No question has exercised the Wagner literature of the last fifteen or twenty years like that of Wagner's anti-Semitism. From a strictly biographical point of view, of course, there is no question: Wagner's well documented antagonism to the Jews as a presence in nineteenth-century Europe is a simple matter of record, although scholars can debate the exact origins, the shifting contours, or other “nuances” of his attitudes. The real question has to do with the consequences of these facts, either for our understanding of the operas or for any possible consensus regarding Wagner's implication in the murderous anti-Semitic policies of the Nazi regime that came to power in Germany fifty years after his death. These are almost certainly two separate questions. To argue that the extermination of European Jewry attempted in the later years of the Third Reich was a direct result of social messages encoded in Wagner's dramas and their music would be more than a little preposterous. But to argue that Wagner as a historical figure (which includes his writings and public persona, and indeed his artistic oeuvre) contributed in some significant way to the cultural climate in which Nazi ideologies could take root is by no means preposterous. It is the undeniable affinities between Wagner, “Wagnerism,” Bayreuth, and Hitler (if not the entirety of the Nazi Party) that give the question of Wagner's anti-Semitism a moral urgency quite incommensurate with such other perennially popular topics as his adultery or his reckless borrowing and spending habits.