Christian Davis has performed a great service by demonstrating the precise link between colonialism and antisemitism in Imperial Germany. By focusing on the role of colonialist thinking in the antisemitic camp and the role of Germans of Jewish descent in colonial enterprises from 1884–1914, Davis proves a fundamental contradiction: while many antisemites favored colonialism, they were willing to accept, and at times champion, adept colonial leaders who violated their conceptions of Aryan identity. Of course, preternaturally competent Jews from Moses Mendelssohn to Walther Rathenau benefited from “exception Jew” status, in Hannah Arendt's formulation. But Davis has shown this to be a major motif of Germany's colonialism.

Chapter one sets the stage for the mutual development of political antisemitism and colonialism, which emerged in the same basic period. Davis appropriately contrasts the incubation of antisemitism in the 1870s with the creation of press and parties in the 1880s, following the famous Antisemitic Petition of 1880, and Bismarck's shameful nonresponse. Similarly, German colonialism “came into being on April 24th, 1884,” the day Bismarck proclaimed the government's protection of Southwest Africa (p. 25). Building on the work of Woodruff Smith, Davis usefully contrasts military-economic imperialism, sometimes called Weltpolitik, with a variety of migrationist-settler colonialism, often tied to the racialist cult of Aryanism and Lebensraum. Both groups were pro-colonization and antisemitic, but they differed in their willingness to accept the role of non-Aryans in the colonial enterprise, roughly paralleling the debates between pragmatists and eliminationists during the Third Reich. Davis focuses on two central figures in this chapter, Friedrich Lange and Theodor Fritzsch, who roughly represented these two camps. Lange, an enthusiastic colonialist from early on and a leader of the Deutschbund, is clearly a figure in need of reappraisal, which Davis capably provides (pp. 42–45). Fritzsch, probably better known to readers, served as the editor of the vile antisemitic Hammer. Fritzsch emerges in these pages as an ambivalent supporter of colonial endeavors and capable of breaking with the antisemitic parties on the issue of mistreatment of natives, which justify Davis's view that the brutalizing effects of colonialism should not be so quickly dismissed as a sideshow to the violence of World War I.

Chapter two argues that representations of African blacks and German Jews were increasingly conflated and radicalized as the world war approached. Some of this linkage may be traced back to the eighteenth century with David Johann Michaelis playing a role. (Recent treatments of Michaelis by Heschel, Legaspi, and Hess have convinced me that many threads of post-Napoleonic Jew-hatred may be traced back to this “distinguished” Orientalist.) Davis's analysis of Michaelis yields this unsurprising conclusion: blacks could not become true Christians or true Europeans, and they lacked national capacity, whether creative or political. Remarkably, given the vast differences in propinquity between Jews/Christians in Germany and whites/blacks in colonial Africa, even the paranoid fear of miscegenation with its sexual overtones surfaced. With ample evidence, Davis makes his case that colonialist and antisemitic existed symbiotically.

Were Jews and Germans of Jewish descent disproportionately involved in German colonial enterprises? The uneven spread of Jews in the Imperial German economy was bemoaned by detractors and defenders alike; readers of Davis's work will probably conclude that here was another area where the absence of traditional exclusions worked to the benefit of some Jews and ex-Jews. Davis sensibly asks whether this ethnic difference made any difference in their colonial practices; specifically, whether men such as Paul Kayser, Bernhard Durnberg, Karl Schnitzer (Emin Pasha), and a host of others (p. 144) reacted in a less racist manner than German officials generally. Just as sensibly, Davis suggests that while this is probably the case, one cannot push this evidence too far. Chapter four offers a fascinating reading of Bernhard Durnberg, named in 1906 by Chancellor von Bulow as German colonial director and thrown immediately into the maelstrom over the colonial atrocities perpetrated by General von Trotha. Among the sharpest critics of Trotha were the Catholic Center and the Social Democrats, two parties whose record on opposing antisemitism was fairly good. Following the “enemy of my enemy” rule, Durnberg found warm support among some antisemitic organizations, though not all.

Davis's work has all the merits of a good dissertation-based book (meticulous research, mastery of primary materials, awareness of current secondary scholarship) and some of the defects. A sideways glance at Jewish status at the edges of the German Kulturbereich in Alsace, Posen, or Prague would show a similar latitude toward Jewish participation in “borderlands” that begs for comparative consideration. Similarly, radical forms of Jewish assimilation such as apostasy and intermarriage have been well researched and this literature might have been used to explore some of the main characters. Finally, several contentions in Davis's conclusion went beyond the evidence presented in the body of the work. I will limit myself to one example. After summarizing the positive reactions to Durnberg's tenure, Davis concludes, “All this provides perhaps the strongest evidence yet that the antisemitic milieu of imperial Germany was not that of the Weimar era” (p. 248). Aside from the fact that the book contains no assessment of Weimar antisemitism, I think that the polarized nature of Weimar politics on the Judenfrage would leave this a live question: many Germans responded in disgust, for instance, to the murder of Rathenau. Notwithstanding this overreaching, Davis has produced a fine book that fills a surprising and significant gap in the scholarship.