Olaf Blaschke takes on here those he identifies as “revisionist and apologetic” scholars, especially Catholic historians, who attribute the intensification of Catholic anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany partly to Jewish behavior. His investigation of Jewish attitudes toward Catholics finds no evidence that the German Jews were responsible for any part of their own unpopularity. Nor does he view Catholic anti-Semitism as a reaction to the Jews' emancipation and subsequent rise to prominence in German economic, political, and cultural life. It was, he insists, internally generated, based on imaginary phenomena, and wholly one-sided. It served principally to maintain Catholic cohesion in the fight against modernity and had nothing whatever to do with Jewry.

Blaschke begins with an analysis of Catholic anti-Semitism that mirrors both the strengths and the limitations of his earlier book, Katholizismus und Antisemitismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich (1997). He demonstrates that late-nineteenth-century Catholic intellectuals, deeply influenced by the rise of ultramontanism, cultivated a Judeophobia uniquely suited to the German Catholic milieu, eschewing racism (“bad antisemitism”) but more often denouncing the “harmful advance” of Jews who promoted secularism, materialism, and radicalism (“good antisemitism”). Blaschke expertly outlines the social-psychological functions of anti-Semitism for German Catholics trying to make sense out of an increasingly threatening modern industrial world. His somewhat monolithic view of Church and Center Party opinion, however, minimizes the significance of Catholic opposition to the most radical forms of anti-Semitism, and his reliance on the tools of intellectual history reveals little about the impact of anti-Jewish thought on ordinary Catholics. The author's lengthy examination of the roots of Catholic Judeophobia seems a bit misplaced in a book ostensibly dedicated to exploring Jewish attitudes toward Catholics, as does his exegesis of conceptual definitions and levels of anti-Semitism. As a result, German Jews occupy less than half of this slim volume.

When Blaschke turns to his central concern, analysis gives way to polemic. He ignores the evidence advanced by Uriel Tal and others that most of Germany's prominent liberal Jewish politicians and journalists enthusiastically welcomed the first Kulturkampf laws as blows against their historical adversary, Catholicism, and as advantageous to the cause of Jewish civil rights. Instead, Blaschke amplifies the few Jewish voices that expressed ambivalence about the anticlerical laws and the more numerous ones that later identified the police-state implications of the law suppressing the Jesuit order. Where there is incontrovertible proof that Jews attacked Catholicism, Blaschke falls back on apologetics of his own. If Heinrich Heine engaged in such attacks, we must forgive him in view of unpleasant childhood experiences in his Catholic hometown and his penchant as an adult for subjecting everyone to biting irony. If the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz repeatedly pilloried the Catholic Church in his eleven-volume history of the Jews, he was only responding to Catholic anti-Semitism and did not hesitate to criticize his coreligionists as well. If Jews were clustered in anticlerical parties of the left, it merely reflected the Jews' delayed emancipation and continuing outsider status. This line of reasoning can only end in unprofitable speculation about who initiated tensions. In a chapter devoted to Jewish press commentary on Catholic anti-Semitism, Blaschke characterizes denunciations of ultramontane Judeophobia as objective analysis. On the other hand, he views Jewish praise for Church and Center Party leaders who rejected anti-Semitic extremism as tactical dissembling designed to gain Catholic support. Occasionally the author is led astray by insufficient acquaintance with the secondary literature. To give but one example, had he consulted Susannah Heschel's work on Abraham Geiger, he would not have argued that the Jewish theologian confined his anti-Catholicism to private correspondence.

Blaschke's polemic against Albert Lindemann, Uwe Mazura, Wolfgang Altgeld, and other historians who acknowledge a real conflict between Jews and Catholics in the Kaiserreich betrays a perhaps willful misunderstanding of their position. Nothing in their scholarship implies that there was a real Jewish threat or that the Jews were largely responsible for provoking an anti-Semitic backlash. Nor do they portray Jews as “offenders” whose success was bought at the expense of Gentile suffering. Their concern is not to judge the minority but rather to illuminate Gentile perceptions of Jewish attitudes and actions. In an age when most Jews embraced liberalism as the apotheosis of emancipation and most Catholics fought liberalism as an agency of the devil, real group tension was inevitable. Much of Blaschke's evidence substantiates Eva Reichmann's classic formulation of a “genuine Jewish question” based in objective group interaction. Certainly Catholic anti-Semitism in Germany was founded more on fantasy than on fact, but it cannot be explained satisfactorily without any reference to the Jews.