86. The Scientific Proof of the Anti-Semites

We understand,¹ when the anti-Semites try to put their program on a scientific basis. After all, we have seen the Social Democrats at work these days trying to save their party doctrine, scientifically endangered by Bernstein, from being undermined. This is certainly a laudable endeavor, provided it is not based on pontificating, as in Lübeck, or the evidence is based on fallacies and cleverly concealed truth, as in the "Staatsbürger-Zeitung" (September 22), where Professor Paulsen is invoked as the key witness of anti-Semitism.

The article in question is based on Paulsen's "System of Ethics", a widely read and older work that was already available in its 4th edition in 1896. Anyone who has ever studied Paulsen's works with an objective understanding, be it the aforementioned "System of Ethics", the "History of Teaching", his "Philosophia militans" or even his "Introduction to Philosophy", cannot possibly believe that Paulsen had a tendency such as the one attributed to him by anti-Semites. The aforementioned scholar is protected from this by the fine historical sense that runs through all his works. Everything Paulsen says in his "System of Ethics" about the nationality and religion of the Jews has grown out of this historical understanding, and so he can rightly say: "The awareness of being the chosen people of God permeates religion and nationality". Of course, this is a historical reconstruction of Judaism from its gray past. If the writer of the article in the "Staatsbürger-Zeitung" had learned to see objectively, then the concept of Jewish "nationality" must have already indicated this to him. But such an admission would have destroyed the whole tendency of the anti-Semitic article. At the very moment when the Jews lost the "down-to-earthness" of their old homeland, their rigid nationalism was struck to the heart, and true to all human laws of development and adaptation, the process of new "down-to-earthness" began among them.

History should prove to our anti-Semites that we are only dealing with a historically possible and even necessary event. The Slavs of eastern Germany have become "native" in places where Germanic peoples once lived, and Germanic language islands (the Saxons of Transylvania) have survived in the middle of Slavic countries. All the migrations of prehistoric times are a tearing of the old homeland bond and a new contract with nature. Part of the story is, one might say, a shifting groundedness, sometimes unsuccessful, in many cases also successful. The mixture between Slavs and Germanic peoples as we know it will roughly correspond to the ethnological state in which Judaism finds itself in the midst of European or other cultural states. If the process of assimilation had not been artificially halted, the Jew among us would in any case not suffer from any greater exclusivity than the Slavs in Germanic countries, for example. The author of the above-mentioned anti-Semitic article is hopefully familiar enough with German Jewish legislation up to the middle of the nineteenth century to prove us right. Even the century of "enlightenment" and "humanity" came up with paragraphs in this regard that are reminiscent of the conditions of slavery. Every police law of the eighteenth century provides information on this. These things certainly gave the Jews a certain "mobility and internationality" that Paulsen talks about. But are these characteristics so thoroughly un-German, "unteutsch" our anti-Semites would say? Haven't hundreds of thousands of Germans left their homeland to try their luck on the other side of the ocean? And it is precisely among these emigrants that a considerable percentage are Upper Germans, i.e. unadulterated Germanic people. If these hundreds of thousands were to make a national profession of faith, it would or should, judging by their actions, read: "Ubi bene, ibi patria", "Where it is well with me, there is my fatherland". And don't "national" papers, to which the "Staatsbürger-Zeitung" surely also belongs, sing the lament that many Germans living abroad so soon deny their Germanness? Yes, this national immersion is even said to be one of the characteristics of the German "Michels". So "mobility and internationality" on both sides, not just as a specific feature of Judaism.

The feeling of being linked "for life and death" with the people to which one belongs is not based on race, but on the moral fitness of the individual. The "Staatsbürger-Zeitung" pretends that "standing and falling" with one's own people has always been found among Germans, otherwise the contrast to Judaism would make no sense. The apparently historically untrained writer of the "Staatsbürger-Zeitung" is probably unaware that seven Prussian ministers with illustrious noble names offered their services to Napoleon, that in 1808 no fewer than seven senior officers were sentenced to death by the courts martial for cowardice before the enemy. Names such as von Lindener, von Ingersleben, von Poser, von Hacke and von Romberg were probably not Jewish. The author is probably also unaware that after the retreat from Jena and Auerstädt, liberated Prussians, at least half of whom were "down-to-earth", refused to take up arms. German princes courted Napoleon I, and they glorified his day as prince. In the "Confidential Letters", the "Fires of Fire" and the "Gallery of Prussian Characters" from the days after 1806/07, there was a lot of truth alongside some vituperation. Did the accusations concern Jews? Stein's angriest letter was addressed to a German imperial prince, that of Nassau-Usingen. The depth of Stein's confession: "I have only one fatherland, that is Germany", can only be expressed by a moral concept of duty, as Stein knew it. First and foremost, moral responsibility is the deciding factor when it comes to going along "to the death". And this moment was also lacking in the racial Germans when Napoleon trampled on the fatherland. No amount of "down-to-earthness" helped.

Now the "Staatsbürger-Zeitung" believes that the Jew could never enter into this pact of life and death "without abandoning the old national religious ceremonial". The ceremonial thus seems to be essential to the writer of the article. What does he say about the sects that form outside of national churches? Finally, what about the Protestant regional church, which broke away from the womb of the Roman Catholic Church not least because of its ceremonial. So the ceremonial really can't be the deciding factor: no, it's the religion itself.

Paulsen is supposed to be the scientific savior of the anti-Semites. In any case, it is not without significance for them when the meritorious scholar says of the Jewish religion in his "Introduction to Philosophy", 4th edition, p. 294, that "the special talent of the Israelite people lies in the seriousness and depth" with which they grasp moral and religious matters. "Seriousness and depth" are what made Stein, Blücher, Fichte, Scharnhorst and others act when life and death were at stake. A lack of "seriousness" gave rise to the wretched treachery of those days, despite the racial purity of Germanism and membership of the state, which had been gloriously ruled by Frederick the Great only a short time before. The "seriousness and depth" of Judaism is really not as specifically Jewish as the anti-Semites would like us to believe.

The Jewish religion has all the elements that make it capable of assimilation, which are especially useful for Christianity: these are the elements of denaturalization and denationalization. Paulsen, the classic proof of the "Staatsbürger-Zeitung", says on $. 295 of his "Introduction to Philosophy": "As moments in this development" (of the Jews' conception of God and the world) "there emerge first the centralization of the cult through kingship and priesthood, then the moralization, denaturalization and finally denationalization of the concept of God through prophethood." But the "Staatsbürger-Zeitung" knows for which circles it is writing, otherwise it could not play such an unscientific jugglery as in its leading article in the September 22 issue. It does not matter to her that Paulsen himself rejects the accusation of anti-Semitism. Nor does she see that the ethicist Paulsen generally castigates the degenerate, naturally also in Judaism. Science or no science! Science here! says the writer of the article in the "Staatsbürger-Zeitung".