JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES Publications, No. 2 ESSAYS ON ANTISEMITISM Edited by KOPPEL S. PINSON Associate Professor of History, Queens College With a Foreword by SALO W. BARON Second Edition Revised and Enlarged NEW YORK CONFERENCE ON JEWISH RELATIONS 1946 Copyright 1946 by The Conference on Jewish Relations, Inc. Printed in the United States of America at The Comet Press, New York City EDITORS PREFACE The warm reception accorded to the volume of Essays on Anti semitism, published by the Conference on Jewish Relations in 1942, gave encouragement to the editors of Jewish Social Studies to present a new revised and enlarged edition. Antisemitism, far from disappearing from the world scene after the victorious end of the war, is still an ever-present problem for us. Here, where this preface is being written, in the very center of the worlds most terrifying and most systematically organized form of antisemitism, where the shattered remnants of once flourishing Jewish communities are ever present before ones eyes, where one meets streams of Jews coming in daily from the new free Poland in order to escape mob violence and persecution, here one may easily despair of ever being able to cope with this problem. Yet we dare not lose a sense of broader perspective. If humanity is to survive and with it the Jewish people, a healthy optimism that is under no illusions concerning the tragic complexities of the question and that does not satisfy itself with petty and superficial triumphs is a prime prerequisite. Intelligent study combined with energetic action may still be able to keep this disease from infecting and eventually annihilating our entire civilization. All the essays in the first edition havealso been included in the new edition, most of them in revised form. To this collection have been added the essay on France by Hannah Arendt, the study of German racial antisemitism by Waldemar Gurian and a brief article on 1 the postwar world by the Editor. Grateful appreciation is due to Dr. Joshua Starr for his most valuable aid in the preparation of this volume. Frankfurt-on-the-Main, K. S. P. March 1, 1946. 1S4 G15 MAY 2 01947 FOREWORD Prior to the recent defeat of Germany and its satellites antisemitism had become a world power. Shattering all historical precedents it tran scended the boundaries of any particular country or group of countries. While in the throes of defeat it scored a terrifying victory, which may leave ineradicable traces on the destiny of the Jewish people. Unlike its medieval antecedents which, notwithstanding their basic inter-territorial features, operated with considerable independence and lack of simul taneity within the countries of Christendom and Islam, current anti semitic propaganda has extended far beyond the confines of western civilization. It penetrated deeply into the Arabian world, despite the demonstrably greater Semitism of the Arab-speaking peoples when compared with the bulk of westernized Jewry. It penetrated the far reaches of Japan, despite the numerical and economic inferiority of its Jewish community and the total absence of an anti-Jewish tradition. In former ages, moreover, it was primarily an instrument of domestic policy, but in our day it has constituted a pre-eminent factor in international relations. The melancholy adage of a third-century Palestinian sage, living in an era of great Jewish sufferings, that he who persecutes Israelbecomes a chief Sanhedrin 104b, often borne out by the history of domestic rivalries and the successful careerism of individual antisemites, has perhaps for the first time in the ages of Jew-baiting, come true on the world scene. The fanciful, conspicuously spurious accusation of the alleged Jewish drive for world dominion has served as a powerful vehicle of the realistic Teuton attempt at gaining complete mastery over the world...