Die Welt

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No. 11 | Vienna, 16 March 1900. | Fourth Year

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Confusions.

By Robert Jaffé.

The soul of the peoples, in its simplicity and its narrowness and its want of any keen logical faculty of distinction, holds strange and blurred notions of the boundaries that have been drawn among men by the concepts of religion. In those German districts where the population consists for the most part of Protestants, a Protestant will lament the diversity of religions and the hostile sentiments prevailing between "Christians, Catholics and Jews," and between the "Christians and Catholics" even more than "between these and the Jews." In the Prussian, formerly Polish province of Posen the notions "Poles" and "Catholics" are utterly confounded with one another, and it may be impossible to make clear even to the more intelligent people — as though their intellect and their logical power of discrimination were, as it were, hardened — that the one is a national and the other a religious category. Even if one sought to lay it out for them in hours of laborious and subtle deduction, they come in the end always back to their original misunderstanding. The higher officials, who come, say, from the Rhineland and are Catholic, but who of course hold their German nationality divided from the Polish by a sheer wall, are styled "German Catholics"; and the some 12,000 Protestant Poles who — as the exception that confirms the rule — dwell in the Fraustadt district present so great a logical difficulty to the popular notions of religion and nationality that their existence is not comprehended at all, as though it were a transcendental miracle. Thus the wide circles of the Christian peoples feel in their consciousness, over against the Jews — though assuredly a racial antagonism is present in the instinct — only the antagonism of "confessions."

Anthropological fanatics, who would tear open dividing lines with skull-measurements within a politically and confessionally uniform population, and fanatical race-antisemites such as Dühring and Friedrich Lange, are not comprehended at all, remain isolated, and appear like morbidly overheated unnatural creatures. It may then be no matter for wonder that those Jews who strive so ardently after an assimilation to the German people should, with a superior shrewdness, be well content to let this naive misunderstanding pass, and should exploit it with a conjurer's unconcern which is by now not far removed from conscious hypocrisy. They note a contradiction when Treitschke celebrates the tolerance of the wise Nathan and at the same time becomes, from German-national motives, a political antisemite. They hold themselves to be not only "German citizens of the Jewish faith" (which, if not according to the general and actual sentiment, is at any rate permissible according to the theoretical construction of Manchester professors of public law), but Germans of the Jewish faith as well. The proprietor and editor-in-chief of a Berlin newspaper, who is a baptised Jew but at the same time the son-in-law of a Jew, emphasised, on the occasion of a polemic, in an express declaration, that only Christians were employed upon his paper. But the Zionist, who has assuredly no reason to abet the surreptitious procuring of an assimilation to alien peoples, will know how to hold the concepts of "religion" and of "nationality" apart with a stricter logic, and will feel upon the body of his own people — without reference to its assimilatory endeavours — the consequences of these minglings and confusions. Herein he will be compelled to sever the finest threads and cells one from another.

If the intermingling of religion and nationality can serve those Jews who long for assimilation at any price by veiling the boundary trenches, it may yet be of no use whatever to religion itself. It suggests to the apostate Jew that he attest his efforts at assimilation by an ostentatiously displayed indifference, or even hostility, towards the Jewish "confession." As soon as Judaism is really only a