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.

“At the beginning of this book,” Ernst Kantorowicz wrote in the preface to The King's Two Bodies, “stands a conversation held twelve years ago with my friend Max Radin (then John H. Boalt Professor of Law, at Berkeley) in his tiny office in Boalt Hall, brimful floor to ceiling and door to window of books, papers, folders, notes—and life.”1 The conversation the two men had that day centered on Kantorowicz's amusement at receiving a mailing from The Order of St Benedict, Inc. “To a scholar coming from the European Continent and not trained in the refinements of Anglo-American legal thinking,” Kantorowicz wrote, “nothing could have been more baffling than to find the abbreviation Inc., customary with business and other corporations, attached to the venerable community founded by St. Benedict on the rock of Montecassino in the very year in which Justinian abolished the Platonic academy in Athens.” Kantorowicz thus traced the origins of his magnum opus to an amusing tale about a mailing from an American Benedictine abbey and a stimulating conversation between two scholars on the Berkeley campus. But what Kantorowicz accomplished with this opening—in part by reminding his reader of his European erudition—was to place his study in a realm very different from that occupied by his first immense volume of 1927, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite.

For a long time, the emotional, more intimate and private spheres of life have not been taken seriously by historians. Only the public side of life has been considered to be a legitimate subject for scholars. Disregard of “the private” is as yet not a practice of the past, in particular when traditional historians are concerned. In spite of the “new, wide-ranging anthropological orientation” of historiography in the last few years, the marginalization of private life is, (in contrast to French and Anglo-American historical research) still the norm in Germany. The reasons for this disinterest in the private are numerous, but lie primarily in the tenaciously held, often not openly expressed, assumption that the nature of the private is in itself ahistorical. In contrast to the public, (a correlation considered to be dualistic) the private is seen as an anthropological constant, “timeless” and universal, simply a part of “nature.” The private, used synonymously for the spheres of marriage, family, and household, thus was placed beyond history, and therefore beyond historical change. This more than anything else determined that women had no “history” (Geschichtslosigkeit)—their inherited place was, after all, to be found within the context of family and household. Against this background, the binary concept of public and private appeared to be a promising heuristic tool for tracing women in history for quite sometime.

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.

Rosa Luxemburg's commitment to democratic politics stands as her most pronounced intellectual legacy. Her rhetoric, rarely mundane, becomes especially compelling and powerful when she invokes the creative potential of human beings to order their own affairs, the lifeblood of society pulsing through the actions of ordinary people. Especially her famed writings on the Russian Revolution have served as the intellectual wellsprings for an alternative socialist politics beginning with Paul Levi (her successor as head of the Communist party of Germany) in 1922 and continuing through the entire history of the twentieth- century Left. Written within months of the Bolshevik Revolution and while she still languished in prison, the oft-cited passages offer some of the finest expressions of her democratic sensibilities. In the margins she wrote what would become one of her most famous passages, the central phrase of which— “Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden”— was unfurled at the Liebknect-Luxemburg counterdemonstration in January 1988 in the German Democratic Republic and became the clarion call of the opposition in its early phase.

During the past twenty years a number of social historians have stopped looking at history as if observing the environment from the highest floor of a skyscraper and instead have made the microscope their most important tool. Rather than concentrating on objective, large structures and processes that are discernible from such great heights they have turned to the study of smaller entities all the way down to the single individual, taking ethnographical research methods as their guide. Rather than the study of hierarchies and class, and conflict and coalition among these large groups, popular culture, the relationship of the sexes, and the subjective side of history have moved into the foreground. How the large structures relate to individual experience, how they are perceived, interpreted, and acted upon became the central question. As a result, sweeping explanations, all too often the product of abstract logic coupled with limited awareness of the sources, are now tested by the informal, frequently quite different, and much more complex logic of everyday existence.

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.

On 29 December 1918 Gustav Noske was appointed as a People's Commissar and charged with command of the armed forces in Germany. Within days Noske was confronted with an armed in surrection in Berlin, the so-called Spartacist Uprising, and subsequent revolutionary outbreaks in Bremen, Braunschweig, and the Ruhr, where sympathy for the events in Berlin existed. Relying on volunteer units, the Free Corps (drawn from war veterans, students, and the middle classes), Noske developed a powerful army on which he could rely to suppress the revolutionary violence from the Left. Using military force and martial law, he reestablished order throughout Germany in 1919 and 1920. The results of the so-called Noskepolitik were at best mixed. Mass movements based on the councils (Räte), often identified as “bolshevism’ by Noske and his contemporaries, were indeed suppressed, but the price was very high: counterrevolution and right-wing terror developed to the point that massive protests were provoked among wide segments of the working class. Bloodshed ensued, including the political murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht by members of the Free Corps. Many workers became alienated from the newly formed Weimar Republic, while the Reichswehr drifted into hostility toward the young democracy, and some units joined in the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch in March 1920. Noske, already under serious criticism from his own party, the Social Democrats, was forced to resign because of his inability to control the army and guarantee its loyalty to the Republic.

When European society was still divided into estates, rules of behavior covering all essential aspects of life were in effect for (and were expected to be observed by), even the smallest social group. Knowledge of the often quite subtle differences in the behavior expected and their strict observation within ones personal sphere determined the position of every individual. The adage, “Schuster bleib bei deinem Leisten” (shoemaker, stick to your last), had meaning not only for one's occupation, but extended to all areas of life. In the eighteenth century the room for movement slowly broadened for the individual. It was primarily in the educated circles that the pioneers of this process of gradual change could be found, and where the estates system itself began to be questioned. The room for mobility of those in the lower social groups expanded—to be sure only slightly—as far as one can judge on the basis of the restricted amount of sources at our disposal. But in individual cases, even people from the lower classes were able to make use of the loosening of barriers and to profit from them.

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”.