Considering all that is known about the place of anti-Semitism in German society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there are relatively few studies of anti-Semitism within a religious context. This is surprising given that Germany was and is more evenly divided numerically between Catholics and Protestants than almost any other large European nation, (about 60 percent Protestant to 40 percent Catholic). Most studies of anti-Semitism in the last two centuries have focused on various secular motivations. When scholars do choose to investigate religious anti-Semitism, almost all concentrate on Evangelical Lutherans or on Catholics, but not on both. Likewise, many historians consider religious anti-Semitism to be anachronistic. Yet many study the incidence of secular or modern anti-Semitism within a religious context whether institutional or popular, seldom paying equal attention to that context. Additionally, studies of anti-Semitism emphasized Protestantism and the Protestant north of Germany in particular, because, after 1870, that was where anti-Semitic political parties, movements, and groups appeared to thrive.

This essay examines the paradoxical relationship between Jewish emancipation and the revival of Catholic neoorthodoxy in the years preceding the revolutions of 1848/49. My focus is on the Grand Duchy of Baden, renowned as the most liberal of all the nineteenth-century German states. The rise of neoorthodoxy in Baden provoked political liberals to rethink the relationship between church and state and, consequently, through a conjunction of circumstance, to make Jewish emancipation a central plank in their political platfrom. The Jewish emancipation implemented by the liberals in the revolutionary years, however, would be heavily burdened from its inception by the manner in which the new Catholic “religious right” deployed anti-Jewish rhetoric in its struggle for religious and political influence.

Rahel Straus, a Jewish woman from Karlsruhe, begins her memoir of childhood in the 1890s with a story of her experience in a Simultanschule for Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish girls. She does not, as one might expect, complain about “Christian” anti-Semitism. Rather, she notes that when conflicts arose, they were typically between Protestants and Catholics.

Historians of the Second German Kaiserreich have increasingly identified the Catholic milieu as a tightly woven subculture easily as dense and symbolically rich as the social-democratic milieu. But while we have detailed and excellent studies on the alternative culture of the workers, we still know comparatively less about the Catholic milieu: its literature, its patterns of reading and ideological dissemination, its complex world of popular beliefs, attitudes, and symbols.

Some recent trends in the study of National Socialism tend to downplay the significance of antisemitism*—in particular of Christian antisemitism—in producing the Holocaust. Indeed, it would be inaccurate and misleading to present the Christian legacy of hostility toward Judaism and Jews as a sufficient cause for Nazi genocide. Christianity, however, did play a critical role, not perhaps in motivating the top decision makers, but in making their commands comprehensible and tolerable to the rank-and-file—the people who actively carried out the measures against Jews as well as those who passively condoned their implementation. In his analysis of pre-Nazi forms of German antisemitism, Donald Niewyk concludes that, “The old antisemitism had created a climate in which the ‘new’ antisemitism was, at the very least, acceptable to millions of Germans”.

Anti-Semitism is the darkest and ugliest side of a modern German history that has had more than its share of dark and ugly sides. There is a strong and intellectually by no means illegitimate temptation to see the entire history of German anti-Semitism as a one-way street leading straight to the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Yet such a teleological approach to anti-Semistism does not do justice to the complexity of the past, does not highlight what Karl Schleunes has called “the twisted road to Auschwitz.” The excellent thematic articles in this issue all take up this complexity, their authors demonstrating a subtle and sensitive approach toward understanding anti-Semitic attitudes and behavior. One could go further and say that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, that several themes running through all the individual contributions describe and characterize a one hundred year history of Catholic anti-Semitism in Germany. I have identified four such themes and will discuss their changes and variations, both over time and in the different handling of them by the authors.