Nationalist Constructions

With the rise of modern nation states in the nineteenth century, antisemitism changed in many parts of society from a religious hostility into a racially and politically charged ideology. Jews were now frequently no longer regarded as ‘heretics’ to be missionised or fought in a religious war, but as a fundamentally alien and unassimilable group – as the ‘other’ within the nation.
Nationalism promised unity through descent, culture and frequently also blood. Within this logic, Jewish women and men became a placeholder and a symbol for everything that did not fit the nation’s image of itself, or – in accordance with racist notions – that of the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’, the ethnically defined community of the people.

Important differences existed here: in nation states that understood themselves early on as communities of shared values or of a shared constitution – France or the USA, for example – antisemitism did rest on social and cultural prejudices, but it could in theory be overcome through citizenship and integration. There, Jews were regarded as citizens who, despite discrimination, could be part of the political order.
In the German Reich, however, an understanding of the nation as an ethnic-völkisch community of fate soon prevailed, from which Jews were fundamentally excluded: they could adapt, convert or assimilate – yet in the national self-image they remained the ‘other’, the ‘foreign body within the body of the people’. Here antisemitism was not social or religious, but identitarian and existential.

As early as the late nineteenth century, modern antisemitism combined biologistic theories, social-Darwinist world views and cultural anxieties: Jewry was constructed as a ‘race’ whose characteristics – intellectuality, urbanity, internationalism – were held to be the opposite of the supposedly ‘down-to-earth’, ‘honest’ people.
Out of this rhetoric arose the enemy image of the ‘internal stranger’: Jews as a ‘people within the people’, as an unreliable minority allegedly unable or unwilling to fit into the national community.

The antisemitic movement of the German Empire, with agitators such as Heinrich von Treitschke (‘The Jews are our misfortune’) and parties such as the Christlich-Sozialer Volksverein, translated these constructions into a political programme. The Jew was presented as a screen onto which social and economic crises were projected – at once capitalist and communist, powerful and parasitic, hypermodern and devoid of tradition. These contradictory ascriptions fulfilled an ideological function: they explained social tensions by means of a supposedly homogeneous, hostile actor.

Under National Socialism this construction radicalised into a total ideology. Jews were no longer regarded merely as a foreign body in the national organism, but as a biological threat, as a ‘racial enemy’ threatening to corrode the ‘healthy body of the people’.
The language of the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ served to define belonging in ethnic terms and to exclude everyone who did not correspond to this image.
The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 codified this logic in law: descent, not faith or cultural identity, decided over belonging – and over life or death.

At the same time, national antisemitism merged with völkisch patterns of thought: one’s own people was glorified as a natural unity, while Jews were held to be ‘uprooted cosmopolitans’, incapable of taking root, of sacrifice or of heroism.