From Prejudice to Destruction; Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933

Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Good/Fair. viii, 392 pages. Some wear and small tears and creasing to dust jacket. Endpapers and text contains substantial red and black underlining and notations. Includes Preface and Introduction. Also includes chapters on Background, 1700-1780; Germany, 1780-1819; France, 1780-1880; Germany, 1830-1873; Austria-Hungary, 1780-1880; The Movement; and Culmination. Also contains Notes and Index. Jacob Katz (born 15 November 1904 in Magyargencs, Hungary, died 20 May 1998 in Israel) was a Jewish historian and educator. He established the history curriculum used in Israel's High Schools. Katz deployed sociological methods in his study of Jewish communities, with special attention to changes in Jewish law and Orthodoxy. He pioneered the modern study of Orthodoxy and its formation in reaction to Reform Judaism. In the year 1945 Jacob Katz presented to a conference of historians his article "Marriage and Sexual Relations at the close of the Middle Ages". Katz had already been credited with a few articles in the fields of education, psychology, and pedagogy, and their publication had given him a good reputation in the field. Ben-Zion Dinur encouraged Katz not to give up on his research even in the absence of an academic post. With hindsight it is possible to claim that Katz's article on "Marriage and Sexual Relations" in Zion paved the way for his joining the faculty of Hebrew University. Katz became a specialist in Jewish-gentile relations, the Jewish Enlightenment, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. His works provide much of the basis for scholarly analyses of anti-Semitism. This historical survey of the development of Western anti-Semitism examines the transformation of Christian anti-Jewish theology into secular anti-Semitism and its ultimate extension, the Holocaust. The author emphasizes the precursors of the anti-Semitic movement in Germany of the 1880s by evaluating the grist contributed to the anti-Semitic political mill by Enlightenment luminaries such as Voltaire, philosophers Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, socialists Fourier and Proudhon, the radical Marx, nationalist historians Michelet and Treitschke, and racial theoreticians de Gobineau and Chamberlain. Derived from a Kirkus Review: This historical survey of the development of Western anti-Semitism examines the transformation of Christian anti-Jewish theology into secular anti-Semitism and its ultimate extension, the Holocaust. Following a step-by-step historical approach, Katz's scholarly delineation emphasizes the precursors of the anti-Semitic movement in Germany of the 1880s by evaluating the grist contributed to the anti-Semitic political mill by Enlightenment luminaries such as Voltaire, philosophers Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer, socialists Fourier and Proudhon, the radical Marx, nationalist historians Michelet and Treitschke, and racial theoreticians de Gobineau and Chamberlain. Although most of the rationalists attacked Christianity as well as Judaism, Judaism nevertheless emerged inferior; and even completely secular writers drew upon Christian anti-Jewish polemics to bolster their views. Consequently, secular anti-Semitism never completely lost its Christian connotations and relevance for the Christian societies in which it flourished. Thus, to the concept of deicide (whose guilt could be exculpated only through conversion) were added descriptions of cultural and ethical inferiority, primitive religious practices, and degrading occupations (commerce and banking) which might disappear through conversions: assimilation into the majority. Once theoreticians developed hereditary racial characteristics, however, nothing could expunge these infirmities but the Nazi Final Solution. Katz's examination is a solid study.