Modern anti-Semitism (dating back to 1870) differs from older brands in that it has a program for dealing with Jews. “Anti-Semites began to address, recruit, and mobilize the lower orders…”
Prior to 1870, attacks on Jews were not well organized. After 1870, anti-Semites began to organize and get their act together.
From Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews by Albert S. Lindemann:
A key unifying trait of these diverse anti-Jewish groups was anxiety about the economic changes of the time and more broadly about the meaning of a wide range of modern trends, many of which seemed to benefit Jews.
* A century later, when it became clear that the stock market scandals of the mid-to-late 1980s in the United States saw an overwhelming preponderance of Jews — at least ninety percent was a widely accepted figure — that clear correlations seemed to interest the broad American public scarcely at all… But in Germany in the 1870s popular interest and indignation were intense; demands for new controls over the stock market…blended into demands for greater controls over the free market generally. Such controls were especially necessary, it was believed, since Jews, now equal under the law, were so much inclined to go out of control in a liberal environment, to take an unfair and destructive advantage…
Otto Glagau: “No longer should false tolerance and sentimentality…prevent us Christians from moving against the excesses…and presumption of Jewry. No longer can we suffer to see the Jews push themselves everywhere to the front…everywhere seize leadership and dominate public opinion.”
…Those Jewish newly rich in Germany who had recent origins in the esatern European shtetlekh, where standards of civility or public manners were markedly different from those of Germany, were widely regarded as especially offensive…
Similar remarks concerning the public manners of Jews in large cities, New York being an obvious example, were common…
Theodor Herzl said that anti-Semitism served to “inhibit the ostentatious flaunting of conspicuous wealth, curb the unscrupulous behavior of Jewish financiers, and contribute in many ways to the education of the Jews.”
…[Heinrich] Graetz considered contemporary European civilization to be “morally and physically sick”…
Other Jewish observers regretfully commented upon the bad blood created not only by Graetz but also by other Jewish historians.
…Graetz had written much that was stunningly offensive to German sensibilities of the time and that would have offended even more self-confident peoples. In reviewing some of Graetz’s pages, Treitschke echoed the reactions of many Germans:
“What deadly hatred of the purest and most powerful exponents of German character, from Luther to Goethe and Fichte! And what hollow, offensive self-glorification! Here it is proved with continuous satirical invective that the nation of Kant was really educated to humanity by the Jews only…”
Graetz had written that Boerne and Heine had “renounced Judaism, but only like combatants who, putting on the uniform of the enemy, can all the more easily strike and annihilate him… To these two Jews the Germans owe their pure taste, their feeling for truth, and their impulse for liberty… They grafted wit and life on German literature, and banished that clumsiness and awkwardness which had aroused the ridicule of neighboring nations.”
In 1868, Graetz had written to Moses Hess, “I am looking forward with pleasure to flogging the Germans and their leaders — schleiermache, Fichte, and the whole wretched Romantic school.” In the same letter, he wrote “we must above all work to shatter Christianity.” Treitschke was not far off base when he angrily noted that “the man shakes with glee every time he can say something downright nasty against the Germans.”
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the famous “evangelist of race” and Wagnerian anti-Semite, impishly remarked that attendance at the meetings of the political anti-Semites of these years [1880s] left him “full of pity and love for all Jews,” so repelled was he by the intellectual and moral tone he observed.
