Vorlesung im Kolleg: Der "Berliner Antisemitismusstreit" – Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte im 19. Jahrhundert

What was the "Berlin Anti-Semitism Controversy"? About a key event in German-Jewish history in the 19th century

In November 1879, the anti-Jewish essay "Our Prospects" by the Berlin historian Heinrich von Treitschke appeared in the Prussian Yearbooks, in which he lamented a "gulf between occidental and Semitic nature" and even an opposition between "Germanness and Semitism". Treitschke agitated against the supposedly "vile materialism" of German Jews and also spread fear of - as he literally wrote - a "German-Jewish mixed culture". His exclamation "The Jews are our misfortune!" immediately became the slogan of the anti-Semitic movement. Liberal readers and, above all, Jewish contemporaries were stunned. They responded to him in the knowledge that they were witnesses and recipients of a completely new tone of hostility. Many contemporaries - such as the Breslau rabbi Manuel Joel, the Marburg philosopher Hermann Cohen and the liberal politician Ludwig Bamberger - recognized Treitschke's breach of taboo immediately: for the first time, resentment and abuse against the Jewish minority was not being voiced in the ecclesiastical milieu or on the street, but by a representative of Germany's largest and most important university who was known far beyond Berlin.

Nicolas Berg's lecture presents Treitschke's attack on the Jews and their public responses, which went down in history as the "Berlin Anti-Semitism Controversy", as a key event in German-Jewish history and also looks at the historical consequences that resulted from it well into the 20th century.

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