How a Socialist Revolution in Southeastern Germany Inspired Hitler

In 1918, as the German empire collapsed in the midst of its defeat in the First World War, a socialist revolution took place in Bavaria, establishing the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic. Shortly thereafter, this regime was overthrown by local Communists, whose repressive rule was subsequently ended by the German military and members of rightwing militias. The fact that Jews played leading roles in both these socialist governments—especially in the first, whose prime minister, Kurt Eisner, was a Jew—was not lost on their sympathizers. Nor was it lost on the National Socialists of Munich, the Bavarian capital, who in 1923 would attempt a revolution of their own in that city, directed by their new leader, Adolf Hitler.

Michael Brenner argues that there is a clear connection between the events in revolutionary Bavaria and the shaping of Hitler’s anti-Semitic worldview, and the events that followed—a subject that historians have treated with the same understandable reticence with which they treat the complicity of various individual Jews in Soviet crimes:

As a rule, one skates on slippery ice when researching the Jews and their participation in socialism, Communism, and revolutionary movements. The ices become very slippery indeed when dealing with a place that, so soon after the events of the revolution, became the laboratory for Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist movement. After all, it was mainly the anti-Semites who highlighted the prominence of Jews in this revolution to justify their anti-Jewish behavior. In Mein Kampf, Hitler himselftitled the chapter about the period when he was active in Munich after November 1918, “Beginning of My Political Activity.” He drew a direct line between what he called “the rule of the Jews” and his political awakening.

For many contemporary witnesses as well as subsequent interpreters of these events, there was a clear causality: the conspicuous prominence of Jewish revolutionaries (most of whom, moreover, were not from Bavaria) prompted a reaction that created a space for anti-Semitic agitation to an unprecedented degree.

To Brenner, however, it would be wrong to say that German Jews somehow reaped what the Jewish socialists of Bavaria sowed:

The anti-Semitic excesses of the period following the war would have been unthinkable if they had not been planted on fertile ground. Anti-Jewish resentments had struck deep roots going well back into the early modern era. They repeatedly pushed to the surface especially during political upheavals. Eisner and his comrades did not cause anti-Semitism; the events associated with them merely reactivated it.

What had fundamentally changed now was the ubiquity of the “Jewish question.” It would be worthwhile to investigate systematically how rarely the word “Jew” appeared in the press before the First World War and how frequently it occurred after the war. Starting in 1919 there was hardly a week that went by without reporting about Jews as communists or capitalists, draft dodgers or war profiteers—or articles featuring disclaimers of reporting like this. There was talk about foreign or alien elements, the customary code words for Jews, alongside terms like profiteer, trafficker, or black marketeer.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Adolf Hitler, Anti-Semitism, Germany, Socialism

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society