Universities have been a powerful force of progress, instrumental in Jewish adaptation to and assimilation in the modern world, and opening immense opportunities for social and economic advancement. They should be in the vanguard in fighting Jew-hate — but historically were instrumental in the spread of modern racial antisemitism.
There is a dark history of antisemitism in European universities going back to the Middle Ages.
As universities began as training grounds for the Church, theology students were taught to accept Christian antisemitism, including the notion that Christianity had superseded Judaism, that Jews were deicides and, in refusing to recognize the divinity of Jesus, were allied with the devil and doomed to hell.
The Bible, a Jewish work written mostly in Hebrew in the land of Israel during a millennium of Jewish statehood, was taught in universities in the perspective of Christian anti-Judaism. Prior to the Holocaust, Jewish Studies were generally excluded from university curricula.
In the predominantly Orthodox Jewish world concentrated mostly in Eastern Europe, the university was seen with dread as a centre of impiety and anti-Jewish intent. A Jew who went to university was a heretic by definition, lost to his community and ancestral faith.
In any case, most universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, did not admit Jews until the 19th century. When Jews were emancipated, starting in France in 1791, and began to enter universities, they almost invariably faced anti-Jewish prejudices, against which they had no legal protection. In many universities, Jews could not gain academic positions unless they converted to Christianity.
Legal protection against racial and religious hatred was, and is, no cure. Still, European universities as centres of reason, truth and science, inspired by the humanist ideals of the Enlightenment, might have been expected to take a moral stand against the superstitions and false beliefs of Jew-haters.
Instead, many universities themselves became centres of anti-Jewish bias, where antisemites spread lies about Jews and encouraged hatred and violence against them. Respected professors expounded anti-Jewish racial theories, and Jewish students were routinely harassed, insulted and attacked.
Academic antisemitism flourished in universities in France and Austria, but it was mainly German professors who prepared the ground for racial antisemitism, bearing out WB Yeats’ sombre meditation during the Irish Civil War: “An intellectual hatred is the worst.”
Among Germany’s crimes leading to the Holocaust was its university-teaching of Jew-hatred in the name of “truth”, “science”, and “freedom of expression”.
Immanual Kant (1724-1804), professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Königsberg; Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), professor of philosophy at Jena University and, later, rector of Berlin University; Christian Friedrich Rühs (1781-1820), professor of history at Berlin University; Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843), professor of philosophy at the universities of Jena and Heidelberg; Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and the Young Hegelians, all displayed forms of prejudices which, largely deriving from traditional Church antisemitism, were part of normal everyday European life.
To Kant, Judaism was not a true religion; Jews were a nation of cheaters.
Fichte, prophet of German nationalism, declared the Jews should be segregated or “sent back” to Palestine.
Rühs attacked the Jews as aliens, economic parasites whose number should be limited and who should be forced to wear the yellow badge of shame and subjected to a special tax.
According to Fries, Judaism was a plague — Jewish children should be brought up as Christians and unrepentant Jews expelled, with the “parasites” among them wiped out.
Hegel, though a supporter of Jewish emancipation, believed that Jews were inferior to Christians.
To Schopenhauer, Christianity was itself a contemptible Jewish depravity.
Among the Young Hegelians, Ludwig Feuerbach saw Judaism as the religion of egotism, while Bruno Bauer denounced Judaism as “animal cunning and trickery”. The German was the aristocrat among the nations, in contrast with the Jew, who remained a “white Negro”.
Karl Marx’s antisemitism encouraged Marxists to hate Jews and feel contempt for Judaism — even after antisemitism was officially outlawed by the Soviet Union. Marx identified Judaism with the hated capitalist system, though most Jews at the time belonged to the impoverished working class.
Even liberals, notably the classical scholar, Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903), who defended the Jews, often held antisemitic beliefs. The best solution to the Jewish Question, wrote Mommsen, was mass conversion.
But it was Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896) who did more than any other university figure to make “academic” antisemitism respectable. As well as teaching at various German universities, Treitschke was a prominent political figure.
He accused the Jews of ‘intruding’ into German culture and causing the German economic crisis of the 1870s, and he helped make popular the antisemitic slogan, ‘Die Juden sind unser Unglück’ (the Jews are our Misfortune).
The charismatic Treitschke’s students listened to his lectures spellbound; and in German and Austrian universities between 1918 and 1933, German history was mostly taught by Treitschke’s former students. They taught that the Weimar republic was weak and ‘Judaised’, and they helped bring Hitler to power.
Other academic antisemites, such as the economist, Eugen Karl Dühring (1833-1921), and the orientalist and philosopher, Paul de Lagarde (1827-1891), went so far as to call for the extermination of the Jews. Dühring, whose morbid obsession with Jews was exacerbated by his blindness by the age of 30, anticipated Hitler in attacking the Jews as a parasitical race which the superior Nordic race must destroy by “killing and extermination”.
The one prominent 19th century academic who strongly opposed antisemitism was the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche broke angrily with Wagner over the composer’s antisemitism but, ironically, gave Nazism the ideology of the ruthless will to power, of racial superiority, of a morality in which mass murder could be justified.
A unique account of university-based antisemitism is given by Sigmund Freud, a student at the University of Vienna in the late 1870s and early 1880s. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1896), he relates a dream of his, conveying his strong German national feelings followed by his discovery that the entrance to the university was blocked. In a related dream, he recalled the antisemitic decrees frequent in Jewish history, Psalm 137 describing the Jews in exile, “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept”, and the uncertainty of his children’s future amid growing Jew-hatred.
Theodor Herzl, a younger contemporary of Freud’s at the University of Vienna in the early 1880s, recognised that racial antisemitism could lead to catastrophe. Herzl’s nationalist feelings, too, were weakened by overt antisemitism.
Herzl was an ardent Austrian patriot and admirer of German Kultur - including the music of Wagner. Herzl’s antisemitic fellow students drove him to give up his patriotism. At this time, in the early 1880s, he read Dühring’s writings, calling for the extermination of the Jews. This, to Herzl, was a declaration of war against the Jewish people. In his diary, Herzl condemned Dühring and other racial antisemites in imagery prophetic of the Shoah: “… religious attacks on the Jewish people no longer work. Now race must step forward! The faggots of the Middle Ages have become damp; they refuse to ignite. Modern fuel is needed for them to blaze jollily, for spluttering Jew-fat to send up its savoury smell…”
Antisemitism, “the longest hatred” as the historian Robert Wistrich described it, has changed with time, but preserves the aim of demonising, harming and degrading Jews, and ultimately justifying violence against them.
Forms of antisemitism in 19th and early 20th century universities, though generally unacceptable in the West today, are not far removed from what passes for truth about “the Jews” in many countries today, some of which preserve religious and racial forms of prejudice transmitted in large part from 19th and early 20th century Europe.
If only as a gesture toward rectification of an historic injustice, universities today might show greater sensitivity to the pernicious role of universities in making antisemitism respectable in the name of ‘science’ and ‘free speech’ prior to the Holocaust, and pledge never to make the same deadly error again.
David Aberbach is author of ‘The European Jews, Patriotism and the Liberal State 1789-1939’
