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How German nationalism between 
1871 and 1890 restructured and 
fueled antisemitism.  
 
 
Flora Warshaw 
    
 
Abstract: This essay seeks to explain through textual analysis of speeches and writings 
of key antisemitic figures of the time, how German nationalists used antisemitism as a 
unifying force for citizens, who were disappointed with the lack of German cultural 
homogeneity in the wake of German unification in 1871. Taking a distinct turn from the 
religious prejudice suffered by many Jews in what became the German Empire, a new 
form of racialized antisemitism emerged and created a legacy of racialized hatred that 
was most commonly associated with the Third Reich.  

 

94 



 
Introduction  
 

The 1870s witnessed a different and new kind of antisemitism, one that was 
racialized in its nature and took a distinct turn from the religious prejudice under which 
Jews had suffered so far in the German empire.1 Modern antisemitism had, according to 
Hannah Arendt, “emerged with the birth of the modern nation-state.”2 Indeed, as Klaus 
Holz wrote, “modern antisemitism constituted itself more than anything else through its 
association with nationalism.”3 Nationalism is a very contested idea, and its meanings 
and interpretations have varied over time. As Eric Hobsbawm summarizes it, 
nationalism is an idea that stresses the convergence of the state, the nation, and society.4 
For Ernest Gellner, nationalism stresses the idea of a culturally unified state.5 This idea is 
seen most evidently in the evolution of German nationalism within Germany in the late 
19th century. German nationalism evolved from a predominantly liberal movement into 
a xenophobic ideal after the failed 1848 revolutions.6 It is important to note, however, 
that the rise of nationalism in the late 19th century was not unique to Bismarck’s unified 
Germany. As Julie Thorpe highlights, German unification spurred greater debates about 
Pan-German nationalism outside Bismarck’s borders, such as in Austria-Hungary.7 Yet 
for the purposes of this essay, the German nationalistic goal, within the borders of an 
1871 Germany, became one based on identity. Even after unification in 1871, Germans 
felt they lacked an identity and sought to construct one based on ethnic exclusion.8 

 

This idea of ethnic exclusion and its relationship to nationalism is the subject of 
this essay; more specifically, the exclusion of the German Jews through the new form of 
antisemitism that was created. The term “antisemitism” today is simply a synonym for 
“Jew-hatred.”9 However, this essay will showcase its original meaning and why 
“antisemitism” is so specific in its racialized nature and how the German Nationalist 
movement helped motivate it. Whilst many associate racial antisemitism with the Third 

9 Shulamit Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code: Reflections on the History and Historiography of 
Antisemitism in Imperial Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 23, no.1 (January 1978): 39, 
https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/23.1.25.  

8 Marcel Stoetzler, The State, the Nation, and the Jews: liberalism and the antisemitism dispute in Bismarck's 
Germany (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 286. 

7 Julie Thorpe, Pan-Germanism and the Austrofascist state, 1933-38 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 
2011).  

6 Peter Pulszer, “Third Thoughts on German and Austrian Antisemitism,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 4, 
no.2 (July 2005):154, https://doi.org/10.1080/14725880500133293.  
David J. Wertheim, “German Jewry and the Development of the Jewish Question in the Nineteenth Century,” in 
Oxford History of Modern German Theology, Volume 1: 1781-1848, eds. Grant Kaplan and Kevin M. Sander 
Schel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 691, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198845768.003.0036.  

5 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism. 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, [1983] 2008), 
132. 

4 Eric Hobsbawm, “Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914,” in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric 
Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1983] 2012), 265, 
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107295636.  

3 Klaus Holz, Nationaler Antisemitismus: Wissenssoziologie einer Weltanschauung (Hamburg: Hamburger 
Edition, 2001), 12, quoted in Peter Pulszer, “Third Thoughts on German and Austrian Antisemitism,” Journal of 
Modern Jewish Studies 4, no.2 (July 2005):155, https://doi.org/10.1080/14725880500133293.  

2 Hannah Arendt, The Burden of our Time (London: Secker & Warburg, 1951), 8, quoted in Shulamit Volkov, 
“Antisemitism as a Cultural Code: Reflections on the History and Historiography of Antisemitism in Imperial 
Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 23, no.1 (January 1978): 25, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/23.1.25.  

1 Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (London: Allen and 
Unwin, 1977), 498. 

95 



 
Reich, the foundations for such beliefs were created within Imperial Germany.10 This 
essay will look at the socio-economic conditions, specifically the economic crash of 1873, 
and subsequently argue that the ensuing German identity crisis laid the groundwork for 
this new form of antisemitism.11 This context fueled new secular, racialized ideas that 
declared that Jewish Germans constituted a separate race, as opposed to a religion. Due 
to the secular nature of this antisemitism, this essay will go on to analyze the religious 
antisemitism that had persisted and now accompanied this new racial antisemitic 
movement. However, as will be evidenced, even this religious antisemitism became 
racialized in its movement. Through an analysis of the key antisemitic figures of this 
period and their writings and speeches, we can understand how the two ideologies of 
nationalism and antisemitism converged and mutually reinforced each other to create a 
unifying factor for Germans who craved an identity and a true nation-state.  
  
The relationship between the 1873 economic crash and the German Jewry  
 

Despite the physical unification of Germany in 1871, many Germans still felt a 
lack of unity.12 Nationalism within Germany thus far had often been a local movement 
due to the reality of the German confederation prior to unification in 1871.13 
Furthermore, due to the success of many of these individual German states, “regional 
patriotism” continued even after German unification.14 As Yehuda Cohen summarizes, 
“unification was more structural, the machinery of governance, than unification on a 
psychological or cultural level.”15 Yet, as Paul de Lagarde, an infamous German antisemite 
and scholar, said, 

 
When people talk of the unity of Germany, they almost always think of 
the unity of political leadership; I contend that unity has to be 
understood as the unity of the governed. The former without the latter 
would be mere force; to demand the former when the latter prevails 
would be unnecessary, for it would come about by itself.16 

16 Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, 53. 

15 Yehuda Cohen, The Germans: Absent Nationality and the Holocaust (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 
2010), 29.  

14 Nancy R. Reagin, “Recent Work on German National Identity: Regional? Imperial? Gendered? Imaginary?” 
review of Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat, by Celia Applegate, review of Music and German 
National Identity, by Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, review of The Nation as Local Metaphor: Württemberg, 
Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918, by Alon Confino, review of Körper der Nation: 
Habitusformierung und die Politik des Turnens, 1860-1890, by Svenja Goltermann, review of Fatherlands: 
State-Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth Century Germany, by Abigail Green, review of Staging 
Philanthropy: Patriotic Women and the National Imagination in Dynastic Germany, 1813-1916, by Jean 
Quataert, review of Denkmal im sozialen Raum: Nationale Symbole in Deutschland und Frankreich im 19. 
Jahrhundert, by Charlotte Tacke, review of Political Poetry in Periodicals and the Shaping of German National 
Consciousness, by Lorie A. Vanchena, Central European History 37, no.2 (2004): 281. 

13 Christian Jansen, “The Formation of German Nationalism, 1740–1850,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern 
German History, ed. Helmut Walser Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 235, 
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199237395.002.0003. 

12 Saul K. Padover, “Treitschke: Forerunner of Hitlerism,” Pacific Historical Review 4, no.2 (June 1935):161, 
https://doi.org/10.2307/3633727.  

11 Harold James, A German Identity: 1770 to the Present Day. 2nd ed. (London: Phoenix, [1989] 1994),  
103. 

10 Yfaat Weiss, “Identity and Essentialism: Race, Racism, and the Jews at the Fin de Siècle,” in German History 
from the Margins, eds. Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer, and Mark Roseman (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University 
Press, 2006), 52. 

96 



 
Importantly, he said later in 1888 that despite German unification, “our life is more 
joyless than anyone can imagine.”17 Germans were evidently disappointed by Bismarck’s 
unification and felt a lack of cultural homogeneity, defined in this essay as a shared sense 
of identity. It was a “national and cultural crisis of identity,” according to Reinhard 
Rürup.18 Whilst this essay only covers the period from 1871-1890, it is important to note 
that even Hitler, decades later, “found it necessary to boast that his greatest achievement 
was the creation of a united-totalitarian- Reich.”19 It is clear how important it was for 
Germans to have a strong sense of unity. Marcel Stoetzler summarizes these ideas well 
by arguing that Germany was founded before developing “a strong national 
consciousness.”20 It makes sense then that many German Nationalists then sought to 
discover it.  

 
This disappointment in German unity was also compounded by the fact that 

Germany was dealing with a dramatic societal shift as a result of industrialization and 
urbanization, with many Germans yearning for a “pre-industrial past.”21 This meant 
many Germans began seeking a societal change in the 1870s, which was compounded in 
the 1890s, summarized by Shulamit Volkov who writes,  

 
The unique German culture emerging in the 1890s was expressed in the 
“German ideology”; in a radical anti-modern mentality, rejecting 
liberalism, capitalism, socialism; in a nostalgic passion for a long-lost 
world. It implied a series of political views including an opposition to 
democracy and a call for the reestablishment of a national community 
of harmony and justice.22 

 

These ideas showcase a contradictory group of Germans who sought a new 
culturally unified Germany while simultaneously yearning for Germany’s 
pre-industrialized past that had existed prior to unification.  

 

22 Volkov,“Antisemitism as a Cultural Code,” 31.  

21 Stern, Gold and Iron, 498. 
Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley, CA: 
University of California Press, [1961] 1974),  
https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.5972996. 
Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders 
of Zion (London: Serif, 1967), 164-179, quoted in Shulamit Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code: 
Reflections on the History and Historiography of Antisemitism in Imperial Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute 
Yearbook 23, no.1 (January 1978): 30, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/23.1.25.  

20 Stoetzler, The State, the Nation, and the Jews, 288.  
Peter Pulzer, Jews and the German State (Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, [1992] 2003),  
30. 

19 Padover, “Treitschke,” 161.  

18 Reinhard Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus: Studien zur “Judenfrage” in der bürgerlichen 
Gesellschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975), 123, quoted in Peter Pulzer, “Third Thoughts on 
German and Austrian Antisemitism,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 4, no.2 (July 2005):154, 
https://doi.org/10.1080/14725880500133293. 

17 Anna de Lagarde, Paul de Lagarde. Erinnerungen aus seinem Leben für die Freunde zusammengestellt 
(Göttingen: W. F. Kaestner, 1894), 163, quoted in Fritz Stern,  
The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley, CA: University of 
California Press, [1961] 1974), 32, https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.5972996. 

97 



 
Antisemitism and pogroms were rife in times of economic uncertainty in 

Germany prior to 1871.23 Therefore, when Germany experienced the stock market crash 
in 1873, due to the prevalence of German Jews within the financial industry, many 
sought to blame the disaster of the crash and the subsequent collapse of the German 
economy on them.24 Indeed, the Jews “were widely portrayed as an excessive powerful 
minority that had financial control over the German host society.”25 The issue was that 
the modern Jew was now a “symbol of the modern world,” as Norman Cohn wrote.26 
German Jews gained full emancipatory rights in 1871, and they took the opportunities 
associated with assimilation and emancipation more than any other minority group, 
becoming “disproportionately active” in industries and professions that provided an 
income and societal standing higher than the average German.27 As Peter Gay writes, 
Jews “stationed themselves across the social, political, and stylistic map.”28 Ironically, this 
was probably due to the Jewish assumption that the more a Jew acculturated to German 
society, the more likely they were to be accepted. Yet, as Rürup highlights, the more 
assimilated German Jews became, the more aggrieved German society was as a result.29 
For those who strove to turn against modernity and the supposed evils that 
accompanied it, the Jews were the easiest target. This can be seen most evidently with 
the antisemitism associated with Bismarck’s banker Bleichröder, a key target of this new 
virulent strain of antisemitism as he “embodied all that the socially aggrieved came to 
detest.”30 

 
These ideas were summarized well by Harold James who described this new 

emergence of antisemitism as resulting from, “an intellectual uncertainty in national 
identity; an increase in uncertainty when there are powerful fluctuations on housing, 
farming, money or stock markets; and a definition of national identity against an 
“enemy” associated with market operations.”31 The “enemy,” and reason for this 
uncertainty was found in German Jewry.32  

 
The relationship between German Jewry and nationalism  
 

One of the most prominent figures in the German antisemitic and nationalist 
movement, who sought to relate the question of the German Jews to the question of 
nationalism and cultural unity, was Heinrich von Treitschke.33 As a university professor, 

33 Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code,” 42. 
32 Ibid.,101 
31 James, A German Identity, 103. 

30 Stern, Gold and Iron, 495. 

29 Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus, 82-84, quoted in Pulszer, “Third Thoughts on German and Austrian 
Antisemitism,” 100. 

28Peter Gay, “Encounter with Modernism: German Jews in German Culture, 1888-1914,” Midstream 21, no.2 
(February 1975): 41 

27 Geoffrey G. Field, review of The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Parties in Imperial Germany, by Richard S. 
Levy, Journal of Social History 11, no.1 (Autumn 1977): 99. 
Stern, Gold and Iron, 499. 

26 Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 23–24, quoted in Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code,” 30.  

25 Alexander Jacob, “Introduction,” in Political Ideas, eds. Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Alexander Jacob 
(Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, [1915] 2005), 6. 

24 Ibid. 
Matthew Lange, Antisemitic Elements in the Critique of Capitalism in German Culture, 1850-1933 (Oxford: 
Peter Lang, 2007), 122. 

23 James, A German Identity, 101. 

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Treitschke had the social and “intellectual stature” required to formulate and popularize 
a new form of nationalism based on exclusionary, anti-Jewish factors.34 Furthermore, for 
those seeking a “respectable argument” for antisemitism, Treitschke’s standing provided 
the intellectual validation they sought.35 For Treitschke, the overwhelming success of 
Jews within Germany showcased a “lack of nationalism,” whereby Germany lacked its 
own culture, which in turn had allowed for the success of Jews.36 In his infamous piece 
“Our Views,” published in the Prussian Yearbook in 1879, he declared,  

 
The Jews in France and England have become a harmless and in many 
ways beneficial, element of civil society. That is in the last analysis the 
result of the energy and national pride of these two ancient 
culture-bearing peoples. Our culture is a young one. Our being still lacks 
a national style, an instinctive pride, a thoroughly imprinted character. 
That is why for so long we stood defenseless against alien essences. 
Now, however, we are at the point of acquiring those goods. We can only 
wish that our Jews recognize in time the transformation that is the 
logical consequence of the rise of the German state.37  
 

Treitschke here is pointing to the idea that Germany was “behind” its European 
counterparts in terms of nation-state building, thus it needed to “catch-up.”38 It is clear 
from this writing that in Treitschke’s mind, France and England could accommodate the 
Jewish minority as they already possessed a strong sense of national culture and pride. 
Yet, Germany clearly did not. German Jews purportedly shared the unity and 
commonality that the Germans could not possess, whilst simultaneously subverting 
Germany’s attempt to gain it.39 The Jews supposedly sapped the culture of those who 
surrounded them, seen most evidently in the work and writings of Richard Wagner who 
declared that Jews “have no authentic culture of their own.”40 Lagarde, meanwhile, said 
that the Jews were “the carriers of decay and pollute every national culture.”41 In the eyes 
of German Nationalists in the new German state, it was clear the state could not thrive 
with such a parasitic presence within its society.  

 
Therefore, the German nation-state was to be constructed by process of 

“othering,” defining minorities such as Jews as not real Germans.42 As has already been 
established, Germany desired cultural homogeneity, which invariably requires a degree 

42 Reagin, “Recent Work on German National Identity: Regional? Imperial? Gendered? Imaginary?,” 286. 

41 Paul de Lagarde, Deutsche Schriften (Mainz: Dieterich, 1892),41, quoted in Fritz Stern, The Politics of 
Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 
[1961] 1974), 61, https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.5972996. 

40 James Loeffler, “Richard Wagner’s “Jewish Music”: Antisemitism and Aesthetics in Modern Jewish Culture,” 
Jewish Social Studies 15, no.2 (Winter 2009): 2, https://doi.org/10.2979/jss.2009.15.2.2.  

39 Stern, The Politics, 61. 

38 Stoetzler, The State, the Nation, and the Jews, 55. 

37 Heinrich von Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” in Antisemitism in the Modern World: An Anthology of Texts, 
trans. Richard S. Levy (Lexington, Mass. and Toronto: D.C. Heath Canada, 1991), 73. 

36 Stoetzler, The State, the Nation, and the Jews, 47. 
35 James, A German Identity, 101. 

34 Ibid. 
Michael A. Meyer, “Great Debate on Antisemitism: Jewish Reaction to New Hostility in Germany 1879-1881,” 
The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 11, no.1 (January 1966):143, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/11.1.137.  

99 



 
of exclusion unless a minority is willing to wholly assimilate.43 Treitschke, for example, 
demanded the complete assimilation of Jews into Germany—which would in turn 
“strengthen national unity”—writing in “Our Views,” “[the Jews] they should become 
Germans. They should feel themselves, modestly and properly, Germans… For we do not 
want to see millennia of Germanic morality followed by an era of German-Jewish hybrid 
culture.”44 As Donald L. Niewyk describes, “at the heart” of most of the early antisemitic 
attacks by the likes of Wagner, Treitschke, and Lagarde was the idea that the Jews had 
failed to “live up to their part of the bargain” of emancipation by amalgamating to 
German culture fully.45 Yet, as has been mentioned, many Jews had already assimilated. 
Indeed, Marion Kaplan’s work “Refining Judaism in Imperial Germany” highlights how 
modern Judaism was reformed to better suit Germanic society, more specifically the 
German middle class.46 She writes, “measured in lagging synagogue attendance or in 
rising rates of intermarriage or conversion, “Judaism” as a practice declined, especially in 
the cities.”47 The cultural changes Jews attempted to make within this period, alongside 
their success within Germanic society, shows that Jews did assimilate, or at least showed 
an attempt to which, according to German Nationalists, led to the conclusion that the 
German Jew was to be despised if they were rich or poor, working or middle class.48 
Hence, whilst this demand for complete assimilation that many antisemites put forward 
may not have appeared “extreme,” it was an impossible task for German Jewry.49 
Therefore, the “racist position” many antisemites began to take was that Jews were 
physically “unable to assimilate.”50 Thus, for the Jews that had technically assimilated, 
especially into the middle class, Germans had to find a new way to distinguish, as 
Jonathan Judaken refers to it, the now “evermore-indistinguishable Jewish Other.”51 This 
could only be achieved with a new construction of anti-Jewish hatred based on racism.52  
 
Racializing antisemitism  
 
 Racial antisemitism of this period was very specific because the idea of racial 
difference itself was not dangerous; rather, racial difference denoted a “shorthand to 
differences of cultural, religious, moral, and economic behavior.”53 This was everything 
the new Germanic state did not want, and was, in turn, what the German Jew had been 
accused of by German Nationalists. Racial antisemitism was not a wholly new concept. 
There were many examples of scholars who wrote about Jewish racial theories in the 
latter half of the 19th century, such as Theodore Fritsch in 1881, who described theories 
that revolved around the idea that Jesus was an “Aryan.”54 However, racial theory had, in 

54 Cohen, The Germans, 19. 
53 Stoetzler, The State, the Nation, and the Jews, 303. 

52 Ibid. 

51 Jonathan Judaken, “Antisemitism and the Jewish Question,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism: Volume 8: 
The Modern World, 1815-2000, eds. Mitchell B. Hart and Tony Michels (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 2017), 561, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139019828.021.  

50 Stoetzler, The State, the Nation, and the Jews, 286. 

49 Meyer, “Great Debate on Antisemitism,” 145. 

48 Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code,” 37. 

47 Ibid., 9. 

46 Marion Kaplan, “Redefining Judaism in Imperial Germany: Practices, Mentalities, and Community,” Jewish 
Social Studies 9, no.1 (Autumn 2002): 1–33. 

45 Donald L. Niewyk, “Solving the “Jewish Problem”: Continuity and Change in German Antisemitism, 
1871–1945,” The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 35, no.1 (January 1990): 338. 

44 Von Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 71.  

43 Stoetzler, The State, the Nation, and the Jews, 286. 

100 



 
fact, appeared throughout the first half of the 19th century, with works such as Count 
Arthur de Gobineau’s essay that cited the “supremacy of the Nordic-Aryan race.”55 
Indeed, as early as 1835, the Königsberg historian Friedrich Schubert, in his criticism of 
Jewish emancipation, declared that a Jew could never be a true “member of the German 
nation” because the Jews were “an Asiatic tribe.”56  

 
The coining and proliferation of the term “antisemitism” was itself a direct 

product of the racialization of Jews in Europe. The man most associated with 
popularizing this term was Wilhelm Marr.57 Marr, a German journalist, was another 
figure frustrated with the state of Germany in the 1870s.58 The term “antisemitism” had 
been coined by the Austrian-Jewish scholar Moritz Steinschneider in 1860.59 However, it 
was Marr that revolutionized the anti-Jewish movement by popularizing the term 
“antisemitismus,” whereby it “far exceed[ed] its direct communicative value.”60 Indeed, as 
Richard Levy writes, “over the next fifteen years, variants of anti-Semitism, anti-Semite, 
and anti-Semitic, made their way out of the German-speaking world into nearly every 
European language.”61 “Antisemitism” was more than a word. Even the very construction 
of the word- using “ismus”- meant it was viewed within the same discourse as words 
such as “liberalism” (liberalismismus) or “conservatism” (konservatismus), added more 
power, weight, and respect to the term.62 The most important thing to note about this 
new term is that it did not denote being anti-Jewish, a religious idea. Instead, it denoted 
an opposition to a race, the Semites.63 As Judaken writes,  

 
In this new era, the discourse of race replaced the earlier theological 
and then social distinctions between Christians and Jews with new 
scientific-sounding criteria based on blood and descent that could be 
easily welded onto an exclusionary nationalist, ethno-racial vision of 
“the people.” The language of race was secular, scientific, and positivist. 
The invention of “Semite” as a category suggested objectivity and 
science, making Jewish qualities fixed and unchanging, from which 
neither conversion nor assimilation was possible.64 

 

64 Judaken, “Antisemitism and the Jewish Question,” 568. 

63 Ibid., 38. 

62 Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code,” 39 

61 Richard S. Levy, “Political Antisemitism in Germany and Austria, 1848-1914,” in Antisemitism: A History, 
eds. Albert S. Lindemann and Richard S. Levy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 123. 

60 Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code,” 38. 

59 Armin Lange, “Jew-Hatred in Antiquity: Cultural, Legal, and Physical Forms of Antisemitic Persecution,” in 
Volume 3 Confronting Antisemitism Through the Ages: A Historical Perspective, eds. Armin Lange, Kerstin 
Mayerhofer, Dina Porat, and Lawrence H. Schiffman (Berlin: De Greuter, 2021), 44, 
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110671995.  

58 Mosche Zimmerman, Wilhelm Marr: The Patriarch of Antisemitism (New York: Oxford University Press, 
1986), 75. 

57 Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-semitism, 49. 

56 Friedrich Schubert, Handbuch der Allgemeinen Staatskunde in Europa (Königsberg: Bornträger, 1835), 
161-62, quoted in Till van Rahden, “Germans of the Jewish Stamm: Visions of Community between Nationalism 
and Particularism, 1850-1933,” in German History from the Margins, eds. Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer, and Mark 
Roseman (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 29. 

55 Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 
1964), 49.  

101 



 
Marr wanted to make it very clear that his Jewish hatred was not religious in its 

nature, even writing “how nonsensical the religious aspect of this [Jewish] hatred was” 
in his infamous work “The Victory of Judaism over Germanism” in 1879.65 He goes on to 
say that “from the very beginning it was not a religious war, it was a battle for survival 
against the foreign rule of Judaism, of whose character we only now have become clearly 
aware.”66 Marr successfully connected the idea of racial difference to anti-Jewish hatred 
despite the clear similarities between this new racial hatred and the older theological 
anti-Jewish ideals.67 As Volkov writes, “Semitism provided sufficient, though indirect 
indication of Marr’s real target, but it was also conveniently inaccurate, enabling him to 
infuse it with a meaning that transcended hatred of Jews yet elegantly became identical 
with it.”68 

 
Marr, who had three Jewish ex-wives, once believed in the concept of assimilation, 

albeit through intermarriage.69 However, by the time of his published work in 1879, he 
had concluded that assimilation was impossible as Jews were “impelled to dominate 
others.”70 For Marr, Jewishness was “an irreversible matter of heredity,” and in his eyes, a 
Jew could never win his favor.71 Therefore, “antisemitism” meant that no matter what, 
the Jew, on account of their inherent racial difference, would forever be a societal 
outcast. Furthermore, Marr’s antisemitic writing highlights the idea that in order for 
Germany to become a strong nation, it must rid itself of the parasitic presence of the 
Jews, writing that “Germanism did not possess sufficient spiritual endurance to protect 
itself from Judaization.”72 This idea alludes to Tretischke’s work, which talked of Jewish 
culture prevailing as a result of Germany’s lack of cultural unity.  
 
 Another figure to which we can attribute the success of racial antisemitism is Otto 
Glagau. Another German journalist, Glagau also sought to blame the economic crash on 
the German Jews.73 In 1879, in a published pamphlet, he wrote against the dominance of 
“a foreign race,” writing “Die soziale Frage its die Judenfrage,” translating to “The social 
question is the Jewish question.”74 Whilst Marr supplied the name of “antisemitism,” 
Glagau provided the perfect slogan to accompany it, successfully distributing it through 
mass media and in turn, “permanently linking a specific view of social reality and a 
particular method in attempting to improve it with open and virulent opposition to 
Jews.”75 Thus, antisemitism became, as Volkov calls it, a unifying “cultural code,” that 
signified one’s cultural identity and was “a way of communicating an acceptance of a 
particular set of ideas.”76 “Antisemitism” became such a powerful statement that even the 

76 Ibid., 34-35. 

75 Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code,” 40. 

74 Otto Glagau, Deutsches handwerk und historisches Bürgertum (Osnabrück: Verlag von Bernhard Wehberg, 
1879), quoted in Shulamit Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code: Reflections on the History and 
Historiography of Antisemitism in Imperial Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 23, no.1 (January 1978): 
40, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/23.1.25. 

73 Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-semitism, 89. 
72 Marr, The Victory of Judaism over Germanism, 14. 

71 Meyer, “Great Debate on Antisemitism,” 143. 

70 Ibid. 

69 Niewyk, “Solving the “Jewish Problem,” 351. 
68 Ibid. 
67 Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code,” 39 

66 Ibid., 27. 

65 Wilhelm Marr, The Victory of Judaism over Germanism, trans. and ed. by Gerhard Rohringer. 8th ed (Bern: 
Rudolph Costenoble, 2009), 9. 

102 



 
word “Jewish” seemingly lost all religious connotations.77 Steven Aschheim talks of the 
“Jewification” of German society that many spoke of in this period, whereby the term 
“Jewish” just denoted something believed to be a degenerative force.78 
 
 This new virulent racist antisemitism found its way into the speeches of many 
other prominent Germans of the time. Otto Böckel, a German politician, successfully 
“became the first antisemite in 1887 to win a seat in a Reichstag.”79 He also declared the 
Jewish question to be racial, as opposed to a religious issue.80 Böckel described the 
German Jews as “a tenacious, ancient race that is remote from our own and that cannot 
be disposed of through baptism or mixed marriages.”81 Böckel saw Jews and Germans as 
two mutually exclusive nations that couldn’t exist alongside one another.82 Once again, 
this points to the concept of an alien or parasitic presence of the Jews within German 
society and showcases the idea that assimilation was no longer a viable option. Whilst 
antisemitism was not necessarily a winning idea for many politicians at the time, 
Böckel’s success shows how these new racial ideas were not left to the fringes of society; 
they penetrated all areas of life. Antisemitism had transformed the age-old religious 
anti-Jewish hatred into a “symbolic” and respectable movement that sought to unify 
Germans.83  
 
Religious antisemitism  
 

In Volkov’s study on the lineage of antisemitism, she is keen to separate this new 
racial antisemitism from the more religious anti-Jewish hatred of Germany’s past, 
emphasizing the secular nature of this new racial variant of antisemitism. 84 This makes 
sense considering the work of Marr; yet, despite the existence of this new racial 
antisemitism, there still existed an anti-Jewish nationalist movement that was more 
religious in nature.85  

 
Therefore, the debate within the historiography surrounds whether or not this 

religious anti-Jewish hatred was a distinct entity or if it was also influenced by these 
racial ideas. Indeed, Peter Pulzer, according to Jeremy Telman, either “categorise[s] 
antisemites as either Christian-Conservative or racialist.”86 Uriel Tal, in agreement with 
Puzler, argues that the Christian anti-Jewish movement “pervaded German intellectual 
circles until the late 1880s and helped prepare the way for the more virulent racial 

86 Jeremy Telman, “Adolf Stoecker: Anti-Semite with a Christian Mission,” Jewish History 9, no.2 (September 
1995): 94. 

85 Todd H. Weir, “The Specter of "Godless Jewry": Secularism and the "Jewish Question" in Late 
Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Central European History, 46, no. 4 (December 2013), 823. 

84 Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code.” 

83 Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code,” 39. 
82 Niewyk, “Solving the “Jewish Problem,” 354. 

81 Otto Böckel, Die Juden - die Könige unserer Zeit. 7th ed. (Berlin: Böckel, 1887),7, quoted in Donald L. 
Niewyk, “Solving the “Jewish Problem”: Continuity and Change in German Antisemitism, 1871–1945,” The Leo 
Baeck Institute Year Book, 35, no.1 (January 1990): 354, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/35.1.335. 

80 Ibid., 122. 

79 Lange, Antisemitic Elements, 139. 

78 Steven E. Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism 
and Other Crises (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), 66.  

77 David J. Wertheim, “German Jewry and the Development of the Jewish Question in the Nineteenth Century,” 
696. 

103 



 
strains which appeared in the next decade.”87 Whilst these positions emphasize the 
continuing existence of a religious anti-Jewish hatred, they fail to connect the racial 
aspect to these movements. Indeed, as Telman argues, these positions are “misleading” 
as they create a “false teleology” of the creation of this new form of antisemitism.88 This 
“racial variant of antisemitism” also found its way into the religious side of the 
antisemitic movement.89 In short, each antisemitic movement of this period, even the 
religious, was racial in its nature. The religious and anti-religious antisemitic movements 
were distinct. However, they both helped to unite disparate groups of Germans with a 
common negative view of the German Jew.  
 

These concurrently religious and racial ideas can be found in the work of 
Treitschke, who wrote, “[Christianity was] tightly interwoven… with all fibers of the 
German people.”90 He goes on to say in the same publication that the “Jewish question 
[would not subside] until our Israelite citizens learn through our stance that we are and 
want to remain a Christian people.”91 Jews were viewed as secular and atheist, thus 
ruining the Protestant nature of Germany. This religious anti-Jewish movement placed 
more emphasis on the Christian nature of Germany, as opposed to the religious 
differences found in Judaism.92 This inadvertently stresses the racial nature of the 
religious movement. In answer to those who questioned the role of Catholics within this 
idealized (Protestant) German state, Treitschke determined that there was far more 
difference between a Jew and a Christian than there was between a Catholic and a 
Protestant.93 This just highlights how there were a plethora of excuses for German 
Nationalists like Treitschke as to why German Jews were outsiders.  
  

The most important figure to study, however, in order to analyze the religious 
movement and its relationship to the new racial antisemitism and nationalism is Adolf 
Stoecker.94 The founder of the Christian-Social Party in 1878 and the court chaplain to 
Kaiser Wilhelm I, Stoecker is a key figure in the German antisemitic movement, 
considering that the “Jewish question” was a large factor in his political thoughts and 
speeches.95 For Stoecker, Protestantism formed part of the foundation of the German 
state and supposedly was “the basis of its greatness.”96 Thus, Stoecker believed that 
Germany could only truly unify once it had accepted its Christian nature.97 There is still 

97 Kater, “Either Mammon or the Messiah?” 33. 

96 John C. Fout, “Adolf Stoecker’s Rationale for Anti-Semitism,” Journal of Church and State 17, no.1 (January 
1975): 51. 

95 Ibid., 27. 

94 Lodewijk Kater, “Either Mammon or the Messiah? The Christian-Social tradition in the Netherlands and 
Germany on the Jewish Question, 1875-1914,” Trajecta 28, no.1 (May 2019): 33. 

93 Meyer, “Great Debate on Antisemitism,” 148. 

92 Weir, “The Specter of "Godless Jewry," 825-826. 

91 Ibid. 

90 Heinrich von Treitschke, “Noch einige Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage,” in Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit. 
Trans and ed. Walter Boehlich (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1965), 88, quoted in Todd H. Weir, “The Specter of 
"Godless Jewry": Secularism and the "Jewish Question" in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Central 
European History 46, no.4 (December 2013): 827, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938913001295. 

89 Ibid. 

88 Telman, “Adolf Stoecker,” 94 

87 Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870-1914. 
Translated by Noah J. Jacobs (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), 280, 300, quoted in Michael R. 
Marrus. “European Jewry and the Politics of Assimilation: Assessment and Reassessment.” The Journal of 
Modern History 49, no.1 (March 1977): 104, https://doi.org/10.1086/241541. 

104 



 
discourse within historiography pertaining to Stoecker’s racial nature, and Fout’s work 
on Stoecker even seeks to remove him from the racial antisemitic discourse, by claiming 
that Stoecker’s “position was somewhat set apart from the majority of his 
contemporaries who were far more violent in their attacks and their solutions.”98 
Nevertheless, through an analysis of Stoecker’s writing, we can clearly see how this 
religious movement also racialized (and in turn was racist against) Jewish difference.99 
 
 A consistent idea that reappears throughout Stoecker’s work and speeches is the 
idea of “reform” and “orthodox” Judaism, whereby he affirms that he has no issue with 
Orthodox Jews, just the new modern Jews that have no religious basis.100 In his infamous 
speech “Our Demands on Modern Jewry” from 1879, he declares,  
 

In fact, I see modern Jewry as a great danger to German national life. 
[By “modern Jewry”] I do not mean the religion of the Orthodox or the 
enlightenment of the Reformers…they hold no attraction for the 
children of the nineteenth century and pose no dangers. In its deepest 
core it is a dead religious form, a lower stage of revelation, a spirit that 
has outlived itself and, although still worthy of honour, has been 
invalidated by Christianity. It has no more truth for the present. Reform 
Judaism has even less religious significance. It is neither Judaism nor 
Christianity but a shabby little survival of the Age of Enlightenment.101 

 

This distinction adds a subtle racialized element to his words, emphasizing the 
non-religious aspect of the reformed modern Jewry. It is also interesting to note that in 
the same speech, Stoecker calls on the Jews to be “more modest,” calling on them to “live 
on the same economic level as their countrymen.”102 This not only highlights the fact that 
antisemitism and anti-capitalism are “inextricably intertwined” but that all these 
anti-Jewish nationalist movements, the socio-economic, racist, and religious, are 
intertwined.103  
 

One does not have to look too far to find more of Stoecker’s outwardly racialized 
speeches, where it is clear that his religious ideas have been influenced by the new racist 
antisemitic movement. In one speech, Stoecker declared,  

 
Race is…an important element in the Jewish question. The 
Semitic-Punic type is, in all areas… so different from Germanic morals 
and philosophy of life, that reconciliation or amalgamation is 
impossible, unless it take the form of a sincere rebirth from the depths 
of the consciences of upright Israelites.104  

104 Adolf Stoecker, Reden und Aufsätze, ed. Reinhold Seeberg (Leipzig: A.Deichertsche Verlag, 1913), 143-144, 
quoted in Jeremy Telman, “Adolf Stoecker: Anti-Semite with a Christian Mission,” Jewish History 9, no. 2 
(September 1995): 96, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01668991.  

103 Stern, Gold and Iron, 523. 
102 Telman, “Adolf Stoecker,”102. 

101Adolf Stoecker, “Unsere Forderungen an das modern Judentum,” in Antisemitism in the Modern World: An 
Anthology of Texts, ed. Richard S. Levy (Lexington, Mass. and Toronto: D.C. Heath Canada, 1991), 60. 

100 Fout, “Adolf Stoecker’s Rationale,” 52. 

99 Telman, “Adolf Stoecker,” 94. 
98 Fout, “Adolf Stoecker’s Rationale,” 60-61. 

105 



 
It is clear that whilst Stoecker was determined to unite Germans through the Christian 
faith, this could only be done through the exclusion of the “other”: the German Jews. 
Within this speech, Stoecker says that “the Jewish question is not solely a racial 
question” according to Telman.105 Nevertheless, Stoecker’s work is vital to emphasize the 
linkage between the racial antisemitic movement and the religious movement, and how 
even this religious movement was racialized in its nature. 
 
Conclusion  
 
 One cannot analyze the antisemitism of this period without, as Telman puts it, 
having “an eye to its similarities to and differences from the antisemitism of the Third 
Reich.”106 The Nazi ideas of race and biology clearly have their similarities to the ideas 
founded in the late 19th century Germany.107 Some historians see a direct linkage, such 
as Pulzer, Paul Massing, and Lars Fischer who claimed that the Holocaust was only 
possible because these antisemitic ideas had already “saturated” Wilhelmine society.108 
Despite being successful within society during this period in time, antisemitism did not 
truly enter the political sphere, as after 1890, many of the antisemitic parties that had 
seen success in the Reichstag dwindled in power, and even prior to this, their success 
was “limited.”109 Yet, many parties, such as the Conservative Party, began to adopt an 
antisemitic rhetoric.110 Therefore, antisemitism had been made, by the likes of Marr, 
Stoecker, and Treitschke, “respectable” and even “fashionable,” even if it never truly 
entered mass party politics within this period.111 It is clear that there are linkages 
between the antisemitism of Imperial Germany and the Third Reich, but it is also 
important to treat this movement as “an autonomous topic” that is “present in the 
context of its time.”112  

 
According to German Nationalists, antisemitism was the answer to the disunity 

following German unification. Looking at the context that was a distressed and flailing 
Germanic society that had never truly felt unified, in combination with economic 
hardships that had brought out an older, more well-known hatred for Jews, we can see 
how antisemitism thrived in this period. As James writes, “The 1870s were the first 
instance in which this matrix of forces and calculations operated.” 113These factors, in 
combination with prominent, intellectual figures who were willing to put a name and 
answer to German’s misery and disappointment, meant it came to be that if one believed 

113 James, A German Identity, 103. 

112 Pulzer, “Third Thoughts,” 167. 

111 Niewyk, “Solving the “Jewish Problem,” 369. 

110 Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-semitism, 126. 
Michael R. Marrus, “European Jewry and the Politics of Assimilation: Assessment and Reassessment,” The 
Journal of Modern History 49, no.1 (March 1977): 103. 

109 Oded Heilbronner, “From Antisemitic Peripheries to Antisemitic Centres: The Place of Antisemitism in 
Modern German History,” Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 4 (October 2000): 569. 

108 Paul Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany (New York: 
Harpers & Brothers, 1949), https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.177835/page/n5/mode/2up.  
Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-semitism. 
Lars Fischer, The Socialist Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 2007), xi. 

107 Varshizky, “The Metaphysics of Race,” 255. 

106 Ibid.,93. 

105 Telman, “Adolf Stoecker,” 109. 

106 



 
in German nationalism, they also believed in antisemitism.114 A hatred for the Jews was 
finally the powerful force that could unite Germany. Thus, whilst it is still debatable how 
much we can link this movement to Nazi Germany, the movement was a powerful force 
in and of itself. Part of Germany’s nationalist identity was built on a foundation of 
racialized hatred. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

114 Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code,” 45. 

107 



 
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