The People Speak Out: Anti-Semitism and Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Bavaria.

James Harris' useful monograph joins a series of recent studies which challenge the prevailing orthodoxy on the origins of modern, particularly German antisemitism. According to a still widely accepted view, crucial changes in attitudes toward Jews began in the 1870s and 1880s, when traditional antipathies towards Jews secularized, radicalized, and energized in a form eventually picked up by the Nazis in the period after the First World War. Tracking this change, historians have often looked back to the work of Hans Rosenberg, for whom "the Great Depression" beginning in 1873 stimulated ideologies and political movements that subverted liberal thought and institutions. Battered by the economic downturn, or suffering from more long-term socio-economic decline, various social groups increasingly perceived Jews as the principal source of their troubles. During the 1880s and 1890s antisemitic demagogues fashioned antipathies into a coherent antisemitic ideology, disseminated antisemitism far and wide using up to date means of communication, mobilized opinion through parties and interest groups, and added a "scientific" cachet with the concept of race. Linking antisemitism with the advent of modern industrial society, this interpretation disputes earlier theories of antisemitic continuity. Antisemitism is best understood in historical context, in this view, and that context altered radically in last two decades of the nineteenth century.

The People Speak argues that, in Bavaria at least, a grass roots, "modern" antisemitism, stimulated by inventive journalistic demagogues, emerged in the immediate wake of the 1848 revolutions, considerably before the period identified by most historians. The occasion for this outbreak was the attempt by the government of King Maxmillian II to steer through Parliament a law giving full equality to more than 50,000 local Jews. In pressing full emancipation, the government was appealing to liberal opinion, whom it rightly suspected would be unhappy with its rejection of constitutional and national projects of 1848. "Progressive conservatives," or "moderate liberals," as Harris refers to them, Maxmillian and his advisors also supported giving Jews the same rights as Christians as enlightened social policy. Unfortunately, most Bavarians thought otherwise.

Although the Bavarian Lower House passed the government's bill in 1849, the project ran into serious trouble in the following year when the project came before the more conservative upper house, eventually going down to a decisive defeat. The heart of Harris' book is a description of the powerful grass roots campaign against the bill--a veritable mass movement devoted to the defeat of Jewish emancipation. Through an examination of 552 petitions found in the Bavarian state archives, Harris comments on the dynamics of this campaign as well as popular perceptions of Jews. His conclusion is that Bavarians at mid-century shared many antisemitic assumptions, widely feared the Jews, and pressed their concerns as political issues. Organized in communities, Bavarians mobilized democratically as they had in 1848, but did so now for distinctly non-democratic purposes.

How "modern" was the anti-Jewish campaign of 1849-50? In terms of perceptions of Jews, the record seems mixed. Harris notes the absence of race, the element most commonly used to distinguish traditional anti-Jewish attitudes from Nazi-style antisemitic ideology. On the other hand, he observes that religion played only a minor role in the antisemitic protests of 1849-50. Much more important were economic, social or political considerations--essentially secular fears that Jews threatened established ways of life, particularly in small communities. Concerning popular mobilization, Harris makes a convincing case for the vigor and highly democratic character of the opposition to Jews, a conclusion reinforced with a close look at one region, Lower Franconia. Although spurred on by antisemitic journalists, the local populace responded to political events with an independence born of the struggles of 1848 and in a manner not easily captured by left or right: "The news in 1849-50 was that neither the government nor the press controlled the people," Harris observes (p. 114).

Yet looking back from the vantage point of the Weimar era, as Harris encourages us to do in a chatty, somewhat uneven bibliographical overview in his last chapter, Bavarian opposition to Jewish emancipation seems to me far indeed from the antisemitic fulminations of the Nazis. Mid nineteenth-century Bavarians may have feared, disliked, and in some cases even hated Jews, but they did not see them as a satanic force manipulating the entire country and threatening the entire planet. There was no claim that Jews controlled the government, undermined civilization, or threatened the course of history. And so far as one can tell, there were no physical threats. Ernst Zander, editor of a Catholic newspaper and one of the most influential anti-Jewish polemicists, stoutly opposed violence and denounced revolutionaries of all stripes.

What the Bavarian antisemites did argue was that emancipation challenged their rights--and in this sense, at least, their campaign strikes me as looking more to the past than the future. The widespread opposition to the government's bill was more rural and small town than urban, and came much more from the Catholic majority than Protestant minority. Most important, opposition was community based. Bavaria was a patchwork of some 8,000 mostly small communities, often with populations numbering in the hundreds and many of which had a corporate existence going back hundreds of years. Jewish emancipation promised to reduce the authority of these communities--particularly over Jewish residency--and was part of a broader process of loss of autonomy due to economic growth, urbanization, and the growth of centrally controlled, bureaucratic government. Not surprisingly, many Bavarians fought back, rejecting what they believed (quite rightly) to be a Munich-inspired scheme in favor of the Jews.

Their descendants, in the Weimar period, had an entirely different vision, shaped by economic and political catastrophe, and hardened by the experience of a world war. The People Speak identifies an organized, political antisemitic movement which considerably predates the 1870s; it also reminds us, however, of how different was this antisemitism from that which was later taken up by the Nazi Party.

Michael R. Marrus University of Toronto