Introduction

On Interpreting Antisemitism: An Autobiographical Sketch

I never intended to study or work on Antisemitism. Although hating Jews is clearly, though perhaps not exclusively, a matter for non-Jews, the topic has traditionally been studied by Jewish historians, or, more precisely, historians who write about Jews and Judaism. At the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where I began my studies in 1963, it was taught, of course, in the Department of Jewish History. I, however, chose to study what was then and is today still being called in Israeli universities "general history."1 It was in observing the struggle among states and nations that one confronted the drama of world history, I thought. And after all, it was also in that Department that one could attend lectures given by renowned historians such as Yaakov Talmon, Yehushua Arieli and Michael Confino. The first, by then already world-famous for his book The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, lectured in the largest hall on the university campus in West Jerusalem, where students crammed onto window sills and stairs to hear his performances.2 I, too, listened excitedly, fascinated by what Talmon had to say as well as by the way he said it. He was a brilliant lecturer and an eloquent orator.

When I moved to Berkeley, California a year later, there was not even the option of studying Jewish History, and in any case Berkeley's Department of History provided sufficient intellectual nourishment. Moreover, outside the classroom, the so-called Free Speech Movement was taking shape and, though as a foreign student I always remained an observer rather than an active participant, there could be no better schooling for a beginning historian. It was only there and then that history began to interest me in earnest. I heard Karl Schorske on European Intellectual History, a course in which he surely provided no less eloquence and passion than Talmon had in Jerusalem. I took Richard Herr's seminar on Tocqueville and Wolfgang Sauer's course on Germany in the nineteenth century. I wrote seminar papers for Gerald Feldman on the revolution of 1918 and the early Weimar Republic, and then, significantly, participated in Hans Rosenberg's graduate seminar on the social history of the Kaiserreich. At the same time, I was learning German, though not diligently enough, preparing myself for a career in social history, as befits a young scholar who sought to be politically aware, socially engaged, and intellectually daring.

Antisemitism was not on the curriculum. But as I was galloping towards my Ph.D., preparing a dissertation on the handicraft masters in the later years of the nineteenth century, I was rather unexpectedly confronted with it. To be sure, Rosenberg's opus magnum on the Kaiserreich did include a short and illuminating chapter on Antisemitism, but at first its significance was completely lost on me.3 By then I was focused on what had been Rosenberg's main topics: economic cycles, class relationships and - further on the horizon - the preconditions for Fascism. However, reading documents on the masters' assemblies during the 1848 revolution and later in the late 19th century, I could no longer avoid addressing their Antisemitism.

Then in 1972, as I was busy completing my dissertation, I was asked to contribute to a Festschrift for Hans Rosenberg's 70th birthday. It was an extraordinary honor for me at that stage in my career and feeling indebted to him in many ways, I readily agreed. The volume eventually included thirty-three contributions, written mostly by far more experienced scholars than I; many more men than women. The essay I submitted was, in fact, my first truly independent academic work, and the topic was the social and political function of Antisemitism among handicraft masters in late nineteenth century Germany.4 It is included in this volume as no. 2, despite the fact that it is by no means a ripe piece of work. Like more than a few other essays reprinted here, I would have written it differently today.

To be sure, studying the master-artisans' history, regardless of their Antisemitism, seemed fitting at the time. It was a typical case of research on a lower social stratum, neglected by previous historiography, a group composed of men, whose voices were previously lost to later generations. In addition, this topic allowed me to inch beyond the evolving social history at the time, in the direction of E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, a greatly influential book at the time.5 Thompson presented a mixture of social and what could already be called cultural history. While as students of Hans Rosenberg, we learned to write a history that was above all linked to economics, Thompson's approach called for the inclusion of more social and anthropological considerations. Moreover, the urge to contribute to the understanding of political events, above all to matters concerning the rise of National Socialism, had remained present as well. After all, politics is always an important aspect of writing history and at that time the riddle of Nazism was never far from our minds. Soon it would become apparent, of course, that social history based on the economy alone did not suffice to accomplish political tasks. I was ready to move on and use other analytical tools for my purposes.

In the meantime, the sense of intellectual-cum-political excitement so prevalent in Berkeley during the late 1960s followed me to London, where I then lived with my small family, as well as to the different German towns I visited during my archival research trips. I was still acutely aware of this sense when I returned to Israel in 1972, although just here, at home, I now felt like a complete stranger. In the aftermath of the Six Day War, Israel became triumphant and complacent. Preoccupied with its own problems, it was oblivious to the revolutionary waves that shook the campuses of North America or England and the boulevards of Paris. At the University of Tel Aviv these were still the heydays of the "second-generation scholars."6 The Institute for German History had been established shortly before my arrival and its faculty members were all men in their late fifties, some of whom had even studied in pre-Nazi Germany or Austria, and I - not yet 30 and a woman to boot - did not fit in at all. I felt somewhat disoriented, not sure how to handle the situation and above all confused as to the direction I ought to be taking in my further academic work.

Early in 1974, I was approached by Shlomo Na'aman and asked to contribute to a symposium he was organizing on Jews and Jewish Aspects of the German Working-class movement.7 Other participants were renowned experts in the field. It was an honor. Once again, I agreed, and even if they were not too impressed by my performance, the work I did in preparation for this conference proved to be important in moving me forward. In fact, the building blocks for my later piece, namely "Antisemitism as a Cultural Code," were by then almost all there, and in this case, too, one piece proved to be more crucial than others. Just as Thompson's book was instrumental for my thinking about the master artisans, now an article by the German sociologist Mario Rainer Lepsius, under the English title "Party-System and Social Structure: On the Problem of Democratization in German Society," gave me the clue I needed.8 Lepsius suggested a division of German society since the late nineteenth century into "blocks" based on socio-economic characteristics, but each representing a cultural milieu as well, supported by a more or less outspoken Weltanschauung. The Social-Democratic workers' "block," the inner structure of which had been previously analyzed by Gunther Roth in an English-language thesis published in 1963, seemed ready-made for this kind of analysis. Dieter Groh added another important layer to this edifice by describing the way in which this unique block had managed to be integrated into the overall social web of the Kaiserreich, namely through a process he had named "negative integration."9 I referred to all of these in my lecture (here appearing as number 3), while I was trying to say something new, not so much about Social Democracy, but on the role of Antisemitism within it; something beyond the bare facts and the familiar quotes brought forward by other historians. Now it became clear: Antisemitism was an interesting topic; more importantly, perhaps - it was relevant to my life. After all, it was present as a concept and major historical component of the Zionist ideology, constantly used in the Israeli political discourse, for me often an irritant for the way it had been used or rather manipulated. At first, I tried my hand in a lecture on what was often named, following a memorable book published as early as 1930 by the German Jewish philosopher and publicist Theodor Lessing, Jewish "Self-Hate."10 The main motivation was my objection to the branding of all radical political critics as self-hating Jews. More generally, the stress on the presumed fact that "the whole world was always against us" seemed excessive to me, making improper usage of a much more complicated and many-sided history. By then my interest narrowed on this history.

At this point, I began to sense not only what kind of history I wished to apply to the study of...