Since this intimate relationship between national government and Jews had rested on the indifference of the bourgeoisie to politics in general and state finance in particular, this period came to an end with the rise of imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century when capitalist business in the form of expansion could no longer be carried out without active political help and intervention by the state. Imperialism, on the other hand, undermined the very foundations of the nation-state and introduced into the European comity of nations the competitive spirit of business concerns. In the early decades of this development, Jews lost their exclusive position in state business to imperialistically minded businessmen; they declined in importance as a group, although individual Jews kept their influence as financial advisers and as inter-European middlemen. These Jews, however—in contrast to the nineteenth-century state bankers—had even less need of the Jewish community at large, notwithstanding its wealth, than the court Jews of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and therefore they frequently cut themselves off completely from the Jewish community. The Jewish communities were no longer financially organized, and although individual Jews in high positions remained representative of Jewry as a whole in the eyes of the Gentile world, there was little if any material reality behind this.
As a group, Western Jewry disintegrated together with the nation-state during the decades preceding the outbreak of the first World War. The rapid decline of Europe after the war found them already deprived of their former power, atomized into a herd of wealthy individuals. In an imperialist age, Jewish wealth had become insignificant; to a Europe with no sense of balance of power between its nations and of inter-European solidarity, the non-national, inter-European Jewish element became an object of universal hatred because of its useless wealth, and of contempt because of its lack of power.
The first governments to need regular income and secure finances were the absolute monarchies under which the nation-state came into being. Feudal princes and kings also had needed money, and even credit, but for specific purposes and temporary operations only; even in the sixteenth century, when the Fuggers put their own credit at the disposal of the state, they were not yet thinking of establishing a special state credit. The absolute monarchs at first provided for their financial needs partly through the old method of war and looting, and partly through the new device of tax monopoly. This undermined the power and ruined the fortunes of the nobility without assuaging the growing hostility of the population.
For a long time the absolute monarchies looked about society for a class upon which to rely as securely as the feudal monarchy had upon the nobility. In France an incessant struggle between the guilds and the monarchy, which wanted to incorporate them into the state system, had been going on since the fifteenth century. The most interesting of these experiments were doubtless the rise of mercantilism and the attempts of the absolute state to get an absolute monopoly over national business and industry. The resulting disaster, and the bankruptcy brought about by the concerted resistance of the rising bourgeoisie, are sufficiently well known.5
Before the emancipation edicts, every princely household and every monarch in Europe already had a court Jew to handle financial business. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these court Jews were always single individuals who had inter-European connections and inter-Europcan credit at their disposal, but did not form an international financial entity.6 Characteristic of these times, when Jewish individuals and the first small wealthy Jewish communities were more powerful than at any time in the nineteenth century,7 was the frankness with which their privileged status and their right to it was discussed, and the careful testimony of the authorities to the importance of their services to the state. There was not the slightest doubt or ambiguity about the connection between services rendered and privileges granted. Privileged Jews received noble titles almost as a matter of course in France, Bavaria, Austria and Prussia, so that even outwardly they were more than just wealthy men. The fact that the Rothschilds had such a hard time getting their application for a title approved by the Austrian government (they succeeded in 1817), was the signal that a whole period had come to an end.
By the end of the eighteenth century it had become clear that none of the estates or classes in the various countries was willing or able to become the new ruling class, that is to identify itself with the government as the nobility had done for centuries.8 The failure of the absolute monarchy to find a substitute within society led to the full development of the nation-state and its claim to be above all classes, completely independent of society and its particular interests, the true and only representative of the nation as a whole. It resulted, on the other side, in a deepening of the split between state and society upon which the body politic of the nation rested. Without it, there would have been no need—or even any possibility—of introducing the Jews into European history on equal terms.
When all attempts to ally itself with one of the major classes in society had failed, the state chose to establish itself as a tremendous business concern. This was meant to be for administrative purposes only, to be sure, but the range of interests, financial and otherwise, and the costs were so great that one cannot but recognize the existence of a special sphere of state business from the eighteenth century on. The independent growth of state business was caused by a conflict with the financially powerful forces of the time, with the bourgeoisie which went the way of private investment, shunned all state intervention, and refused active financial participation in what appeared to be an “unproductive” enterprise. Thus the Jews were the only part of the population willing to finance the state’s beginnings and to tie their destinies to its further development. With their credit and international connections, they were in an excellent position to help the nation-state to establish itself among the biggest enterprises and employers of the time.9
Great privileges, decisive changes in the Jewish condition, were necessarily the price of the fulfillment of such services, and, at the same time, the reward for great risks. The greatest privilege was equality. When the Münzjuden of Frederick of Prussia or the court Jews of the Austrian Emperor received through “general privileges” and “patents” the same status which half a century later all Prussian Jews received under the name of emancipation and equal rights; when, at the end of the eighteenth century and at the height of their wealth, the Berlin Jews managed to prevent an influx from the Eastern provinces because they did not care to share their “equality” with poorer brethren whom they did not recognize as equals; when, at the time of the French National Assembly, the Bordeaux and Avignon Jews protested violently against the French government’s granting equality to Jews of the Eastern provinces—it became clear that at least the Jews were not thinking in terms of equal rights but of privileges and special liberties. And it is really not surprising that privileged Jews, intimately linked to the businesses of their governments and quite aware of the nature and conditions of their status, were reluctant to accept for all Jews this gift of a freedom which they themselves possessed as the price for services, which they knew had been calculated as such and therefore could hardly become a right for all.10
Only at the end of the nineteenth century, with the rise of imperialism, did the owning classes begin to change their original estimate of the un-productivity of state business. Imperialist expansion, together with the growing perfection of the instruments of violence and the state’s absolute monopoly of them, made the state an interesting business proposition. This meant, of course, that the Jews gradually but automatically lost their exclusive and unique position.
But the good fortune of the Jews, their rise from obscurity to political significance, would have to come to an even earlier end if they had been confined to a mere business function in the growing nation-states. By the middle of the last century some states had won enough confidence to get along without Jewish backing and financing of government loans.11 The nationals’ growing consciousness, moreover, that thei
r private destinies were becoming more and more dependent upon those of their countries made them ready to grant the governments more of the necessary credit. Equality itself was symbolized in the availability to all of government bonds which were finally even considered the most secure form of capital investment simply because the state, which could wage national wars, was the only agency which actually could protect its citizens’ properties. From the middle of the nineteenth century on, the Jews could keep their prominent position only because they had still another more important and fateful role to play, a role also intimately linked to their participation in the destinies of the state. Without territory and without a government of their own, the Jews had always been an inter-European element; this international status the nation-state necessarily preserved because the Jews’ financial services rested on it. But even when their economic usefulness had exhausted itself, the inter-European status of the Jews remained of great national importance in times of national conflicts and wars.
While the need of the nation-states for Jewish services developed slowly and logically, growing out of the general context of European history, the rise of the Jews to political and economic significance was sudden and unexpected to themselves as well as their neighbors. By the later Middle Ages the Jewish moneylender had lost all his former importance, and in the early sixteenth century Jews had already been expelled from cities and trade centers into villages and countryside, thereby exchanging a more uniform protection from remote higher authorities for an insecure status granted by petty local nobles.12 The turning point had been in the seventeenth century when, during the Thirty Years’ War, precisely because of their dispersion these small, insignificant moneylenders could guarantee the necessary provisions to the mercenary armies of the war-lords in far-away lands and with the aid of small peddlers buy victuals in entire provinces. Since these wars remained half-feudal, more or less private affairs of the princes, involving no interest of other classes and enlisting no help from the people, the Jews’ gain in status was very limited and hardly visible. But the number of court Jews increased because now every feudal household needed the equivalent of the court Jew.
As long as these court Jews served small feudal lords who, as members of the nobility, did not aspire to represent any centralized authority, they were the servants of only one group in society. The property they handled, the money they lent, the provisions they bought up, all were considered the private property of their master, so that such activities could not involve them in political matters. Hated or favored, Jews could not become a political issue of any importance.
When, however, the function of the feudal lord changed, when he developed into a prince or king, the function of his court Jew changed too. The Jews, being an alien element, without much interest in such changes in their environment, were usually the last to become aware of their heightened status. As far as they were concerned, they went on handling private business, and their loyalty remained a personal affair unrelated to political considerations. Loyalty meant honesty; it did not mean taking sides in a conflict or remaining true for political reasons. To buy up provisions, to clothe and feed an army, to lend currency for the hiring of mercenaries, meant simply an interest in the well-being of a business partner.
This kind of relationship between Jews and aristocracy was the only one that ever tied a Jewish group to another stratum in society. After it disappeared in the early nineteenth century, it was never replaced. Its only remnant for the Jews was a penchant for aristocratic titles (especially in Austria and France), and for the non-Jews a brand of liberal antisemitism which lumped Jews and nobility together and pretended that they were in some kind of financial alliance against the rising bourgeoisie. Such argumentation, current in Prussia and France, had a certain amount of plausibility as long as there was no general emancipation of the Jews. The privileges of the court Jews had indeed an obvious similarity to the rights and liberties of the nobility, and it was true that the Jews were as much afraid of losing their privileges and used the same arguments against equality as members of the aristocracy. The plausibility became even greater in the eighteenth century when most privileged Jews were given minor titles, and at the opening of the nineteenth century when wealthy Jews who had lost their ties with the Jewish communities looked for new social status and began to model themselves on the aristocracy. But all this was of little consequence, first because it was quite obvious that the nobility was on the decline and that the Jews, on the contrary, were continually gaining in status, and also because the aristocracy itself, especially in Prussia, happened to become the first class that produced an antisemitic ideology.
The Jews had been the purveyors in wars and the servants of kings, but they did not and were not expected to engage in the conflicts themselves. When these conflicts enlarged into national wars, they still remained an international element whose importance and usefulness lay precisely in their not being bound to any national cause. No longer state bankers and purveyors in wars (the last war financed by a Jew was the Prussian-Austrian war of 1866, when Bleichroeder helped Bismarck after the latter had been refused the necessary credits by the Prussian Parliament), the Jews had become the financial advisers and assistants in peace treaties and, in a less organized and more indefinite way, the providers of news. The last peace treaties drawn up without Jewish assistance were those of the Congress of Vienna, between the continental powers and France. Bleichroeder’s role in the peace negotiations between Germany and France in 1871 was already more significant than his help in war,13 and he rendered even more important services in the late seventies when, through his connections with the Rothschilds, he provided Bismarck with an indirect news channel to Benjamin Disraeli. The peace treaties of Versailles were the last in which Jews played a prominent role as advisers. The last Jew who owed his prominence on the national scene to his international Jewish connection was Walter Rathenau, the ill-fated foreign minister of the Weimar Republic. He paid with his life for having (as one of his colleagues put it after his death) donated his prestige in the international world of finance and the support of Jews everywhere in the world14 to the ministers of the new Republic, who were completely unknown on the international scene.
That antisemitic governments would not use Jews for the business of war and peace is obvious. But the elimination of Jews from the international scene had a more general and deeper significance than antisemitism. Just because the Jews had been used as a non-national element, they could be of value in war and peace only as long as during the war everybody tried consciously to keep the possibilities of peace intact, only as long as everybody’s aim was a peace of compromise and the re-establishment of a modus vivendi. As soon as “victory or death” became a determining policy, and war actually aimed at the complete annihilation of the enemy, the Jews could no longer be of any use. This policy spelled destruction of their collective existence in any case, although the disappearance from the political scene and even extinction of a specific group-life would by no means necessarily have led to their physical extermination. The frequently repeated argument, however, that the Jews would have become Nazis as easily as their German fellow-citizens if only they had been permitted to join the movement, just as they had enlisted in Italy’s Fascist party before Italian Fascism introduced race legislation, is only half true. It is true only with respect to the psychology of individual Jews, which of course did not greatly differ from the psychology of their environment. It is patently false in a historical sense. Nazism, even without antisemitism, would have been the deathblow to the existence of the Jewish people in Europe; to consent to it would have meant suicide, not necessarily for individuals of Jewish origin, but for the Jews as a people.
To the first contradiction, which determined the destiny of European Jewry during the last centuries, that is, the contradiction between equality and privilege (rather of equality granted in the form and for the purpose of privilege) must be added a second contradiction: the Jews, the only non-national Eu
ropean people, were threatened more than any other by the sudden collapse of the system of nation-states. This situation is less paradoxical than it may appear at first glance. Representatives of the nation, whether Jacobins from Robespierre to Clemenceau, or representatives of Central European reactionary governments from Metternich to Bismarck, had one thing in common: they were all sincerely concerned with the “balance of power” in Europe. They tried, of course, to shift this balance to the advantage of their respective countries, but they never dreamed of seizing a monopoly over the continent or of annihilating their neighbors completely. The Jews could not only be used in the interest of this precarious balance, they even became a kind of symbol of the common interest of the European nations.
It is therefore more than accidental that the catastrophic defeats of the peoples of Europe began with the catastrophe of the Jewish people. It was particularly easy to begin the dissolution of the precarious European balance of power with the elimination of the Jews, and particularly difficult to understand that more was involved in this elimination than an unusually cruel nationalism or an ill-timed revival of “old prejudices.” When the catastrophe came, the fate of the Jewish people was considered a “special case” whose history follows exceptional laws, and whose destiny was therefore of no general relevance. This breakdown of European solidarity was at once reflected in the breakdown of Jewish solidarity all over Europe. When the persecution of German Jews began, Jews of other European countries discovered that German Jews constituted an exception whose fate could bear no resemblance to their own. Similarly, the collapse of German Jewry was preceded by its split into innumerable factions, each of which believed and hoped that its basic human rights would be protected by special privileges—the privilege of having been a veteran of World War I, the child of a veteran, the proud son of a father killed in action. It looked as though the annihilation of all individuals of Jewish origin was being preceded by the bloodless destruction and self-dissolution of the Jewish people, as though the Jewish people had owed its existence exclusively to other peoples and their hatred.