BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

debate over Jewish German citizenship and Treitschke’s role in promoting the “deicide myth”
that Judaism posed a threat to Christianity and therefore to Germanness. Treitschke’s demand
for Jewish conversion, an idea supported even by ostensible philosemites, speaks to the
exclusively Christian conception of German Geist and the rejection of Jewishness as non-
German and separatist. Frustrated assimilationism, in a sense, bred a rhetoric of exclusion and
expulsion. 70
No such antisemitic paranoia dominated British identity politics. Deborah Cohen writes
that Jewish Britons enjoyed full citizenship after 1866 and freedom from pogroms and mob
violence despite a five-fold increase in numbers through increased immigration between 1888
and 1914. 71 Admiration of Jews provided a strong counter-argument to typical racist concerns
about Jewish conspiracy, racial hybridity or characterizations of ubiquitous, social-climbing
“secret” Jews in widely read novels. 72 Racial categories based on physical features, such as big
noses, actually counteracted fears of the Jewish Chameleon. The acknowledgment of Jewish
70 “German Spirit and Holy Ghost—Treitschke’s Call for Conversion of German Jewry:
The Debate Revisited,” Modern Judaism 30, no. 2 (May, 2010): 172-95. See also, Dagmar
Herzog, “Carl Scholl, Gustav Struve, and the Problematics of Philosemitism in 1840s Germany:
Radical Christian Dissent and the Reform Jewish Response,” Jewish History 9, no. 2 (Fall,
1995): 62, 68. Susannah Heschel further traces the susceptibility of German theology to racist
nationalism and Nazi propaganda through a brand of national evangelism that bought into
antisemitic fears of moral and spiritual contamination. The German Christian Movement joined
the Nazi project of dejudaization by establishing a well-funded Institute for the Study and
Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life. See “Historiography of Antisemitism
Versus Anti-Judaism: A Response to Robert Morgan,” Journal for the Study of the New
Testament 33, no. 3 (2011): 257-79.
71 “Who Was Who? Race and Jews in Turn-of-the-Century Britain,” Journal of British
Studies 41, no. 4 (2002): 470.
72 Ibid., 471, 475, 477-78. Cohen mentions George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) as the
most notorious “Jewish” novel that started a trend.
98