The Modernity of Others

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My interest is mainly in the conflict between National Socialism and Catholicism during the Third Reich. This interest has led me to research the history of Catholic conflict with liberal state power in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which, naturally, includes the Kulturkampf. I was attracted to this book because it offered a new perspective on this subject.

We often hear about Catholic anti-semitism, but the subject of Jewish anti-Catholicism is typically not mentioned. Given the population and power mismatch between Jews and Catholics, this is not surprising, but one would think there would be nothing more natural to expect than that Jews would harbor anti-Catholicism, given the usual depiction of Catholicism as oppressors of Jews.

Professor Joskowicz's book is actually surprising on this point in several ways. First, it seems that the theme of Jewish anti-Catholicism arose from the desire of newly-emancipated Jews to demonstrate that they were good Frenchmen or Germans. By aligning themselves with Protestants against Catholics in Germany, Jews communicated that they were culturally aligned with the dominant culture of Germany, namely progressive, educated, cultured, scientific and reforming. So, anti-Catholicism was not a product of historical resentment so much as a kind of political calculation.

Second, the nineteenth century was the period of Reform Judaism, where the Jewish community was attempting to distance itself from its own “non-reform” co-religionists, i.e., the orthodox Jews. Given their relative interests in not being marginalized, relationships between orthodox Jews and Catholics were mutually supportive.

Politics and religion can lead to strange bedfellows.

Professor Joskowicz's book is thoroughly academic. It is very dry and detailed. Joskowicz follows a chronological approach from the early 19th century to the early 20th century. His main approach is to address the historical details through a discussion of key figures. These figures are generally obscure - to me - Jewish intellectuals or politicians. The result is a profusion of names that is hard to track and detailed discussions of the ebbs and flows of the thinking of these individuals. Because of this approach, I wasn't sure whether we were getting the general attitude of Jews or the particular attitudes of a handful of public intellectuals. It seemed that a number of the individuals discussed in the book were outliers in terms of their membership in the Jewish community.

I had gleaned from my reading of other books on the Kulturkampf that in Germany, Jews and Catholics were playing the game of seeing who could throw the other under the Protestant bus. Thus, both minority communities had an interest in pointing at the other and shouting to Protestants that “there is the threat.” This is probably simply a dynamic in any situation where there are multiple minorities in the population.

Of course, this dynamic was made more complicated by politics. Liberalism had done much to realign the traditional lines of European culture, and for liberals in the 19th century, the enemy was Catholicism. Professor Joskowicz observes:

“With the rise of liberal anticlericalism in the middle decades of the nineteenth century in both Germany and France, a new version of the entanglement of anti-Catholicism and anti-Judaism came into existence. Although the transition from romantic nationalism to liberal politics entailed strong continuities, for the purpose of this survey one discontinuity in particular is worth highlighting: Among nineteenth-century liberals, as well as democrats and republicans, the preoccupation with the Catholic Church became predominant, while interest in Jews diminished. In this age of liberal and middle-class ascendancy, the relations between church and state as well as expectations about decorum in religious practice took center stage. In the process, Catholicism emerged as the principal Other of the French and German liberal middle classes.”

According to Joskowicz, some Jews prospered by aligning themselves with Protestant liberals against the Catholic Other. In doing this, they played on traditional anti-Catholic tropes about Catholics being ignorant, superstitious and foreign. (They also opened themselves up to being attacked for intruding into the affairs of a religion that was not their own.) Given the Vokisch tropes about Jews being inherently foreign, this is humorlessly ironic. In addition, internally, the liberal Reform Jews were not liberal at all in permitting orthodox Jews to separate into a quasi-denomination.

Professor Joskowicz points out another irony from the period:

“The anti-Jesuit law, more than any other legislation during the Kulturkampf, stands as a monument to the will of the liberals in the Reichstag to destroy a force that they perceived as hostile to the nation, even if they had to undermine constitutional guarantees in the process. The anti-Jesuit law did not just dissolve the order in Germany, it also deprived German citizens of their basic civil rights because it forced German Jesuits to leave their country of citizenship. When the bill came before the German Reichstag, none of the four Jewish deputies voted for the law, a position that contrasted with that of non-Jewish members of their respective parliamentary factions.50 After the vote, Jewish periodicals chimed in and denounced the government's overreach, explaining the Jewish deputies' vote as a result of their collective historical experiences as a persecuted minority as well as a particularly Jewish sensitivity to religious coercion.”

The Nazis would follow up on this precedent by stripping German Jews of their citizenship, although it is not clear if this example was in their mind.

Professor Joskowicz calls the idea that the Jewish legislators voted against the anti-Jesuit legislation because of special Jewish sensitivities against religious persecution a myth, which is empirically supported, but what, then, was the reason for these Jewish deputies to all vote against this particular bill? That wasn't clear to me.

This is a fascinating book that provides an understanding of a changing time. We go from a time when religion was normative to a time when churches were disestablished and Catholicism was being persecuted in France, and had recently been persecuted in Prussia. Professor Joskowicz provides a lot of information to assimilate in order to understand how that happened.

This is not a book for a casual reader. However, if you are interested in this subject, or in the subject of how minorities play the game of politics, this is a good read.