41845358-Antisemitism

86 ANTISEMITISM
viewing the former as morally and culturally inferior. His newspaper (founded
with Jesuit funds) blamed all the ills of France on the Jews, called for their expulsion
from the country, and predicted future massacres. Its sensational antisemitic
polemics shaped public opinion for the conviction in 1894 of Captain
Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer appointed to the French General Staff, on
faked evidence of high treason.
The Dreyfus affair led to an explosion of Jew-hatred in France. The
church in France deliberately fueled the flames in the hopes that strategically
employed antisemitism would reinvigorate Catholicism, which the church saw
threatened by liberalism and secularism. Many churchmen blamed emancipated
Jews for the spread of the hated liberal ideals of the Enlightenment and
French Revolution. Numerous priests attended meetings of antisemitic organizations
and denounced Jews from the pulpit in venomous language—as
Christ killers, Satan’s agents, ritual murderers, traitors, greedy capitalists, international
conspirators—designed to inflame their flock. These vulgar attacks
were repeatedly printed in La Croix (the cross), a daily newspaper published by
the Assumptionists, an order of priests; the most widely read Catholic publication
in the country—its readership included some 25,000 clergy—La Croix
was influential in fomenting contempt for Jews. No doubt the thinking of
French collaborators, who rounded up and deported Jews in France to Nazi
death camps, had been shaped by the image of the Jew emblazoned in the
pages of La Croix four decades earlier.
The success of the Jews—even though the majority, particularly in eastern
and central Europe, remained poor, many desperately so—provided ammunition
for extreme nationalists, who were the principal antagonists of Jews. Although
fueled by such economic factors and a traditional Christian bias,
modern antisemitism rested chiefly on national racial considerations. A xenophobic
nationalism, which viewed the Jews as a conspiratorial race with limitless
power for evil and an alien race that threatened the nation’s very existence,
had emerged in full force in several European countries in the decades before
World War I. The extreme racial nationalism of this period was the seedbed of
Hitler’s ideology. Nationalism, whose emergence we shall examine briefly,
provided the setting for modern antisemitism.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, nationalism and liberalism went
hand in hand. Liberals sought both the rights of the individual and national
independence and unification. Liberal nationalists believed that a unified state
free of foreign subjugation was in harmony with the principle of natural rights,
and they insisted that love of country led to love of humanity. As nationalism
grew more extreme, however, its profound difference from liberalism became