A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (28 page)

When Mendelssohn reached the outskirts of Berlin, he was directed to a special gate that Jews were required to use. It was the same gate that farmers used to bring pigs and cattle into the city. The gatekeeper probably asked Mendelssohn what had brought him to Berlin and how long he expected to stay. The gatekeeper was not being nosy; he was just doing his job. Jews needed permission to enter the city for even a few days. They also had to pay a special tax whenever they entered or left the city.

Mendelssohn had come to the city because he was interested not only in religious learning but also in secular studies. He wanted to know more about the world. So, with money earned from copying sacred texts and tutoring, he bought books about philosophy, literature, and mathematics. To read those books, he taught himself English, French, Latin, and even German. Like most young Jews at that time, Mendelssohn had a limited knowledge of the German language. At home, he spoke only Yiddish—the everyday language of the Jews of northern and central Europe in the 1700s. Yiddish is an early form of German, even though about 20 percent of its vocabulary consists of Hebrew and Aramaic words.

A portrait of Moses Mendelssohn.

At another time in history, a bright boy like Mendelssohn might have learned German at school, but by the 1700s, Jewish education in Germany had become increasingly narrow and focused almost entirely on religious texts. Secular learning was frowned upon. So Mendelssohn studied on his own. In time, he met others who shared his passion for education. These new friends included Catholics, Protestants, and freethinkers as well as Jews.

One of Mendelssohn’s closest friends was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the son of a Lutheran minister. He was a freethinker who often expressed his ideas in the plays he wrote. It was Lessing who encouraged Mendelssohn to publish his own thoughts and ideas. In time,
Mendelssohn’s books on philosophy and literature were hailed throughout Europe. He was described as “exceptional”—an “un-Jewish Jew,” one of a kind, a genius. As Mendelssohn’s fame grew, government officials allowed him to live outside the ghetto and travel freely without paying a tax required of other Jews. Mendelssohn’s admirers persuaded officials to exempt him from many other restrictions on Jews, but they never challenged the basic unfairness of those restrictions.

Mendelssohn was keenly aware of the difference between the respect he received and the disdain shown to other Jews. In a letter to a Benedictine monk, he expressed his frustration: “Throughout this so-called tolerant land I feel hemmed in; my life is so restricted on all sides by genuine intolerance.”
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Yet he continued to believe that much of that prejudice would eventually disappear if young Jews combined their religious training with secular studies. It was a controversial idea at a time when many Jews feared that secular learning would lead to the loss of their culture, customs, and traditions. Mendelssohn disagreed. He insisted that it was possible to be both a Jew and a German.

To encourage young people to learn the German language, Mendelssohn and Naphtali Herz Wessely, the son of a privileged Jew from Hamburg, wrote a German translation of the Hebrew Scriptures that included a running commentary on the text. The translation and the commentary were written in Hebrew characters so that Jews could readily read them. Both men were aware that Martin Luther’s translation of the Christian Bible into German had inspired many Christians to learn how to read and write their language (see
Chapter 7
). The two men hoped their project would have a similar effect on Jews. The translation was completed in 1783 and was a success. Within a few years, most Jewish families who considered themselves modern owned the four-volume work.

Many young Jewish men—and a few young women—responded enthusiastically to the idea of broadening their education. But they quickly found that knowledge of German culture could take a Jew only so far. German Christians accepted a mere handful of geniuses and privileged Jews—enough to pride themselves on their “enlightenment” without confronting their prejudices.

Even the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, with their commitment to reason, failed to recognize the ways they stereotyped others. For example, the French philosopher Voltaire believed that Jews were “ignorant and barbarous people who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched.”
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The
power of stereotypes like those Voltaire expressed helps to explain why the ghetto gates were slow to open. It may also explain why many of those prejudices have survived for so long.

Hannah Arendt, a twentieth-century thinker who, like Mendelssohn, described herself as a German and a Jew, retold this popular story from the early 1700s. A noble scolded a Jew for his pride, pointing out that Jews had “no princes among them and no part in government.” Referring to the dependence of many nobles on Jewish bankers and merchants, the Jew replied, “We have no princes, but we govern them.” The noble thoughtfully argued, “But this means happiness only for a few. The people considered a [separate nation within a nation] is hunted everywhere, has no self-government, is subject to foreign rule, has no power and no dignity, and wanders all over the world, a stranger everywhere.”
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For Arendt, the story showed that education and wealth were not enough to pull down the walls of the ghettos; Jews would need political rights, as well.

In the 1600s, a century before Moses Mendelssohn arrived in Berlin, Europe was in the midst of an economic revolution. It was a time when world trade expanded and money became increasingly central to everyday life. Even a few generations earlier, ordinary people bartered for goods and services they could not produce themselves. By the early 1600s, however, they had more opportunities to earn money, and with enough gold, even serfs could buy freedom and land. Money was also the key to power for rulers eager to finance lavish courts and large armies, so they were always on the lookout for newcomers willing and able to expand trade and build industry.

On the shooting target from the eighteenth century, a Jewish peddler’s head serves as the bull’s-eye.

Frederick I of Prussia was one such ruler. In 1669, a group of Jews who had recently been expelled from Vienna asked him for permission to settle in Berlin because “the earth and the entire world, which, after all, God created for all humans, appears to be shutting us out.”
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Their plea was written in the language of reason and a common humanity; Frederick responded with a business deal. He offered the 50 richest Jews permission to live in Berlin in exchange for a payment of 2,000 thaler apiece, a huge sum in those days (roughly $90,000 per person in today’s dollars). They were also required to develop industry in Prussia. Other Jewish refugees were not welcome; Frederick had no interest in poor Jews.

The Jews who settled in Berlin in 1669, like most Jews in Prussia and other German states, lived under a bewildering number of laws that applied only to them. Those laws, written centuries earlier, determined where Jews could live, what clothing they could wear, and on which streets they could walk. Until 1710, they also had to wear a yellow patch on their clothes to distinguish them from Germans. By then Frederick William was king, and he, like his father, saw Jews mainly in terms of their economic value. That year he announced that any Jew who paid him 8,000 thaler could remove the yellow patch.

In 1715, Frederick William sold Jews in Berlin the right to build a synagogue. He required, however, that its floor be laid several feet below street level so that the synagogue would be lower than neighboring buildings. In 1722, he decreed that Jews could marry only if they purchased from him a certain number of wild boars. The king knew that Jews were not permitted to eat pork; the law was a way of showing his contempt even as he extorted money from them. It was a malicious and expensive “joke” at Jews’ expense.

In 1740, Frederick II became king of Prussia. Unlike his father and grandfather, he considered himself “enlightened.” Although he, like them, ruled with a heavy hand, he established the first code of laws in Germany, eliminated the use of torture, and reduced corruption in the courts. He also enacted laws designed to protect most religious minorities, but the only Jews he was willing to tolerate were the wealthiest. He encouraged
them to develop ironworks, silk factories, and other new industries, and they more than fulfilled his expectations. During his reign, those Jews created 37 of the 46 new enterprises in Prussia.

Those privileged Jews were known as
court Jews
(because of their relationship with the king). Many were very rich, and some had rights that were almost equal to those of Christians. The vast majority of Jews, however, had few rights and at best just barely made a living. Historians estimate that about 10 percent were homeless. They could not live in Berlin or other German cities unless a privileged Jew was willing to support them. For example, when Mendelssohn came to Berlin as a student, he tutored the son of a court Jew, which is why he had a certificate of residence. When the son no longer needed help, Mendelssohn could have been expelled from Berlin. He was able to stay because that court Jew hired him as a bookkeeper. When Mendelssohn later became a privileged Jew, his wife and children were allowed to live in Berlin only because of his status. If he died, they could be expelled. The same was true of the wives and children of other privileged Jews.

What happened to those who were expelled? Some had enough money to purchase a residence permit in another town. Others had relatives willing to shelter them. Those who lacked money or connections had no choice, as a Christian observer wrote in 1783, but to “roam through life as beggars or be rogues.” For the most part, the homeless traveled through the countryside in large ragtag groups—townspeople described them as “horde[s] of wretched creatures… with their children, carrying their entire possessions on their backs.”
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They were truly outcasts.

These rootless Jews inspired a new stereotype. In 1781, Johann David Michaelis, a professor of Bible studies at the University of Goettingen, insisted that half of the criminal gangs in Germany were made up of Jews. Since Jews accounted for just a twenty-fifth of the population, the professor reasoned that Jewish criminality must be 25 times higher than Christian criminality. Such statements led many Christians to conclude that almost every Jew was a criminal.

Michaelis expressed his ideas in response to an essay by a Christian legal scholar, Wilhelm von Dohm. Von Dohm had called for equal rights for Jews in Germany even though he, too, believed that the Jews “may be more morally corrupt than other nations; that they are guilty of a proportionately greater number of crimes than Christians; that their character in general inclines more toward usury and fraud in commerce, that their religious prejudice is more antisocial and clannish.” Why, then, did he favor equal rights for Jews?

Everything the Jews are blamed for is caused by the political conditions under which they now live, and any other group of men, under such conditions, would be guilty of identical errors…
.

If, therefore, those prejudices today prevent the Jew from being a good citizen, a social human being, if he feels antipathy and hatred against the Christian, if he feels himself in his dealings with him not so much bound by his moral code, then all this is our doing.
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Moses Mendelssohn did not entirely agree with the arguments on either side of the debate, but he was particularly disturbed by Michaelis’s views. In 1793, he wrote:

[Sir] Michaelis does not seem to know any other vice besides fraud and roguery. I think, however, that where the wickedness of a people is to be evaluated one should not entirely overlook murderers, robbers, traitors, arsonists, adulterers, whores, killers of infants, etc
.