How Did Antisemitism Become Modern Politics?

Geoffrey Chen

The Making of the Modern World: Thirty Lectures on Nineteenth-Century European History · Article 25

Religious hostility, segregation, expulsion and violence directed against Jews had long histories in Europe. What changed in the nineteenth century was not the sudden appearance of prejudice, but its entry into a new political environment. Jews gradually acquired citizenship in many states, while urbanisation and education widened public participation. At the same time, nationalism, racial pseudoscience, mass elections and commercial newspapers supplied exclusion with new vocabularies and methods of organisation.

Modern antisemitism retained older religious images, while describing Jews as an immutable ‘race’, foreigners inside the nation, or directors of financial and revolutionary conspiracies. Its accusations regularly contradicted one another. Jews could be represented as capitalists and socialists, obstinate outsiders and dangerously successful assimilators. Contradiction did not destroy the politics, because its purpose was not to explain evidence. It assigned the disruptions of a changing society to an identifiable enemy.

Emancipation changed law without guaranteeing belonging

The civic principles of the French Revolution supported the emancipation of Jews as individuals, and other European states removed residential, occupational and political restrictions at different rates. Legal emancipation was a real and consequential advance. It allowed more Jews to enter schools, professions, armies and public institutions. Later persecution should not be projected backwards to make equality an illusion.

Legal qualification and social acceptance were nevertheless different. National communities were increasingly imagined through common language, culture, history and descent. Some nationalists treated Jewish religion and transnational connections as evidence of divided loyalty. They demanded assimilation, yet interpreted successful participation as covert infiltration. The standard moved: difference proved disloyalty, while similarity could be called deception.

Jewish responses to emancipation were diverse. Religious practice, language, class and political allegiance varied within and between communities. Any account in which ‘the Jews’ entered modern society in a single manner inadvertently repeats antisemitism’s reduction of complex populations to one collective actor.

Emancipation also created a reaction among those who equated inherited privilege with social order. Equality made Jews more visible in institutions from which they had been barred, and opponents misrepresented that visibility as domination. The source of conflict was not emancipation itself, but the refusal of some citizens to accept its implications.

Racial antisemitism recoded older hostility

Christian anti-Judaism attacked Jewish belief and, at least in theory, allowed conversion to alter religious identity. Late-century racial discourse represented Jewishness as blood, biology and inheritance. No profession of faith, intermarriage, military service or patriotism could release a person from the category.

The modern term ‘antisemitism’ helped advocates present ancient hostility as a secular, scientific and political position. Craniometry, racial typology and social-Darwinist language lent prejudice the appearance of expertise without making it rigorous science. Historically formed social differences were naturalised. Discriminators could claim that they did not persecute a faith, but defended a national body.

New and old forms did not replace each other cleanly. Religious imagery, economic stereotypes and racial claims could be combined; secular nationalists could ally with confessional traditions. Modernisation reorganised the past rather than simply discarding it. This adaptation was especially powerful in an age when open opposition to civic equality required new justification.

The distinction matters, but should not become too absolute. Religious prejudice had often treated descent as significant, while racial antisemites continued to use Christian motifs. ‘Modern’ describes a changed political synthesis, not a perfectly new doctrine born on a particular date.

Economic upheaval supplied material for scapegoating

Industrialisation, finance, urban growth and periodic crises exposed many Europeans to changes they found difficult to control. Because earlier restrictions and urban opportunities had concentrated some Jewish families in particular trades and professions, a few prominent figures became highly visible. Jewish occupations and class positions were in reality extremely varied. Propaganda converted selected individuals into the essence of an entire people.

Conspiracy turned impersonal markets and institutional failure into intention. It could accuse Jewish bankers of commanding capital and Jewish revolutionaries of destroying property. Mutually exclusive allegations coexisted because ‘the Jew’ represented whatever seemed threatening in modern society, rather than a cause open to factual testing.

Economic distress did not automatically yield antisemitism. Organisations, newspapers, inherited images and political opportunities shaped how grievances were named. People experiencing the same downturn might support trade unionism, welfare reform, protection, socialism or exclusion. Political actors chose among explanations and cultivated constituencies for them. Blaming an anonymous process of modernisation would remove their agency and responsibility.

Scapegoating also protected institutions. If hardship resulted from a secret ethnic conspiracy, governments, employers and economic arrangements escaped more precise scrutiny. Antisemitism offered an emotional explanation while obstructing practical diagnosis.

Mass politics converted prejudice into a program

Expanded electorates required politicians to address large populations of strangers. Cheap newspapers, posters, rallies and party branches made national mobilisation feasible. Antisemitic candidates and leagues compressed complicated questions of employment, housing, taxation, military defeat and identity into the image of a common enemy. Hostility could now function as an electoral platform rather than only a local custom or religious teaching.

This does not mean democracy necessarily produced hatred. Democratic freedoms also allowed Jewish citizens, liberals, socialists and rights organisations to publish and organise against it. The more exact conclusion is that mass politics enlarged the organisational capacities of inclusion and exclusion simultaneously. A ballot restrained rulers in some respects; it did not ensure that a majority would respect a minority.

Newspapers both reported and produced political events. Repetition, sensational headlines and fabricated material could make an unsupported claim appear ubiquitous. Investigative reporting and open controversy could, conversely, expose injustice. Media were not a one-way cause, but a battleground over evidence, credibility and national loyalty.

Antisemitic politics also varied across Europe. Parties enjoyed electoral success in some settings and failed in others; governments sometimes exploited hostility and sometimes contained it. The existence of common themes should not conceal national institutions, religious traditions and local conflicts.

Nationalism imagined an enemy within

Nationalism could demand equal citizenship and challenge dynastic rule. It could also imagine the nation as the exclusive possession of one descent or confession. Jews were subjected to a loyalty test designed to be impossible. Religious and family connections across borders became suspicious, even though comparable connections among other citizens were not interpreted in the same fashion.

The ‘internal enemy’ suited the modern national state because it explained why an allegedly strong and united people still suffered defeats. Military failure, class conflict or official corruption need not reveal institutional weakness if covert saboteurs were responsible. Conspiracy therefore attacked a minority while shielding existing authority from specific criticism.

Eastern and western European settings differed. In parts of eastern Europe, legal restrictions and collective violence remained severe; western emancipation did not prevent social exclusion or political mobilisation. No national experience can represent the continent. Print, migration and political imitation nevertheless allowed images and strategies to travel across borders.

The Dreyfus Affair tested republican evidence

In 1894 the French Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus was accused of passing military secrets to Germany. He was convicted and deported amid weak evidence, secret materials and prejudice. Later evidence pointed towards Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, while members of the military establishment attempted to preserve the verdict. Émile Zola’s 1898 open letter ‘J’Accuse…!’ publicly charged state institutions with injustice.

France divided because the affair concerned more than the guilt of one officer. Anti-Dreyfusards placed army, order, Catholic tradition and national honour above an individual’s procedural rights. Dreyfusards argued that loyalty to the Republic required correction of state error through evidence and law. Dreyfus was fully exonerated in 1906.

The conflict should not be flattened into a wholly rational left confronting a uniformly reactionary right. Alliances and motives were more complicated, and defenders of Dreyfus could hold other prejudices. Its institutional lesson is nevertheless clear. Secret evidence, organisational self-protection and the treatment of minority identity as a propensity to guilt reinforced one another. A state’s commitment to law is tested less by protecting the popular than by admitting it wronged someone represented as an enemy.

The affair also showed how a judicial case became a media event. Pamphlets, petitions and newspaper campaigns constructed opposing publics. Facts needed institutions and advocates capable of overcoming the authority of an official verdict.

Jewish political responses remained plural

Faced with antisemitism, some Jews continued to seek full citizenship in existing nations. Others joined liberal or socialist movements, strengthened religious and communal autonomy, or embraced Zionism’s claim that Jews required a political homeland. Choices varied with state, class, belief and personal experience.

The Dreyfus Affair is often linked to Theodor Herzl’s political development, but reducing modern Zionism to one case is misleading. Eastern European persecution, the age’s national ideas and earlier Jewish political thought also formed its context. Antisemitism constrained choices without determining one Jewish response.

This plurality is historically important. Antisemitic discourse claimed to uncover a unified Jewish project; the evidence instead reveals argument, disagreement and competing hopes. Victims of a shared prejudice did not cease to be individual political actors.

Political experience and intellectual history

The nineteenth century often understood itself through science, education and civic reason. Antisemitism nevertheless used scientific vocabulary, mass literacy and electoral organisation. That does not show knowledge and democracy to be worthless. It shows that their political use depends on standards and institutions. Science requires testability, journalism verification, and democracy minority rights and law.

Liberal individual citizenship opposed collective guilt but could underestimate persistent social discrimination. Nationalism supplied languages of solidarity and autonomy but could turn difference into disloyalty. Socialism criticised real concentrations of economic power, yet some socialists borrowed antisemitic imagery. Each intellectual tradition contained resources for resistance and possibilities of exclusion. None should be labelled pure by reading history backwards.

How, then, did antisemitism become modern politics? Ancient hostility did not merely survive, nor did modern society inevitably create xenophobia. Older prejudice was recoded as racial knowledge, national security, economic explanation and electoral program, then circulated through modern organisations. Its modernity lay precisely in its capacity to mobilise exclusion while the language of legal equality remained in force. The lesson is not that modern institutions brought no progress. It is that institutions lacking evidentiary standards, the capacity to correct error and protection for minorities can be occupied by hatred. Modern politics supplied powers with which to resist prejudice and machinery with which to magnify it; the outcome always depended on political choices.

Sources

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