JOURNALfor the STUDYof ANTISEMITISM

2011] THE MURDER OF HUGO BETTAUER 239
Catholicism, similar to that of Franco and Salazar and, mutatis mutandis,
Vargas in his first period as president of Brazil.
Bettauer’s murder, like that of Walter Rathenau, marks a sea change in
European antisemitism. Toward the end of the nineteenth century traditional
European antipathy towards Jews, largely for religious motives,
became a codeword for a wide range of attitudes including authoritarianism,
imperialism, ultra-nationalism, racism, militarism, manliness, misogyny,
the desire for fellowship in an exclusive community, hatred of all forms of
democracy, particularly liberalism and social democracy. 37 It was an attitude
summed up by the historian Heinrich Treitschke in his remark, “The
Jews are our misfortune,” or by Otto Glagau, who wrote “The social question
is the Jewish question,” in other words, “The Jew” was symbolic of all
that is out of joint in the modern world—a boo word for boo things. 38 It did
not necessarily imply hatred or even dislike of individual Jews—as Karl
Lueger’s “I decide who is a Jew,” or its later equivalent, “Some of my best
friends are Jews”—clearly indicates. Nor was antisemitism ever transformed
into a systematic ideology, in spite of a series of determined
attempts. It was, instead, a convenient means of explanation for often complex
issues, a blanket rejection of many facets of modernity, a knee-jerk
reaction to an inchoate discontent, anxiety, or unease. It is thus hardly surprising
that Julius Streicher adopted Treitschke’s “Die Juden sind unser
Unglück” as the motto for his appalling weekly Der Stürmer (The
Attacker). By the same token, an alarming number of professed antiantisemites,
particularly among the Social Democrats, let slip many an anti-
Jewish slur and had neither a particular affection for Jews nor concern for
their fate. Some Jews even managed to convince themselves that there was
a grain of truth in the antisemites’ charges against them.
With the rise of violence against Jews, of which Bettauer’s murder is a
37. Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation,
Cambridge 2006, 113; Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code: Reflections on
the History and Historiography of Antisemitism in Imperial Germany,” Leo Baeck
Institute Yearbook 23, 1978, 25-46.
38. Daniela Weiland, Otto Glagau und “Der Kulturkämpfer”. Zur Entstehung
des modernen Antisemitismus im frühen Kaiserreich, Berlin 2004. Otto Glagau is
best known for his series of articles in Die Gartenlaube in 1874-5 on Die Borsen
and Gründergeschwindel in Berlin, in which he blames the Jews for irregularities
in the stock market. Glagau wrote: “The children of Israel multiply in Berlin just as
they once did in Egypt and they are all prosperous and rich people; really poor Jews
are not to be found among them. The climate in Berlin, although lacking ozone,
suits Abraham’s descendents very well. If one wished to assuage their 1800 years
of suffering and send them back to the land of milk and honey, they would say
‘thank you very much.’ ”