BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

with or in opposition to authorities. 61 And while the “Hep! Hep!” catchword and a medieval
Carnivalesque, world-turned-upside-down atmosphere characterized many of these ritualized,
communal acts of violence, opposition to Jewish emancipation remained the central issue
provoking such actions. Riots directed against liberal initiatives for social and economic
modernization advanced by Jews in fact succeeded in postponing Jewish emancipation until
1869-71. Thereafter the “Jewish Question” became a staple of unofficial antisemitism, kept alive
in Bismarckian-era party politics and in a media-driven “domesticated” antisemitism lasting
through the Wilhelmine era. 62 During the Kaiserreich (1871-1914), Christhard Hoffmann has
argued, the success of government and mainstream antisemitic conservatives in disavowing
militant demagoguery only served to make antisemitism “respectable,” more appealing to the
middle-class and part of a nationalist world view that could easily harbor more radical strains of
anti-Jewish activism. 63 Even taking into account some extremely violent antisemitic rhetoric in
nineteenth-century Germany, it nevertheless remains one of the twisted ironies of history that the
61 Compare discussion of these different facets in Stefan Rohrbacher, “The ‘Hep Hep’
riots of 1819: Anti-Jewish Ideology, Agitation, and Violence,” 33, 38, 41, with Manfred Gailus,
“Anti-Jewish emotion and Violence in the 1848 Crisis of German Society,” 45, 55, and
Christhard Hoffmann, “Political Culture and Violence against Minorities: The Antisemitic Riots
in Pomerania and West Prussia,” 70-76, 86, in Hoffmann, et al., Exclusionary Violence.
62 For a discussion of these points and the “self-help” aspects of ritualized violence see the
excellent summary by Richard S. Levy, “Continuities and Discontinuities of Anti-Jewish
Violence in Modern Germany 1819-1938,” in Exclusionary Violence, 192-99.
63 See “Political Culture and Violence” in Exclusionary Violence, 77-79, on Bismarck’s
political exploitation of antisemitism, 90-92 on the government’s distancing itself from militant
antisemitic demagogues like Hermann Ahlwardt and Ernst Henrici.
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