When asked to provide his own “solution to the Jewish Question” for a 1907 survey, the journalist and philosopher Fritz Mauthner responded, “I do not know how to give an answer to your question, because I do not know which Jewish question you mean. The Jewish question is posed differently by every questioner, differently at every time, differently at every location.”Footnote 1 While untypical for its time, Mauthner's viewpoint is shared by many scholars who write today—not one but a myriad of “Jewish Questions” proliferated in nineteenth-century Germany and, indeed, across the globe. The dramas they framed could be transposed onto many stages, because talk about the purported virtues and vices of Jews had the remarkable ability to latch onto and thereby produce meaning for a wide range of public debates. By plumbing this excess of meaning, scholars have teased out some of the key dynamics and antinomies of modern political thought. No longer focusing solely on conservative antisemitism, they have examined the role of the “Jewish Question” in other political movements, such as liberalism and socialism, and in the conceptual elaboration of the state, civil society, and the nation.Footnote 2 Cast in ambivalent roles at once powerful and vulnerable, familiar and foreign, the figure of the Jew acted as a lightning rod for imagining such collectivities. Opposing parties shared common assumptions, such as the tacit understanding that integration into the nation, state, or civil society required a self-transformation of Jews, something historians have referred to as the “emancipation contract.”Footnote 3 Generally speaking, it was the terms of this contract rather than its form that divided liberals from conservatives, philo- from antisemites, and Jews from non-Jews in the nineteenth-century. Accordingly, scholars now increasingly approach the “Jewish Question” not merely as an example of prejudice, but rather as a framework through which multiple parties elaborated their positions.Footnote 4
This essay concerns the “Jewish Question” of one modern movement—worldview secularism—as it emerged in mid-nineteenth-century Germany. Secularism encompassed the anticlerical movements affiliated with the political left, which sought not merely the separation of church and state, but also the replacement of Christianity by an immanent, natural scientific worldview. In the course of conducting research into the history of German secularism, I found that the “Jewish Question” popped up in the sources in initially surprising, but upon further inspection, quite systematic patterns. Antisemites regularly spoke of “godless Judaism,” while liberal and Jewish secularists wrestled over the issue of Jewish difference in a movement whose naturalistic worldview was generally understood to be unitary and universal. By following these patterns, this essay hopes to cast light on strong and hitherto relatively unexamined dynamics at work within nineteenth-century German secularism, Jewish liberalism, and antisemitism. It also calls into question assumptions found in those theoretical models that have been put forward to describe changes to nineteenth-century church-state relations in Germany and elsewhere.
Secularism and the Confessional State
Historians, literary scholars, and political theorists have recently appropriated the term “secularism” to describe not the belief of the freethinkers who coined it in the 1850s, but rather the modern liberal doctrine and governmental practice of separation of church and state.Footnote 5 Here the problem posed by the Jewish religious minority in a Christian nation has been highlighted as the paradigmatic case through which this separation was achieved, but one that also reveals a chief antinomy of liberal universalism. As scholars such as Dagmar Herzog and Aamir Mufti have shown, liberal commitment to the full emancipation of Jews was the guarantee of the universality of the state, the nation, humanity, and the public sphere, yet the persistence of Jewish difference posed a challenge to this very universality.Footnote 6 In the resultant tension between assimilation of minority difference and ongoing hostility to it, the modern state and civil society developed the concept of tolerance. Political philosopher Wendy Brown describes tolerance as a discursive practice that extended rights to Jews while it placed them on notice that these rights could be withdrawn if they did not adhere to majoritarian expectations. A tolerated minority is thus one subject to regulation and the threat of intolerance.Footnote 7 In short, the tolerance of religious minorities has been described in this literature as a necessarily contradictory, but ultimately successful means by which the nineteenth-century European states and liberal society extended their hegemony over the nation.
This conclusion sits uneasily with developments in nineteenth-century Prussia and the German Reich, where, at crucial junctures, the state resisted separation from the church and modified rather than abandoned the classification of the population according to religious affiliation. The early nineteenth-century German states had been confessional states, and even after unification in 1870–71, the division of society according to Konfessionen remained the “ordering model” for managing religious conflict.Footnote 8 The model, particularly as practiced by Prussia, had two facets. On the one hand, the state understood itself as an impartial adjudicator between those religious communities that enjoyed the status of recognized confessions. On the other hand, it felt duty bound to promote the interests of the Protestant church. These two principles clashed in the 1870s, when the Borussian state initiated a legislative program meant to reduce the power of the Catholic Church in the new nation. Confessional struggles also had a social dimension, as emphasized in recent studies of the Kulturkampf.Footnote 9 And, as Gangolf Hübinger and Helmut Walser Smith have shown, the linkage between the organization of an explicitly Protestant nationalism and the continuation of political anti-Catholicism lasted well into the twentieth century.Footnote 10 Although most historians do not view the nineteenth-century as a “second confessional age,” they do increasingly understand confession as a central aspect of modern political organization.Footnote 11 For, rather than eliminating political Catholicism, the Kulturkampf strengthened it. The majority of German Catholics rallied to the Catholic Center Party, thereby leading directly to the lasting pillarization of the German political order.
Historians are now beginning to highlight Jewish positions in these religious-cultural conflicts and thereby to fulfill church historian Kurt Novak's call for a “triconfessional” history of modern Germany.Footnote 12 Nineteenth-century Jewish liberals across western Europe pushed for liturgical, historical, and theological reforms that they believed would make their religion compatible with the established Christian confessions and their community worthy of full emancipation.Footnote 13 Yet, in most German states, precisely the state's denial of the status of confession to Judaism shaped how Jews were integrated into the confessional system. Historian Christopher Clark has shown how the Lutheran neoorthodox circles close to Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV considered the call for Jewish emancipation in the 1840s a threat to the confessional order and the “Christian State.” The key text here is the 1847 essay “The Christian State and its Relation to Deism and Judaism,” in which the Berlin law professor Friedrich Julius Stahl tried to expose what he saw as a fallacy at the heart of the liberal understanding of confession.Footnote 14 Jews could not be elevated to a third confession as liberals wished, because “[c]onfession consists merely in the different understanding of one and the same revelation, which is jointly believed in; by contrast the difference of religion [consists] in the acceptance of different revelations.” God, Stahl continued, may have planned the division of Catholicism and Protestantism as “complements” in order to lead them together later. Jews, who do not accept Christian revelation, stood outside this divine plan, the completion of which it was the state's duty to assist. They could not therefore be recognized as a confession.Footnote 15
Clark correctly pointed out the long-term durability of the concept of the “Christian State” in justifying the continued exclusion of Jews from some realms of the Prussian state even after the formal legal emancipation of the Jews by the North German Union in 1869.Footnote 16 He largely neglected the significance of the inclusion of “Deists” in the title of Stahl's essay, however. Here Stahl was not thinking of Enlightenment deists, but rather of the rationalist sects of “Deutschkatholiken” and “Friends of Light” that had appeared rather suddenly in 1845 and attracted thousands of followers from both Christian confessions (and from Jewish circles as well). Stahl recognized that these were not traditional Protestant dissidents, such as the Mennonites, because the rationalists “dissent from Christianity itself.” For Stahl, Jewish emancipation and secularism represented a joint threat. Because the “relationship [of the Jews] to the Christian State is essentially no other than that of declared deist sects,” Stahl concluded, “it can give neither the one nor the other political rights,” if it “wants to maintain its Christian quality unblemished.”Footnote 17 It was thus not Jewish emancipation alone that prompted Stahl to articulate his theory of the “Christian State,” but rather its appearance together with nascent secularism.Footnote 18
By issuing a law on “church-leaving” in 1847 that allowed dissenters legally to exit their confession without entering into a new one, the Prussian king created a space in the confessional landscape for secularist dissidence. But he placed on it a series of economic and social burdens to ensure that the dissidents would not gather many adherents. Henceforth the term “dissident” in German came to stand for the adherents of the secularist movements that emerged from the matrix of rationalist dissent, including Free Religion (1859), Freethought (1881), Ethical Culture (1892), and Monism (1906). So great was the association of the terms Dissident and konfessionslos with secularism and the left, that when the NSDAP took up church-leaving as a political-religious strategy in the mid 1930s, it felt compelled to introduce a new (non)confessional category: gottgläubig.Footnote 19
By burdening confessionlessness with a host of civil disabilities and by denying rationalist congregations the status of churches, Friedrich Wilhelm IV relegated dissenters to a second-class civic status similar in many ways to that occupied by German Jews. The overlapping of Jew and dissident was revealed in the creation in 1847 of “Registries for Jews and Dissidents” in which police officials registered the state acts (birth, marriage, death) of those who fell outside the acknowledged state churches.Footnote 20 Despite minor variations in practice between the German states, until 1918 Jews and dissidents were largely barred from high office in military, university, or civil service.Footnote 21 This situation formed the background to the punch line to a humorous anecdote about the Prussian army told by Waldeck Manasse, a Jewish Freethinker and mainstay of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation between the 1880s and the 1920s. When a new recruit announced himself to be a dissident, the aristocratic captain responded, “if you don't come up with a proper [anständige] religion by tomorrow morning, I'll have to stick you with the Jews!”Footnote 22
This essay examines some of the ways in which secularists and Jews were stuck together in late nineteenth-century Germany. It acknowledges the lasting importance of the state's modification of the confessional system in the 1840s; however, the focus will not be on the state and its actions, but on those groups that struggled with secularism and with the confessional system in the period after the faltering of the Kulturkampf in 1878. The essay takes up three vantage points, beginning with the antisemitic camp, where the specter of “godless Jewry” was raised with the dual aim of stopping secularism and reversing Jewish emancipation. The second perspective is that of secularist philosemites, whose defense of the Jews proved highly ambivalent. Although they embraced Jewish emancipation and welcomed Jews into secularist fold, most secularists believed that the “Jewish question” was linked to the problem of confession overall and could only be solved by Jewish “conversion” to secularism. The third perspective is provided by the liberal Jews who entered secularist organizations in Berlin in the 1880s and 1890s, seeking there not only a means of combating antisemitism but also a mode of attaining national unity that did not require them to relinquish their identity as Jews. For, by and large, liberal Jewish secularists did not wish to cease to be Jews, even as they sought a point of spiritual convergence with other secularists.
My claim here is that modern antisemitism must be understood in the context of the struggle over secularism. At the same time, the confessional dynamics of secularism itself are clearly revealed in the struggle against antisemitism. As this essay will explore, the debates over the “Jewish Question” contributed directly to the differentiation of organized secularism in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Progressive Jews constituted the core membership of the Berlin's first Freethought Association Lessing in 1881. While it did not demand conversion as Free Religion apparently did, Freethought, too, confronted Jewish members with a secularist antinomy. Did the expectation that German unity would be achieved through a new post-religious, scientific worldview not contradict their right to community identity? Searching for an alternative, some liberal Jewish Freethinkers wrote ethics on their banner and entered into a struggle with the advocates of naturalistic monism. Five years after police repression closed Lessing in 1887, a new association took up the banner: the German Society for Ethical Culture. Yet here, too, the antinomies of supraconfessional politics became apparent.
All parties to the debate over confession and secularism sought to hold Jews accountable to their version of the “emancipation contract.” The German confessional context, however, calls into question the assumption found in much recent literature on the “Jewish Question” and on political secularism, that the emancipation contract coincided with the growing hegemony of liberalism or of the modern state. In fact, quite the opposite was the case. The hegemonic aspirations of each anticonfessional model, whether to be achieved through an ecumenical “Christian state,” the secularization of the state, or the triumph of worldview secularism, only deepened confessional antagonisms in Germany. In the process, they revealed a divided confessional field defined by struggles among secularists, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants.Footnote 23 This quadriconfessional arrangement marked Germany as distinct from the essentially mono-confessional Catholic countries, such as France, Italy, and Spain, where secularism was ensconced in the political culture of the republican left, as well as from England, where a more pluralistic religious field developed under the domination of the established church.Footnote 24 The trope of godless Jewry was propagated in all countries where Jewish emancipation coincided with the rise of secularism and processes of secularization, but its confessional articulation varied greatly.
Antisemitism and Antisecularism in the “Berlin Antisemitism Controversy”
Historians commonly cite the eruption in 1879 of the “Berlin Antisemitism Controversy” as the event during which antisemitism was first fully articulated and popularized in its modern form. In September of that year, Protestant Court Chaplain Adolf Stoecker elevated Jews to the chief target of his Christian Social movement. A greater shock to Berlin's liberal public sphere came two months later when the prominent Berlin historian Heinrich von Treitschke declared Germany's Jews its national “misfortune.” This intervention by one of Germany's leading intellectual voices is widely credited with having taken antisemitism from the streets (and the pulpits) and having made it socially acceptable. Within the next two years, antisemitism became a rallying point for a nationalist right that had become disaffected with liberalism. The petition drive of Berlin students that called for a reversal of Jewish emancipation found thousands of signatories at other universities and prompted a debate on the floor of the Prussian Diet in November 1880.Footnote 25 On the day following a large antisemitic rally in Berlin in late December, organized crowds descended on the central Friedrichstadt neighborhood, where amid shouts of “Juden raus!” they broke windows and provoked fistfights with those they took for Jews. The Jewish socialist Eduard Bernstein considered the year following the riot “one of the most eventful in Berlin's political history. It was the year when for a time it appeared that the antisemitic agitation would dominate the entire public sphere.”Footnote 26
The standard interpretation of these events was provided more than thirty years ago by historian Shulamit Volkov, who argued that antisemitism served as an organizing principle of illiberalism. It bundled together a number of “false metaphors” to make antisemitism a conservative cultural code. Her central thesis was that the shift from religious arguments to racial-biological metaphors served in the transition from traditional anti-Judaism, which focused on individuals and religion, to modern antisemitism, which conceived of Jewry (Judentum) as an abstract idea. Here Volkov quoted the statement by Wilhelm Marr, the man credited with coining the term antisemitism in 1878, that his antisemitism was made from “a non-confessional point of view.”Footnote 27
Historians have subsequently called into question Volkov's neat sequential division of modern racial antisemitism from traditional religious anti-Judaism. Some have stressed the importance of the long-term continuities of Christian anti-Judaism, while others have focused on the importance of the notion of the Christian nation to the formation of reactionary integral nationalism.Footnote 28 Wolfgang Altgeld has drawn attention to the structural similarity of the antisemitism of the late 1870s to the anti-Catholicism at the outset of the decade. Like the “black international” of ultramontane Catholicism, the “yellow international” was portrayed as an antinational, divisive conspiracy to weaken the nation.Footnote 29 Depictions of “Talmudic Jewry” as a fossilized, superficial, and retrograde religion paralleled similar tropes that Protestant liberals mobilized against Catholicism. While it is true, however, that there was a religious logic to the new antisemitism, this was not a mere continuity of religious anti-Judaism. The crucial difference between antisemitism and anti-Catholicism was that antisemites identified Judentum less as a religious competitor than as religion's very undoing. A survey of texts by key protagonists in the Berlin Antisemitism Controversy will reveal that the conflation of modern Jewry with worldview secularism was a unifying feature across the political and religious spectrum of the emerging antisemitic discourse. Christian conservatives could and did agree with the atheist Marr that they were operating from “a non-confessional point of view” because they were all accusing Jews of being the secret agents of antireligion in Germany.
The antisemitic wave followed opposition to the secularizing measures of the Kulturkampf. In its early phase, the Catholic press depicted the Kulturkampf as a Jewish ploy to deepen the confessional division of Germany with the ultimate aim of destroying Christianity.Footnote 30 In 1874, the conservative Historisch-politische Blätter für das katholische Deutschland claimed that the hidden “titan” in the Reichstag was “the religion of material interests,” or “in short, Judaism.”Footnote 31
Similar tropes circulated with greater frequency in the conservative Protestant press, as the Protestant Church began to feel the effects of the secularizing legislation put forward by Bismarck's Minister of Education, Adalbert Falk. Following the introduction of civil marriage and proposals for nondenominational schools, many Protestants came to see their church as the greatest victim of the Kulturkampf. As in Catholic circles, some of the most vocal Protestant antisemites, such as Adolf Stoecker, were also frontline leaders in the battle against secularism and the Kulturkampf.Footnote 32 Stoecker had experienced the Franco-Prussian war as a sacred intervention, in which God handed the German people a weapon to purify itself of “French godlessness” and “the dogma of its animality.” Soon after arriving in Berlin to become a court preacher in 1874, he began to preach against the “dance around the golden calf,” party division and de-Christianization he witnessed in the capital.Footnote 33 It was at this time that he first developed the notion of an inner bond between secularism and Judaism. In a speech given in March 1875, Stoecker claimed that the anticlericalism and materialism that threatened German culture were products of the disintegration of the Jewish religion. It was, he declared, “a judgment of God that a nation that God chose to be the guardian of religion is attempting to cheat Christians of their religion. Do not let yourselves be fooled by the remains of religion” that Jews manifested in their maintenance of the Sabbath, “[t]he division of belief and unbelief is also splitting the ranks of Israel.” But, whereas Christianity was still withstanding the onslaught, Stoecker believed that Judaism had already succumbed to unbelief: “[w]ith that the prophets are dead, the Old Testament dead: Blood has come and in its torrents has engulfed the faith of Israel. The blood of judgment has come; the Jews no longer have a hope.” Their only salvation was the “blood of Jesus.”Footnote 34
Stoecker's argument about the vulnerability of Jews to secularism relied on the old Protestant tradition of viewing Judaism since Jesus as a degenerated and desiccated form of ancient Hebrewism, as well as on the eschatological belief that the mission to the Jews was required for universal salvation.Footnote 35 Stoecker, however, now raised Jews from a negative foil of Protestantism to its chief threat. He repeatedly returned to the accusation that liberal, secular Jews had become “godless,” calling “Jewry” an “irreligious power” in the Reichstag.Footnote 36 In April 1885, he gave a well-attended speech on “Semite, Atheist, and Social Democrat,” in which he restated his appreciation for “Old Testament Judaism,” as against the “modern” Judaism. “Semite and atheist,” he claimed, had “recently gained in affinity” and “such a Jewry, which wants atheism, must be fought by us to the death [auf Tod und Leben].”Footnote 37 This construction had a lasting impact on how Protestant clergy and institutions reacted to secularism and to Judaism. For example, two years after joining the NSDAP in 1932, the influential theologian Immanuel Hirsch updated Stoecker's thought for the “Third Reich”: “When later the human history of the nineteenth century is remembered, one will understand Marxism as the product of a German-Jewish mixed marriage and as an example of the inner impossibility of Jewish emancipation on the soil of a Christian Volk. Perhaps bolshevism will even be designated an unbelieving aberration of the Jewish religion.”Footnote 38
The confessional identification of Judentum with atheism also had a privileged place in the antisemitic bundle of the supposedly “nonreligious” early völkisch nationalists.Footnote 39 This paradox was given expression in the first point of the 1881 program of the antisemitic Deutsche Volksverein, which declared itself to be not a “religious but social-political” association, only to affirm in the next sentence the Christian basis of the German Volk.Footnote 40 Through the negative referent of the degenerated “Jewish spirit,” völkisch groups activated their idealized notions of a national-religious German spirit. Similarly, the notorious antisemite Otto Glagau announced in his Berlin journal Der Kulturkämpfer in 1880 “a struggle against atheism and materialism [. . .] for the loftiest and holiest good of the nation.”Footnote 41 Materialism formed the central metaphor of the antisemitic cultural code because it fused natural-scientific atheism, laissez-faire economics, and socialism in a single term.
The linkage of Jews to atheism and anticlericalism also performed a crucial function in Treitschke's “Unsere Aussichten” of 1879, which appeared amid the looming breakup of the National Liberal Party over Bismarck's willingness to reverse liberal economic policies and freeze the Kulturkampf. Treitschke's article is often cited as the key text that marked the shift from “left to right” nationalism (i.e., from one based on liberal-humanitarian principles to one rooted in authoritarian chauvinism).Footnote 42 In it, he claimed that the recent assassination attempts against the Kaiser had forced Germans like himself to “rethink the value of our humanity and enlightenment.” Against the “feeble philanthropy of our age,” Treitschke applauded the “reawakened conscience of the people,” which sought a restoration of strict order through obedience to law and monarchy. In the tradition of liberal cultural nationalism, Treitschke still adhered to the notion that the German nation reflected a spiritual unity. But instead of embodying the rational political ideals of liberalism, he claimed that this national foundation was grounded in the religious realm and under threat from secularism. “While broad segments of our people have fallen victim to arid disbelief” (a development Treitschke blamed on Jewish journalists), he celebrated the recent and “unmistakable resurgence of church feeling.”Footnote 43
In a further article of January 1880 Treitschke opposed the notion put forward by a leading Berlin liberal Moritz Lazarus that “today every nationality is composed of several religions,” making Judaism “German in the same sense as Christianity.” Treitschke believed that only Christianity was “tightly interwoven [. . .] with all fibers of the German people,” so that if “half of our people deserted Christianity, [there is] no doubt, the German nation must fall. Everything we call German would end in rubble. Lazarus does not consider the difference of religion and confession; he imagines the categories Catholic, Protestant, Jewish as coordinated.” From Treitschke's perspective, confessional division was only tolerable among Christians, for whom he held out the supraconfessional hope that it would someday come to a “purer form of Christianity, [. . .] that would reunite the divided brothers.” He concluded with the warning 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.”Footnote 44
Treitschke's attempt to pin the rise of materialism and anticlericalism on Jews earned him particularly sharp rebukes from Jewish opponents. The Breslau rabbi and philosopher Manuel Joël wrote that he shared Treitschke's abhorrence at the spread of “unbelief” but denied that its source was either the Jews or Immanuel Kant, the philosopher of “humanity” idolized by Jewish liberals and ridiculed by Treitschke. Rather, Joël argued, atheism stemmed from the followers of the idealist Hegel and from the materialists, ranging from Jacob Moleschott to Ernst Haeckel, all of who were Christians like Treitschke. “Why then,” demanded Joël, “do you accept the argument against the Jews of atheism?”Footnote 45
It was Treitschke's confessional argumentation that most vexed Hermann Cohen, a founding figure of Neo-Kantian philosophy. If Treitschke had restricted himself to an argument about biological differences or “Racen-Instincte,” Cohen would have dismissed his attack as merely insulting and tasteless. But by basing his arguments on religious and confessional difference, Treitschke had made “confessing [Bekennen] [. . .] a religious obligation, also in a national sense.” Cohen's Bekenntnis was to a Judaism that shared with liberal Protestantism the “cultural historical mission of humanizing religion.” Cohen agreed with Treitschke that religion was the foundation of the German nation. Contrary to Treitschke's claims, however, Cohen believed that liberal Judaism had already achieved a “religious community” with Protestantism and shared with it the same “enemies” in those naturalists who “attack the idea of the single God.”Footnote 46
Cohen's commentary is instructive because it points to the fact that the racial thinking present in all early antisemitic texts did not supercede the religious understanding of Jewish difference, as has been frequently argued, but rather it helped recast it. Racial thinking made Jews suitable for a new religious role, which was to embody materialism and national degeneration. Christian nationalists first popularized Marr's term through the formation of the Antisemitenliga in 1879, at roughly the same time that Stoecker lauded Marr as a defender of the “Christian state.”Footnote 47 As a writer for a Protestant newspaper found in 1880, once the ancient Jews were abandoned by the spirit of God, all that was left of them was their Semitic race. “The Semitic spirit,” he concluded, “is as different from the spirit of God as night from day.” They oppose one another as “nature and grace” do.Footnote 48 Identified as a manifestation of “Jewish spirit,” secularism could be both robbed of its supposed universality and more readily comprehended as an enemy within the confessional system. Thus, although antisemitism may have flowed through “an old, nearly dried up river bed,” as the philosemitic Democratic politician Ludwig Quidde observed in 1881, its religious motivation was not traditional Judenhass, but “reaction against religious liberalism and radicalism, against modern faithlessness, against skepticism and materialism.”Footnote 49
Philosemitism and Secularism
Joël and Cohen tried to expose Treitschke's accusations as falsehoods by arguing that liberal Judaism was the most reliable partner for Protestant nationalism in a joint struggle against the godless and the orthodox alike. By contrast, organized secularists largely affirmed the linkage of their movement to the Jewish struggle for emancipation. Free Religious preachers were among the earliest non-Jews to denounce the antisemitic agitation of Treitschke and Stoecker.Footnote 50 The manner in which they defended Jews against antisemitic attack reveals how central the “Jewish question” was to the internal construction of secularism. An excellent case study is provided by the agitation initiated by the longtime preacher of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation, Georg Siegfried Schaefer, after Jewish members of the Congregation urged him to respond to Court Chaplain Stoecker's assaults in November 1879.Footnote 51 Rather than merely defend the rights of Jews, Schaefer used his lectern as a platform to develop a public position that placed the “Jewish question” at the center of his critique of the confessional system and linked it to the fate of Free Religion.
Typical of most non-Jewish (and many Jewish) opponents of antisemitism, Schaefer acknowledged the reasonableness of many of the antisemitic claims. Police protocols of his speeches state that he held the Jews partially to blame for the fact that antisemitic slander fell on fertile ground. Here he named pride, the collection of wealth and parvenu ostentation as “excesses” produced by centuries of ghettoization and discrimination. Yet these “excesses” were not the real motor driving antisemitism, Schaefer claimed in a speech in November 1880. Rather, antisemitism was a defensive reaction by the confessional system itself. This system had developed without a place in it for Jews, whom Schaefer called the “recognized dissidents” because of their long history as Germany's most publicly recognized excluded minority. By struggling for the same rights as Christians, Jews exposed the false unity that had existed between the subject of the state and the subject of the state church. This shook the foundations of the confessional state and the divine right of Prussian monarchy. Antisemitism was for Schaefer an elite strategy to rescue the confessional system and its privileges: “the movement does not originate from below, but from above [. . .] from pulpit, lectern and judge's [bench] [. . .] [b]ecause the old privileges of public and social life [. . .] depend on the old faith.”Footnote 52
Schaefer told his listeners that behind the Jews were the Free Religionists, who occupied a similar structural position outside the confessional order. Although less visible, these “nonrecognized dissidents” were ultimately more radical and dangerous because they possessed a fitting anticonfessional worldview. The most radical dissident for Schaefer was, however, the secularist Jew, the ultimate nemesis of the Christian Socials.
One often hears, “I prefer a Jew of the old faith to a Free Religious Christian.” The secularist [freigeistig] Jew, however, destroys the old belief in divine right, the belief [that] you are dependent on God's mercy, you have to submit to it. Instead, the man of reason says Man himself is God. From these principles is born the reform of as a whole life. Thus the religious is the most radical reform.Footnote 53
Schaefer's logic thus far echoes that of Stahl and Treitschke. The historical record provides ample evidence to support their claim that Jews and dissidents made natural allies in a joint struggle against the confessional order. In cities such as Königsberg, Berlin, and Breslau, Jews and Free Religious cooperated in a number of liberal projects, including the formation of confessionless schools.Footnote 54 For Schaefer, however, such cooperation was not the end point of the relationship between Jewish and Free Religious dissent. Schaefer expected the “nonrecognized dissidents” to supersede the Jews because, in his eyes, the ultimate target of antisemitism was dissidence itself. By stepping into the clerical cross fire, Free Religion had “assumed the martyrdom, which had previously burdened [the Jews].”Footnote 55 Furthermore, Schaefer suggested that Jews were being justly punished for not fully embracing secularism. Remaining separate was for Schaefer the real sin of Jewish emancipation. Schaefer told his listeners that the decision of the Reform Jewish Congregations to remain loyal to the “historical mission” of promoting monotheism rather than joining the Union of Free Religious Congregations in 1859 was now “wreaking its vengeance on them.” Schaefer warned “as long as the Jews do not reach out their hands to liberated humanity, they will be castigated.”Footnote 56
Just as the young Karl Marx had argued that the “Jewish Question” could only be solved by the elimination of the capitalist system that produced Jewish difference along with the division of labor, Schaefer argued that that only the destruction of the confessional system would eliminate antisemitism and “then the Jew is also liberated from Jewishness.”Footnote 57 Consequently, at a discussion evening on November 16, 1880, Schaefer proposed that the Free Religious Congregation respond to antisemitism by taking out ads in all major Berlin newspapers with the following declaration: “Away with the dissident and Jewish question from the people. Away with all religious privileges from the state. Away with confessional instruction in the schools.” Dr. Eduard Abarbanell, a prominent Jewish member, objected sharply to this self-interested identification of the Free Religious Congregation with the plight of the Jews: “it is not the time now to step forward publicly and say, ‘we are also not Christians, but demand equal rights.’ Such a declaration would just fan the flames.”Footnote 58 Despite this criticism, Schaefer continued to press his view that the proper response to antisemitism was to strengthen Free Religious anticonfessionalism and pressure freethinking Jews to abandon their confessional autonomy. “The maintenance of the special Jewish confessionality and mission” was, according to theses Schaefer's congregation submitted to the national congress of the Union of Free Religious Congregations in July 1881, a “main obstacle” to the formation of “interconfessional humanistic congregations.”Footnote 59
Schaefer's comments demonstrate that radical secularism, too, displayed the same philosemitic logic of assimilation and exclusion that scholars have identified in a host of nineteenth-century movements ranging from Christian evangelicalism to liberalism. Within the framework of a single nation and a single God, to seek unity between Jews and non-Jews was ultimately to seek the exclusion of Jews as Jews from this unity. Christopher Clark's pithy definition, “a philosemite is an antisemite who loves Jews,” may be overstated, but Clark is correct in arguing that “[a]xiomatic to both was the assumption that the collective destiny of the Jews and that of the Christians were inseparably bound up.”Footnote 60 Schaefer shared with Treitschke and Stoecker the fantasy that the destruction or punishment of Jews would be a means toward the salvation of the nation and a solution to the competition between confession and secularism.
As Dagmar Herzog has shown in her study of the liberal and dissident philosemitism of the 1840s, the encounter between Jews and non-Jews was central to the constitution of liberal humanism.Footnote 61 By dissolving the boundaries between Jew and non-Jew on an imaginary or practical-political level, the universal drama of humanism was performed. Schaefer himself provides a good example of this drama in the preface he wrote to an anonymous pamphlet published in 1885 as Thoughts of the Nineteenth Century on the Inevitable Solution of the Social, Political and Religious Question by a Jew according to his Birth and Orthodox Education.Footnote 62 Schaefer invited the reader to approach the pamphlet's text as a mirror that would reflect his own experience of the spirit of the age. Most importantly, the reader might recognize himself reflected in the man behind the text, the author, “because you only comprehend the spirit that you equal [gleichst] or at least resemble [ähnelst].” It is crucial that the author is a Jew. Only through this sharing of the spirit of humanism across the gulf separating Jew from non-Jew can post-Christian humanism become universal and unifying. “I for my part,” Schaefer concluded, “have found myself reflected in the present work [. . .] with a few minor exceptions. This is a joy of spiritual recognition, which Lessing expressed with the words: ‘O that I could find one more for whom it suffices to be a human [Mensch]!’”Footnote 63
This motif is also found in the writings of Jewish secularists, for example, in this line from Ferdinand Falkson, a key figure in events leading up the 1848 revolution: “And from the Jew, from the Christian / Rises up the human [Mensch] with joy.”Footnote 64 Yet, despite such shared yearning for spiritual unity, Falkson and Schaefer disagreed on its form. Falkson refused to join Free Religion despite his principal agreement with it, while Schaefer demanded that Jew and non-Jew, each having cast off their orthodox upbringing and recognized each other as brothers, must unite in “free humanist congregations.”Footnote 65 Jewish difference is crucial to producing the universality of secularist humanism, but the continued existence of Jews as separate from non-Jewish secularists is, in the eyes of philosemites, an act of betrayal; hence the love of Jews and the hostility toward Jewishness that mark philosemitism. Thus one finds in a single speech Schaefer's exaltation of the “freigeistig Jew” (here he may have had his mentor Johann Jacoby in mind) followed by a resounding condemnation of Reform Judaism, with the intimation that antisemitic persecution was a divine punishment for Jewish resistance to the loving embrace of Free Religion.Footnote 66
Schaefer's views were not idiosyncratic. Philosemitic ambivalence was anchored in the constitution of the Union of Free Religious Congregations. At the founding congress in 1859, the prominent former Protestant preacher Leberecht Uhlich proposed that entrance to the Union “also be held open to Jewish Reform Congregations.” Eduard Baltzer, another former minister, opposed the measure with the remark that, because the Union was open to anyone that supported its constitution, no special invitation to Jewish congregations was needed.Footnote 67 Uhlich's proposal was voted down. While seemingly impartial, this decision expressed a rejection of Free Religious Congregations that wanted to remain Jewish-identified. Jews were welcomed within Free Religion but as individuals rather than as members of a community. In effect, entrance into Free Religion implied a conversion from Judaism.
Despite the exclusionary logic of philosemitism, until the late 1870s liberal and radical Jews had generally been able to identify with the universalist vision captured in the often invoked dream of a “religion of humanity.” For as long as liberals were optimistic, the imagined spiritual unification of Germany remained an open-ended process that encompassed various interpretations of just what was meant by “religion of humanity,” be it national Protestantism, a fusion of cultural Protestantism and cultural Judaism, or materialist Weltanschauung. This changed with the spreading pessimism of the late Kulturkampf, when many segments of the population were gripped by the feeling that Germany had fallen victim to the forces of national disintegration. Whipped on by antisemitic agitation, philosemites demanded that the process of Jewish assimilation be foreshortened and pressured Jewish liberals to sacrifice their difference to shore up national unity.Footnote 68
This shift manifested itself starkly in historian Theodor Mommsen's reply to the antisemitism of his colleague Treitschke. In an essay published in autumn 1880 by this stalwart of the Berlin Progressive Party, Mommsen affirmed the beneficial qualities of Germany's racial pluralism and defended the Jewish right to freedom of conscience, but he concluded with a plea for Jews to convert to Christianity as the ultimate solution to the “Jewish question.” “The entry into a great nation has its price,” Mommsen admonished. As long as it did not contradict the dictates of their conscience, Mommsen believed that German Jews should abandon their religious affiliation, thereby fulfilling their obligation “to eliminate their particularity and cast down all barriers that stand between them and the other German citizens.”Footnote 69 Thus, rather than the self-guided process of assimilation many German Jews accepted, philosemites such as Mommsen and Schaefer confronted liberal Jews with the demand for an immediate assimilation through religious conversion.
Jewish Responses to Secularist Philosemitism
The third level of my analysis concerns the Jewish secularist response to the philosemitic offer to convert. Secularism presented liberal German Jews with a conundrum. How could they join a national community based upon a shared secular-spiritual foundation without abandoning their own Jewish identity and community? Some clearly found an acceptable model of unity in Free Religion, and records reveal a small but steady stream of “converts”—a term that we must use guardedly because until the 1870s many if not most new Free Religionists, Jews and non-Jews alike, did not actually withdraw from their old confessions when they become members. Jews made up roughly three to five percent of all new members of Berlin's Free Religious Congregation in the years 1861–78.Footnote 70 Prominent Jews joined Free Religion in the name of Judaism; among them was Hermann Jacobson, the son of Israel Jacobson, one of the most radical Jewish reformers of the Napoleonic era. He announced his “conversion” to Free Religion in 1852 based on his “conviction [. . .] that Christianity, as understood and desired by its founder, is a further development of Judaism.”Footnote 71 Others depicted Free Religion as an equal confluence of Jewish and Christian developments, such as the young rabbi Felix Adler, who shocked American Jews when he asked them to join and even lead the American Free Religious movement in 1873. After being shorn of his rabbinical duties, Adler went on to become the president of the Free Religious Association of America and the founder of the Ethical Culture movement in the late 1870s.Footnote 72
Many factors contributed to Jewish conversion to Free Religion. For some, there was the practical desire to overcome legal restrictions. Particularly during the Vormärz, membership in Free Religion had helped Jews and non-Jews overcome obstacles to marriage.Footnote 73 In several instances, Jews who had previously converted to Christianity chose to join Free Religion, indicating perhaps that their initial Christian conversion had been a matter of social, marital, or professional necessity rather than of religious conviction.Footnote 74 In the early 1880s, most new Jewish members of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation came from outside Prussia, primarily from Russia. These members, for the most part merchants (Kaufleute), were never mentioned in police reports or in Free Religious publications, and seem to have taken no part in the life of the congregation.Footnote 75 Their assumption of a new confessional identity through membership in Free Religion was likely a ruse to evade the wave of police expulsions of Russian Jews that began in Berlin in 1881.Footnote 76
Most secularist Jews resisted conversion, however. In addition to the factors they shared with other liberals, such as fear of social stigma or professional disadvantage, some Jews, such as Ferdinand Falkson, stated that they did not join Free Religion due to their “moral obligation [. . .] to stay with the oppressed comrades.”Footnote 77
Coinciding with the Berlin Antisemitism Controversy, the entry of Berlin Jews into Free Religion dropped.Footnote 78 Antisemitism compelled many Jews to reaffirm their confessional identities, a painful step for those liberals who felt they had surpassed traditional religion. Georg Brandes, a Jewish-Danish journalist and perceptive observer of Berlin society, noted in January 1881 that in the freethinking era of the 1870s, many Jews “had so completely forgotten their Judaism, that, as one put it ironically during a meeting, only now did they truly ‘become Jews—by the grace of Stoecker.’”Footnote 79 The following year, Fritz Mauthner, like Brandes a foreign-born Jewish writer with secularist affinities, published a novel, Der neue Ahasver, about a Jew who wanted to convert to Protestantism, but was prevented from doing so by antisemitism. In a letter to Theodor Mommsen reprinted as a preface to this novel, Mauthner explained that now more than ever, conversion was no means of countering antisemitism. Just as “no German moved to Paris during the war,” it would be cowardly for German Jews to abandon the field of battle through conversion.Footnote 80 After 1880 Jews who officially left the Jewish “confession” and joined Free Religion tended to “convert” to socialism at the same time (i.e., they became completely oppositional). The dropping off of conversion does not mean, however, that liberal Jews had lost interest in organized secularism.
Freethought
A particularly rich case for investigating the relationship of Jewish and Non-Jewish secularism is provided by the Berlin Freethought Association Lessing, which was founded in May 1881 by Wilhelm Loewenthal, a Jewish physician, social hygienist, and writer. A police lieutenant conjectured that “apparently we are dealing with the establishment of a type of Jewish Masonic lodge.” This was an overstatement. While a majority of its initial fifty-six members appear to have been Jewish, the association attracted a number of non-Jewish notables to its ranks, including writer Robert Schweichel and later the editor Georg Ledebour. Among prominent Jews were the editor and social activist Lina Morgenstern, the founder of Germanys' liberal unions Max Hirsch, and the famous cultural critic and later Zionist Max Nordau.Footnote 81 The patron of the association, who declined election as chairman, was Eduard Lasker, the most important liberal Jewish politician of the nineteenth century. He had been personally responsible for leading his party's legislative efforts in the 1860s and 1870s. Given his refusal to sell out his liberal principles as Treitschke had, Lasker became a bitter opponent of Bismarck's conservative-clerical coalition of the 1880s.
That the Free Religious Congregation had only a small minority of Jews while Jews initially constituted the majority of Lessing points to different social and political milieus from which each association recruited. In 1881, the Berlin Free Religious Congregation was situated politically between the radical democratic and socialist movements and drew increasingly from the lower-middle class and the mass trades that were then drifting into the socialist camp. The students, journalists, merchants, and professionals that initially joined the Freethought Association Lessing represented those segments of the urban middle class, in which most Berlin Jews found themselves; it was politically dominated by the liberal parties.Footnote 82
That does not fully explain the obvious preference of liberal Berlin Jews for Freethought. We must also account for the different positions taken by the organizations on the problem of confession and conversion. At the outset the Freethinkers were at pains to cast their organization as more secular than Free Religion, to which “the eggshells of its clerical origin” still visibly clung.Footnote 83 Max Nordau, who was both a corresponding member of Lessing and a participant in the founding congress of the German Freethought League, accused Free Religion of being too caught up in “the habits of confessionalism” and argued that the truly modern, independent man of science had moved beyond the need for such religious forms.Footnote 84 Despite such radical posturing, there was, however, a conservative element in the Freethought position on confession. Freethinkers rejected calls to have members leave the state churches, not because they had already overcome confession, but because they, as liberal bourgeois men, did not want to be forced to give up their respective confessions. Becoming “confessionless” in Germany was a state act that was tantamount to declaring one's allegiance to Free Religion. Because of the social costs of such a step, most liberal members of Free Thought remained official members of the churches and synagogues.
It may be assumed then that the Berlin Jews who joined Lessing hoped to find in Freethought an adequate vehicle for responding to the problems of confessionalism and antisemitism without having to renounce the confessional identity important to them as liberals and as Jews. Nonetheless, the “Jewish Question” of German secularism appeared here, too, refracted in debates carried out between Wilhelm Loewenthal and representatives of the largely non-Jewish national leadership of Freethought over the question of whether Freethought implied acceptance of naturalistic monism as a universal worldview.
This division had already become manifest in the founding congress of the German Freethought League in April 1881, when Loewenthal asked the delegates formally to adopt a clear statement on “tolerance,” in part to counteract the accusation made by some that Freethinkers erected dogmas of their own, “for example, the dogma of Darwinism.” The delegates in Frankfurt rejected Loewenthal's proposal with the explanation that tolerance “is self-evident” for Freethinkers. Religious tolerance was, however, not self-evident for most Freethinkers, who, while they may have supported freedom of conscience in principle, remained intolerant of the survival of any religious dogmas alongside their humanist, monist, natural-scientific Weltanschauung. When Center Party leader Ludwig Windthorst argued in parliament in 1880 that Catholics deserved full tolerance because they fought for truth just much as liberals, the editor of the Freethinker's house journal Menschenthum called it an “audacious slap in the face of truth.” For, he continued, “intolerance is not a daughter of truth, but a daughter of lies and error. Real truth is—as Feuerbach says—tolerant, because it is sure of itself, because it knows that at bottom nothing can oppose it, because it recognizes itself in the other, also in error, because it is convinced that life can represent the infinite unity of being only in infinite multiplicity and difference.”Footnote 85 For the Freethinker, then, religions could be tolerated by positivist science as long as they did not claim to be true.
The rejection of Loewenthal's resolution on tolerance also corresponded to the failure of national Freethought to commit itself publicly to the defense of the communal rights of Jews in Germany. Numerous articles were published on the “Jewish Question” in Menschenthum. While uniformly condemning antisemitism, many of these articles began with caveats that let the reader know that the author acknowledged the grievances of their antisemitic opponents. Some intimated, in a philosemitic fashion, that the solution to antisemitism was for Jews to cease to be Jews.Footnote 86 Freethinkers, and later monists, portrayed the adoption of a positivist, materialist-monist worldview as an honorable way for Jews to exit their “confession.”Footnote 87
The connection of intolerance and worldview became clear in an exchange between Loewenthal and his organization's vice chairman, the master-builder Gustav Kessler. In early 1882 Loewenthal gave a speech in which he argued that “all religion comes together in one point, thus religion must be universal, all confessions must have the same rights, none may rise above the other.” He demanded “coexistence on an entirely religious, but confessionless foundation.”
In the discussion that followed, Kessler objected to this view and suggested that others in the association shared his opinion that “‘God’ [is] a hypothesis that is not necessary” and took instead a viewpoint “based on force and matter [that] can disregard religiosity.” Trying to placate his opponent, Loewenthal offered a definition of religion as “simply the worship of the unknown in the undiscovered universe. God as a personal, harshly punishing God—he naturally did not share this childish viewpoint.” But Kessler persevered; he was not willing to agree to “these hazy conceptions of religion and God.” This for him was too soft, too conciliatory: “If everything that is ideal is to be God, this he could support, but a certain religion, a positive God, who stands above nature, that he denies. The priests have packaged up morality as religion with great cleverness to secure their influence and dominion.”
This exchange reveals the ongoing tension within the secularist camp between materialist and idealist versions of monism. Kessler's reference to Büchner's book Force and Matter and his crude anticlericalism place him in the camp of the materialists, while Loewenthal's understanding of religion as a positive form of human self-understanding and spiritual development echoes his identification with D. F. Strauss and suggests an affinity with contemporary neo-Kantian philosophers such as Hermann Cohen and Alois Riehl, both of whom were later active in the Ethical Culture movement.Footnote 88
In addition to their different political trajectories (Kessler soon outed himself as a “red” Democrat and eventually joined the SPD, while Loewenthal went on to support Max Hirsch's antisocialist workers' movement), the two men were divided by their anti-confessional perspectives. Kessler's resolute demand for a single worldview corresponded to the philosemitic expectation of national Freethought that Jews should abandon their religion as a means of overcoming Jewish difference.Footnote 89 Against this worldview, Loewenthal proposed ethics as a system that remained pluralist even while it sought to satisfy the positivist requirements of the age.
Loewenthal's hostility to exclusive worldview was a relatively new development that coincided with the rise of antisemitism. In his book Confessionless Religion of 1877, Loewenthal had revealed himself as a strident Kulturkämpfer who gloried in a coming “struggle for existence” between “the advocates of science and free thought” and the representatives of other confessions. He envisioned the formation of small congregations of “spiritually and socially high-standing men” who would “build the solid tree trunk from which must spring glorious buds, [and] destroying the indolence of half-thinking on its victory march, lead the good and the weak on the same righteous path [. . .] and eventually bring the thoughtless mass to knowledge and thus to true life.”Footnote 90
When Loewenthal launched the Lessing Association in 1881, he was clearly seeking to implement this elitist model for change, as he was through his ongoing involvement in freemasonry. But he was now taking aim rather less at the confessions and rather more at confessional thinking within the secularist camp. A clear indication of this shift was the redefinition of the theme for an international essay contest sponsored by the Lessing Association. When the contest was first announced in June 1881, the theme was “the best principles of a unified worldview based on logical premises.” The term “unified worldview” was so overdetermined by that point that the contest would almost certainly have harvested numerous proposals for a positivist, monist system with an anticlerical orientation. In December of the same year, Loewenthal declared that the theme had been changed to “the best formulation of moral laws to guide conduct in the relations of human life.”Footnote 91 This switch was in keeping with “[t]he main task of the association,” which Loewenthal defined as “the struggle against every brutalization whether of belief or nonbelief.”Footnote 92
Loewenthal did not leave behind any lengthy elaborations of his own science of ethics, but it is clear that, despite his criticisms of dogmatic Darwinism, the theory of evolution furnished him with the scientific and temporal undergirding to which he could affix both the differentiations of religions and their future convergence in a science of ethics. According to Max Nordau, Loewenthal understood religion to be a product of man's “prescient knowledge of the aim of evolution,” making “the instinct of development—the indispensable base of all life and all knowledge—identical with the religious need.”Footnote 93
Ethical science was, for Loewenthal, the point at which the dialectic between the social drives of humanity and its evolving religious conceptions became a conscious process. In his 1887 textbook on the educational dimension of social hygiene, Loewenthal called the aim of ethical instruction in schools “to perfect as much as possible the person in the framework of his human essence, to raise him in the consciousness of his relationship to the whole, [and] as much as possible to make him, as one can put it, ideal-like, godlike.”Footnote 94 Thus, rather than reject religion, Loewenthal saw it as the crucial arena for the development of human society.
The historical record does not allow us to delve deeper into Loewenthal's conception of “real idealism” (which he also referred to as “ideo-realism”) as a science that would produce ethics from the empirical study of the history of religion within a developmental model of human society. There are other, better-known professional philosophers who elaborated ethics in the terrain between positivism and Kantian idealism to greater effect. What Loewenthal's combination of practical and theoretical work does show, however, is how much the discourse of ethics owed to the efforts of many liberals, and particularly the Jews among them, to find a means of overcoming confessional division through science that did not eradicate the right to subjective affiliation with religious and cultural communities. As such, it points to the importance of secular Jewish responses to antisemitism, philosemitism, and secularism in the emergence of the discourse of ethics in the 1880s.Footnote 95
The Convergence of the Lessing Association with National Freethought
In the end, Loewenthal's effort to build Berlin Freethought upon a foundation of tolerance and ethics failed, and by 1884 the Lessing Association was moving lockstep with the national leadership. By this time most of the original notable members of Lessing no longer appeared at meetings. The organization was still recruiting many Jews, but overall its confessional and social profile was changing. Non-Jews began to predominate, and representatives of professions previously absent, such as craftsmen and even workers, appeared on the rolls. The simmering down of the “Antisemitism Controversy” in 1882 and 1883 may have lessened the perceived need of Jewish secularists to have Freethought respond directly to the issues raised by antisemitism. At the same time, concern for the international plight of Jews, particular in Russia, where bloody pogroms had begun in 1881, may have contributed to a weakening of some Jewish members' interest in secularism as a means of countering persecution. In 1882 police noted the high interest of Lessing members in the “Relief Committee” to aid Russian Jews, which was probably related to the Berlin branch office of the Alliance Israélite Universelle that coordinated care and transport for fleeing Jews.Footnote 96 By the early 1890s Loewenthal and fellow former Lessing member Sigismund Simmel had joined the Alliance and played an active role in the Jewish Colonization Society founded by Baron Maurice de Hirsch. On behalf of Hirsch, Loewenthal traveled to Argentina, where he purchased land to settle Russian Jewish refugees.Footnote 97
In May 1885 the apothecary Otto Friederici assumed leadership of the organization. He had recently become a member of the Free Religious Congregation and soon advanced to head that organization as well, serving as chairman of both organizations until Lessing was dissolved under police pressure in April 1887. Under Friederici, the Berlin Freethinkers moved to a more aggressive anticlericalism. Increasingly the lectures were constructed around the stark contrast of dogmatic religion and modern popular science. The visiting head of the Deutsche Freidenkerbund, Ludwig Büchner, drew a crowd of 700 to his speech on “the religious and the scientific view of the world [Weltauffassung]” in March 1886, in which he claimed that “[t]he conflict between religion and science is presently so great that a crisis is unavoidable. The blinders have fallen from the eyes of humanity and the political conditions will emerge, where no one will need to hesitate to speak his opinion freely.” He closed with an appeal to democratic humanism: “The atheist also believes in a God, not a wrathful one, but rather in universal humanity. The last goal of our spiritual movement is [expressed in] five words: freedom, education, prosperity for all.”Footnote 98
The German Society for Ethical Culture
Although defeated within Freethought and Free Religion, the banner of ethics was carried forward by, among others, Georg von Gizycki, the Berlin University philosopher who had won the 1882 Lessing essay competition. Gizycki joined with the Court Astronomer Wilhelm Foerster to spearhead the formation of a new organization in Berlin in October 1892 that made ethics its core mission: the German Society for Ethical Culture (Deutsche Gesellschaft für ethische Kultur, or DGEK).Footnote 99 As Foerster later recalled, two events of 1891 prompted them to begin exploratory meetings with “a number of high-minded Jewish men.”Footnote 100 The first event was the visit to Berlin by Felix Adler, who was promoting Ethical Culture as an international movement. The second was the controversial draft Prussian School Law proposed by the new Minister of Culture von Zedlitz-Trützschler. By codifying and extending the de facto reconfessionalization of the public schools that had followed Falk's demission in 1879, Zedlitz's law would have had particularly negative consequences for liberal Jews, who did not want their children segregated in Jewish schools.Footnote 101 Thus, like the Lessing Association, the formation of the DGEK was prompted by a conservative assault on secular traditions that contained within it an antisemitic barb.
Unlike Freethought and Free Religion, the DGEK represented a new type of organization that meant to influence German society, religion, and politics from the highest social echelons. It self-consciously stylized itself as an “aristocracy of the spirit,” and in the list of thirty-two original members, a number of prominent professors were intermingled with representatives of true aristocracy. These elites clashed with more plebian Berlin secularists at the founding meetings of the organization in October 1892, which were open to the public but for which voting privileges were restricted to registered members.Footnote 102 The differences of opinion on worldview and religious tolerance that had separated Loewenthal and Kessler and yet been contained within Freethought now provided the conceptual framework by means of which Ethical Culture defined and defended itself against the mainstream of organized German secularism.
In a programmatic speech to the founders, the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, one of the key figures of the DGEK, proposed that a science of ethics could serve as a common basis for moral action that would encompass rather than eliminate the various confessions. He proposed that the DGEK accept adherents of all religions and Weltanschauungen, who acknowledged as “a scientific truth” that “morality was independent of religion, superior to it, and did not necessarily develop through it.” This meant that “the atheist could be just as moral or even more [moral] than the adherent of any faith in God.”Footnote 103
The secularists present promptly attacked Tönnies for his idealistic belief that a science of religion might lead the reactionary churches or classes to abandon their grip on key institutions. The Social Democratic city councillor and leading member of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation, Ewald Vogtherr, denied the possibility of overcoming confessional division by mere liberal tolerance. “[T]he Society will have to show its colors regarding the confessions,” he demanded. “Either Protestant, Catholic, Jew, or none of the three!”Footnote 104 This outburst sums up the dominant secularist position on confessionalism. It called for strict anticlericalism to disempower or destroy the confessions rather than fuse them via ethics, while at the same time constituting secularism ex negativo as a partisan formation within the struggle of the confessions.
The “German Darwin” and later founder of the Monist League, Professor Ernst Haeckel appeared on the third day and argued similarly for the clear division of ethics from traditional religion, for “[o]nly ethics is religion for us!” In his eyes, scientific ethics was identical with scientific Weltanschauung, and the practical path to the promotion of ethics lay in an intensification of the anticlerical struggle.Footnote 105
Wilhelm Foerster responded critically to Haeckel with the words “[w]hen it comes to Weltanschauung, we all get a little jittery.” Though willing to “greet Prof. Haeckel as a brother in ethicis, he was in no way in agreement with his worldview.” The following day, Foerster unrolled a criticism of worldviews from an ethical perspective, accusing them of contributing to rather than solving the confessional and party-political division of society. Whether economic or natural scientific (i.e., Marxist or monist), worldviews necessarily provided the false answer to the “social question,” which he called the “riddle of the sphinx.” Only a nonpartisan ethical position could address the suffering of the masses without preparing the ground for socialist revolution. “[A]s can be proven historically,” he concluded, “a philosophical or natural-scientific worldview in no way guards against a return of [inquisitorial] atrocities, rather only the cultivation of true humanity, the feeling of solidarity with the happiness and suffering of all.Footnote 106
Despite its critique of worldview, Ethical Culture manifested the same tensions over philosemitism as the other secularist organizations examined thus far. In his first public talk after the founding of the DGEK, Wilhelm Foerster spoke on “the ethics of nationalism and the Jewish question,” telling listeners why he considered Jewish participation of vital importance to the success of the DGEK. Antisemitism was a manifestation of the contemporary malaise inflicted on Germany by chauvinistic, militaristic nationalism and reconciliation with Jews would be a key part of its cure. At the same time, he believed the Jews were equally in need of a cure. He equated Jewish separatism with exclusive Jewish nationalism and declared that “as supporters of ethical culture, we call to the Jews: do not organize among yourselves, rather join with us against all evil, also in your own ranks, against German and against Jewish nationalism.” Foerster rejected the proposal brought up in the discussion that the DGEK issue a declaration against antisemitism. This would “have no great value for the outer [world], because the Society and this meeting are made up in large measure of Jews, as he expressly recognizes and welcomes.”Footnote 107 While the conservative press indeed interpreted the DGEK as a front for liberal-Jewish anticlericalism, Foerster's statements again demonstrate the ambiguity that constituted secularist philosemitism.Footnote 108
Ethical Culture addressed the confessional quandary of freethinking liberals who wished to overcome confessionalism without abandoning their respective confessions. An ethics produced through the comparative analysis of the moral content of different religions would rise above religion. It promised a means of modernizing the religions and ending confessional struggle between them without calling on one to submit to the other. (The ethicists were decidedly less ecumenical in their treatment of “primitive” religions, which were at that time widely interpreted as inferior antecedents to monotheistic religions). Science or the scientific method appeared as the mediator and new authority.Footnote 109 Confessional affiliation, so essential to the social honor of nineteenth-century liberals, remained untouched. By subjugating Darwinian-inspired natural scientific Weltanschauung and socialist Weltanschauung to the same conditions as the churches, ethics managed to appear as a new liberal perspective “above the parties.”Footnote 110
Conclusion
The conflation of the “Jewish Question” with the question of secularism was not unique to Germany, although the confessional context through which it was negotiated largely was. The strong shaping that Friedrich Wilhelm IV gave rationalist Christian dissent in the 1840s brought this forerunner of modern secularism close to the legal status of the Jews. The struggle for the emancipation of these two confessional outsiders became widely conjoined in the minds of supporters, opponents, and state officials alike and formed part of the backdrop to the emergence of antisemitism in the 1870s. In that decade, “godless Jewry” became a central metaphor in the conservative-nationalist cultural code and one that gave voice to shared opposition to the forces of secularism and secularization unleashed in the Kulturkampf. Antisecularism and not just traditional Christian Judenhass provided the religious glue that held together the heterogeneous alliance of antisemites.
Most secularists would have affirmed Shulamit Volkov's claim that antisemitism and emancipation became watchwords for two opposing political cultures of Imperial Germany. In keeping with the direction of recent studies of state secularization, however, this essay has shown that both sides of this cultural divide shared basic assumptions. All the key actors in the “Berlin Antisemitism Controversy” criticized Jews within the framework provided by the discourse of tolerance. Adolf Stoecker's opening salvo in 1879 was an admonishment to German Jews to be “a little more modest, a little more tolerant,” while philosemites such as G. S. Schaefer and Theodor Mommsen spoke of Jewish “excesses.” Even liberal Jewish critics of anti- and philosemitism such Hermann Cohen and Fritz Mauthner urged fellow Jews to assimilate more fully with German culture and eliminate their “negative peculiarities.”Footnote 111
The “emancipation contract” lined up with the expectation that national unity would involve the overcoming of confession. Yet although this logic was widely shared across the political and religious spectrum, it did not lead to a binary ordering of religious conflict or to the extension of the hegemony of liberalism, as the recent studies noted in the introduction have suggested. Instead, each anticonfessional model and each solution to the “Jewish Question” deepened confessional antagonisms in Germany. This essay has examined three models.
By arguing that the bulk of German Jewry had switched its faith from monotheism to materialist humanism, antisemites sought to expose the universalist claims of both liberal secularity and radical organized secularism to be particularistic creeds that had no right to be tolerated. The response of philosemites such as G. S. Schaefer was to reassert the key tenets of liberalism, namely tolerance and the separation of church and state, while at the same time demanding Jewish assimilation within the secularist fold. This demand had always been present in German secularism but became more urgent as anxieties of national disintegration spread across the political and religious spectrum in the wake of the Kulturkampf and its failure.
Those influential Berlin Jews who formed the Lessing association in 1881 believed that Freethought offered a means of upholding secularism without having to leave their confessional identification as Jews. Yet, even in Freethought liberal Jews were confronted with pressure to confess the materialist-monist worldview. Against this pressure, Wilhelm Loewenthal, and later the founders of the DGEK, promoted ethics. Ethics provided a second-order perspective that enabled them to analyze monist worldview in the same frame as religion. It is no coincidence that this decisive critique of worldview appeared in secularist organizations with a strong Jewish membership. According to literary scholar Aamir Mufti, the liminal position that Jews were assigned in the imagined national communities of the modern era destined Jewish intellectuals to be preeminent critics of the myths of nationalism.Footnote 112 The same appears to be true of the Jewish critics of secularist worldview. Whereas resistance to the exclusion of their community from the nation prompted Jewish thinkers to demystify and thereby “secularize” the nation (this is Mufti's conclusion), resistance to philosemitism prompted Jewish Freethinkers and Ethicists to demystify monist worldview by revealing it to be as much dogma as science. In so doing, it may be said that they “secularized” radical secularism.
What is left out of Mufti's account, however, is the degree to which Jewish critics engaged in the work of demystification in order to serve their own mythmaking. While the Jewish and liberal Ethicists were able to expose Freethought and Free Religion as something of a “fourth confession,” it would be false to believe that the critics of worldview were “above the parties.” Jewish secularists were also trapped within the parameters established by the confessional order. The results were sometimes comical, as in the proposal made by Georg Zepler, a Jewish physician and sometimes socialist who led Berlin's Union of the Confessionless (Bund der Konfessionslosen). Responding to the rising antisemitism of the waning years of World War I, Zepler proposed the following: “if the most personal interests of the individual are taken into account, the best solution to the Jewish question would result from the legal exit [Austritt] from Judaism and the legal entry [Übertritt] into confessionlessness. This entry implies no sacrifice of the intellect, as [is the case] with baptism.” The absurd twist came when Zepler then suggested that those Jews who did not want to reject their heritage could join together in a “society for confessionless [people] of Jewish background,” thus implicitly recreating confessional differences which confessionlessness was to eliminate.Footnote 113
Despite his passionate advocacy of monism and anticlericalism, Max Nordau struck a pessimistic note when considering confessionlessness as a means for secular Jews to end discrimination. He recounted how the Austrian church-leaving law of 1869 had not only failed to damage the confessional system, but had ironically reinforced the connection of secularism and Judaism in the minds of antisemites. Those Jews who took advantage of the church-leaving law found that few Christians followed suit, making “confessionless and Jewish nearly synonymous.” Thus, when students registering at the University of Vienna answered the usual question about religious affiliation with “confessionless!,” the university registrar customarily responded “with a good-natured smile” and the comment, “Why didn't you just say straight out that you are a Jew!”Footnote 114
Nor did ethics offer a way out. The discourse of ethics emerged not from a desire not to debunk the dream of national spiritual unity, but to reformulate it. Ethical Culture remained trapped, like Freethought and Free Religion, by the premise that a new and universal spiritual foundation beyond the competing confessions was necessary to produce national unity. By positing a unity prior or subsequent to the confessionally divided nation, anticonfessionalism of any stripe only exacerbated confessional tensions. The Jewish publicist Karl Kraus realized this at the end of the nineteenth century. Responding to a reader's suggestion that he use the pages of Die Fackel to promote a “confessionless religion” as a means of overcoming antisemitism and establishing religious peace, Kraus argued that even if one could dream up a “common religion of the educated” that mediated “between the teachings of all existing churches,” it could never compete with real religions. Just as the artificial languages Volapük and Esperanto pretended to be “world languages” but lived in the shadow of international English, the “moral Volapük” of Ethical Culture destined it to remain a muddy sect, incomparable to the world religions that “actually unite wide segments of modern humanity.”Footnote 115
In the end, each model of overcoming confession within the secularist tradition was effectively reinscribed into the confessional system that it was too weak to dismantle. Beginning with the rational Christian dissent of the 1840s, proceeding to a monist-atheist Weltanschauung, and ending with a science of ethics, each of these failed solutions to the “confessional question” contained within it a failed solution to the “Jewish question.”
