HIEU 158 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Paul Von Hindenburg, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Racial Antisemitism
Document Summary
Germany was almost evenly split catholic and protestant. Jews generally used to escape persecution by converting. Hostility towards jews and judaism continued with a shift to racial rather than religious ideologies. He pioneered the shift to racial antisemitism. The protocols of the elders of zion. First publication around 1897 around the time of the first zionist congress. Zionism made it seem that jews were their own race. The talk of returning to their own land and identifying as a people fed the flames. Happens at the end of a very peaceful century. Europe had been at peace since about 1815. Statesmen like bismarck figured out how to unify their nations without causing a war. After the war, there were a lot of fingers pointed at germany. Germany is landlocked and at the time of the war, doesn"t really have any colonies. There was the idea that germany needed to be punished.
