Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2009] DEFEAT, RAGE, AND JEW HATRED 107
sities and scientific personnel, could collapse and surrender while the German
army, numbering in the millions, still occupied the soil of its enemies.
Moreover, the greatest humiliation was arguably yet to come. Article 231,
the “war guilt clause” of the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919,
stipulated that
Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing
all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments
and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war
imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies. 51
During the nineteen-twenties, the Treaty of Versailles, especially Article
231, was viewed by the majority of Germans as a “dictate of shame”
whose purpose was to keep Germany from regaining the status of a great
European power. The compulsory signing was especially bitter because
Germans of all political persuasion “had rushed to arms in 1914 in the sincere
conviction that they were fighting a war of self-defense.” 52
The stab-in-the-back legend (Dolchstoss in den Rücken) offered an
enormously potent means of shifting responsibility so that German “honor”
could be preserved. It was not difficult to identify a suitable “betrayer.”
The legend had its roots in two powerful traditions: the Nibelungen Saga in
which Siegfried, the dragon-slaying hero, is stabbed in the back by Hagen
von Tronje; and the New Testament narrative in which Jesus is betrayed by
Judas Iscariot for money with a loving kiss. 53 Over the centuries, Jews have
been identified with Judas as the paradigmatic betrayer within Christendom.
More often than not, whenever the stronger community met with grave misfortune,
Jews were punished as calamity’s alleged authors.
Apart from its sources in myth and legend, the stab-in-the-back legend
gained enhanced credibility in the German Right from the presence of leftwing
Jews in the leadership of revolutionary movements that sought to end
the war and establish socialist or communist regimes in its aftermath.
51. “The Treaty of Versailles June 28, 1919,” Part VIII, Article 231, Avalon
Project of the Yale Law School, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/partviii.asp
(accessed October 4, 2008).
52. Wolfgang Mommsen, “Max Weber and the Peace Treaty of Versailles,” in
Manfred E. Boemeke, Gerald E. Feldman, and Elisabeth Glaser, eds., The Treaty of
Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 535.
53. On the Niebelungen tradition, Siegfried and Hagen, see Geyer, “Insurrectionary,”
506, 517-20; for a discussion of the role of Judas in transforming the Jews
into the perennial betrayer of the Christian world, see Richard L. Rubenstein, After
Auschwitz, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 50-51.