The Eastern Perspective

In his autobiography, From Berlin To Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem described how he had found himself isolated among his Jewish friends when he began to take interest in the antisemitic literature of the time. Twenty years before Hitler's accession to power, he recalled, he had discovered in this literature “clearly and unmistakably … everything that the Nazis later translated into action.” And this was how he tried to account for the blindness that gripped his co-religionists: Jews in Germany had never bothered to familiarize themselves with this literature, just as later on hardly anyone bothered to read Hitler's Mein Kampf. They failed to appreciate the gravity of the situation although the writing had been clearly on the wall. They kept repressing that one single truth, already upheld and propagated by Zionism then and there: that Jews cannot live safely amongst the nations. No amount of tolerance and liberalism would do. No emancipation could ever eradicate the eternal enmity toward them.

From this point of view, blindness seemed to have been a chronic condition. It did not begin with the Nazis' rise to power. Of paradigmatic importance was Jewish reaction to the manifestations of antisemitism that surfaced during the decade after the completion of their legal emancipation, in the early years of Bismarck's New Reich. Historians usually regard anti-Jewish activities during that time as manifestations of “modern antisemitism.”