This book by Albert S. Lindemann challenges my anti-goy prejudices.
Steve Oney reviews it in 1992 for the Los Angeles Times:
In 1860, Vienna’s Jewish population was but 6,000, yet by 1910 it had grown to 175,000. And numbers don’t tell the entire story. “Nearly all banks in the capital and indeed in the . . . monarchy were owned by Jews, as were the important newspapers,” the author writes, adding: “For the citizens of Vienna the rise of the Jews was a . . . striking, palpable matter.”
Now Austria–as Lindemann acknowledges–was the most antisemitic country in Europe (oddly enough, neighboring Hungary was the most philosemitic, and stranger still, it was during this period of terrible bigotry that Vienna’s fabled community of Jewish intellectuals flourished), yet across the continent, similar increases in Jewish population and visibility were creating similar stresses. For instance, in France–also a traditionally philosemitic land–Jews sided with forces that in the 1880s tried to bring about secular as opposed to Catholic control of public schools, thus incurring the wrath of right-wingers. And in Germany, several Jewish brokers –the 19th-Century equivalents of Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken–were involved in an 1873 stock-market scandal that set off a stubborn recession during which poor farmers, craftsmen and shop owners suffered horribly…
Yet even in Russia, Lindemann contends, the public was in part reacting to the fact that Russian Jews–mostly Hasidim–were willfully resistant to social and political intercourse with either peasant or prince. “For . . . Russians, their country’s Jewish population appeared intractable, foreign, and hostile. . . . There was, in short, a rather widespread consensus in Russia that Jews were a separate . . . race steadily working to dominate those among whom they lived.”
By the time Lindemann actually addresses the Dreyfus, Beilis and Frank affairs, he’s succeeded in constructing a backdrop that not only makes these three episodes seem predictable but leaves us wondering why there weren’t more like them. Meanwhile, he’s established himself as the writer to rescue the cases from some of the mythologies that over the years have grown up around them…
A Jewish nation remained; Jews, no matter in which country they lived and in spite of their protestations of modern-style patriotism, still held the interests of their Jewish brethren to be higher than those of their adopted countries…
Even more ominous was the spreading belief that wealthy and prominent Jews like the Rothschilds, Cremieux, or Montefiore were part of a covert international network with steadily growing power in the highest councils of Europe’s states. It was a natural step from such beliefs to the panicked conviction in the latter part of the century that Jews were surreptitiously taking over in Europe, that a secret Jewish power was everywhere and nearly omnipotent.
On page 38 of his book, Lindemann writes:
What was remarkable and difficult was the necessity of cooperating with France’s enemies in order to rescue the Jews in Damascus. Adolphe Cremieux (1796-1880), a Jew and a prominent French politician, openly cooperated with Jewish leaders in Great Britain and Austria, countries considered to be France’s enemies. Partly through exploiting the pressures exerted by those enemy countries, Jewish leaders in France were successful in obtaining the release of the Jewish prisoners in Damascus…
Thus the dilemma — and a troubling precedent: A victory for the Jews was perceived by many French patriots as a defeat for France, a defeat in which French Jews had collaborated with France’s enemies.
This reminds me of the allegation that Jewish spy Jonathan Pollard stole the crown jewels of America’s nuclear secrets, handed them over to Israel, which then gave them to the Soviet Union in exchange for the release of Jews.
