Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

TWO The Rise of Modern Racism(s)
but that their heads should be cut off in one night and
replaced with others not containing a single Jewish idea.” 36
Historian Peter Pulzer has incisively described the essence
of the Jewish question in nineteenth-century Germany:
“Those who governed Germany, and those who strongly
influenced public opinion, could not decide between the
insistence that Jews should assimilate more and the conviction
that they were incapable of ever doing so.” 37
The growth of a firm conviction on the part of some
Germans that assimilation was impossible was the mainspring
of the antisemitic racism that developed after German
unification in 1870. Explicit biological racism was not
applied to Jews in Germany until well after it had been
invoked to rationalize white American attitudes toward
blacks. The older tradition of antisemitism, which stressed
cultural differences and, at least in theory, made conversion
to Christianity the miraculous cure for Jewishness, survived.
For a time an expectation of full Jewish inclusion in
German life was reinforced by the liberal conception of
the state as guarantor of individual rights, a viewpoint that
competed with the more mystical and authoritarian conceptions
of the state that eventually triumphed. A transitional
figure who embraced the coercive, culturally intolerant,
and increasingly pessimistic assimilationism that served
as a segue between the old religious intolerance and the
new racism was the famous professor and public intellectual
Heinrich von Treitschke. When he wrote in 1879 that
“the Jews are our misfortune,” he was referring mainly to
an influx of culturally alien immigrants from Poland rather
than to the German-born Jews who he thought still might
be turned into good subjects of the Reich. 38
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