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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2005
“The Jews are our misfortune.” This was the final conclusion of the eminent historian Heinrich von Treitschke—should it prove impossible to slow down the “flock of ambitious young men hawking trousers” who were penetrating into Germany “year and year . . . over the eastern border.” “Experience taught,” von Treitschke averred that these Polish Jews were alien to the “Germanic soul.” He had nothing against Jews, “baptized and otherwise,” such as Felix Mendelssohn, Gabriel Riesser, and others, all of them “fine specimens of the German man in the best sense of the term.” But then there were all the others, etc. These are sentences taken from Treitschke's November 1879 essay “Unsere Aussichten,” subsequently triggering the debate that has been known since Walter Boehlich's first edition of source materials as the “Berlin Anti-Semitism Dispute.”