The Wanganui Chronicle. SATURDAY, MARCH 19, 1938. ANTI-SEMITISM

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 80, Issue 66, 19 March 1938, Page 8

The Wanganui Chronicle. SATURDAY, MARCH 19, 1938. ANTI-SEMITISM

QOINCWEN’T with the success of Nazism Europe lias witnessed

an outburst of Nazi anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is a strange phenomenon which may be called a left-over from the Dark Ages. There is a prejudice against, Jews in the minds of many primitive peoples because Jews differ from them, but that prejudice lies dormant until it is kindled, and it is usually worked up by those who seek to inflame passions to serve another end. The history of anti-Semitism is one of crime, forgery and false witness. • In its modern sense, manifestation anti-Semitism was launched by Wilhelm Marr, an obscure Hamburg journalist, who in 1873 published sensational pamphlet, “The Victory of Judiasm Over Germanism.” It was one of those insignificant pieces of work which at any other time might have passed unnoticed, but circumstances conspired to give it significance. After the spending of the War Indemnities collected from France in the, war of 1870, Germany suffered a slump. It was convenient to have an excuse that it was caused by the Jews, just as Mr. A. N. Field, in his “Truth About, the Slump,” preached the same doctrine in New Zealand during the last depression. It is a short answer and it has the convenience of providing a. whipping boy who cannot easily retaliate. The Jew was by Marr asserted to be something aside from the national spirit. But more was to assist this terrible movement: The Infallibility of the, Pope was proclaimed in the year 1870, which led to a secession of many of the intellectual leaders of German Catholicism and brought Bismarck and the Vatican into conflict. Bismarck was supported by the Liberals, in whose ranks most of the German Jews were naturally to be found. In the drives of the Agrarians and the Catholics against the Liberals in subsequent years, anti Semitism had front place; and when Bismarck was deserted by the Liberals under the leadership of the Jew, Lasker, the former supplied the secret springs of the renewed agitation whicti rose to a. fury over the whole of Germany in 1879. The leadership of the new campaign was headed by the Court Preacher, Adolf Stocker, and under his auspices the years 1880-81 became a period of bitter and scandalous conflict with the Jews. Conservatives, Catholics and Lutherans joined in the anti-Jcwish hunt, until the Crown Prince, afterwards Emperor Frederick, publicly declared the agitation to be “a shame and a disgrace to Germany.”

Anti-Semitism in Germany, however, affected Russia. The Jews took front place in the organising of trades unions. AntiSemitism served the purposes of reaction for it struck at the head of the democratic movement, resulting in murderous riots and outrages in 167 Russian towns and villages at Easter in 1881, and being followed by the passing of the infamous repressive May laws in 1882. These laws were the most conspicuous achievement of modern anti-Semitism. Prosperity, however, did not follow; on the contrary, a depression set in and the Russian Finance Minister sought the aid of the House of Rothschilds. The London house, however, insisted that unless the persecutions of the Jews were stopped the House would withdraw from the operation. The Tsar immediately ordered the breaking off of negotiations and the contracting with non-Jewish houses in Paris. Thus was laid the first of the foundations of the Franco-

Russian Alliance. The height of anti-Semitism, however, found its expression in the famous Dreyfus case, when the, nation was fanned by the clergy and aristocracy against the alleged Jewish and Protestant financial monopoly. The Dreyfus case was one, of the most outrageous cases of injustice perpetrated against an innocent man, made more so by the efforts made to sustain the unjust sentence. It was the pen of Emil Zola and his famous “J’Accuse” letter which precipitated a national crisis, and eventually freed Dreyfus. The sears of “L’Affaire Dreyfus,” however, remained until the Great War. The recrudescence of anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria to-day can be put down to its usual causes, inflaming influences by reactionaries, the desire to inspire the nationalistic spirit, and a shaky financial structure needing a whipping boy to distract attention from the real cause of the disease in the body politic. Jews, Catholics and Protestants now suffer together, but the Jews the more so.