far the greatest numbers of German Jews were North and East European Ashkenazim, very different in their beliefs and life-style from the Sephardim, of Portuguese and Spanish origin and who lived mainly in Southern Europe. The Jewish community in Germany was further divided into orthodox Jews, following the prescriptions of their faith to the letter, and less strict or sceptical believers; then there were the apostate Jews who had converted to Protestantism or Catholicism, and who were baptized; and there were the atheist Jews, who no longer believed in a God of any kind, or maybe in the abstract God of Spinoza or of the Enlightenment’s deism. Another dividing line among the Jews ran between the “assimilationists” and the separatists, the latter being mostly orthodox, and was caused by differences in attitude towards a desired or despised integration into the society of the goyim. And there were, as relative newcomers, the Zionists, for whom leaving the European host countries and going back to Jerusalem was the only solution to the Jewish question.

The political choice of the Jews, now legally free citizens of the German nation, was inevitably influenced by the tribulations in their past. Not only did the reactionary German right disagree with their emancipation, many rightist organizations frowned at Jewish membership and more and more of them inserted “the Aryan paragraph” into their statutes. The majority of Jews who participated in the political process were therefore found among the liberal parties at the centre of the political spectrum, while some no longer confessing activists moved to the left and joined the socialists and the communists. This choice was also influenced by another differentiation within the Jewish community between rich, well-to-do and poor. There were only a few Rothschilds, Rathenaus, Ballins and Wittgensteins, but many peddlers and pawn-brokers, with in between the respectable middle class of lawyers, doctors, journalists and clerks.

The most eye-catching difference in the German Jewish population was that between the “assimilated” Jews and the Ostjuden, Jews who had recently arrived from the East. The majority of the German Jews felt at home in Germany and considered the country their fatherland. Not only had they fully adapted to the culture of the Gentiles and did they feel comfortable in it, they actually loved Germany, were proud of being Germans, and would not hesitate to give their lives for the country. They married Germans and could in most cases not be told from them, for the caricatural stereotype did not often agree with the real people.

The Ostjuden, however, were of a different kind. They were refugees from Eastern Europe, mainly from Russia, and belonged to orthodox, socially backward communities. They were “frequently unemployed and disoriented by the post-war upheavals and revolutions in Eastern Europe. Moreover, they were cultural outsiders and an easy target for xenophobic accusations of economic parasitism. In the Weimar Republic they were approximately one fifth of the Jewish population. The more assimilated and established members of German Jewry tended to believe that the revival of anti-Semitism was directed primarily or even exclusively against the Ostjuden, but this turned out to be a tragic self-deception.” 593 In fact, the integrated Jews detested the Ostjuden, who, in their black kaftans, with their unkempt beards, large hats and weird hairdo, were so highly visible, and who therefore put into question the security which the integrated Jews thought they had obtained.

The stream of Ashkenazi Jews from the East towards Austria, Germany and, in their tens of thousands, towards the USA, had started moving because of a wave of pogroms in Russia in the wake of the 1903 events in Kichinev. Kichinev was the capital of Bessarabia and forty-five percent Jewish. The inimical feelings against the Jews climaxed, as usual, in the Holy Week before Easter, when in many places the murderers of Christ were even forbidden to appear in public. Though there were unmistakable signs of an imminent eruption of anti-Semitism, the authorities took no preventive measures, which enforced the populace in their belief that the Tsar himself wanted it. Jews were killed, many more were wounded, and their houses were ransacked. What the Russian authorities had not foreseen was the international outcry caused by this pogrom in “primitive, barbarian Russia”, where the belief that “the Judeans cut the throat of the Russian child and drink its blood” was still widespread. When pondering the number of Jews killed in the Russian pogroms at that time – 47, or 110, or 810 … – Poliakov has the reflection: “It is hard to repress a nostalgic thought about a past when the massacre of 810 Jews prompted a universal condemnation”, 594 when after the Holocaust the habit of reading and writing the numbers of thousands, tens of thousands and even millions made our souls callous.