The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality / Edition 1

by Michael Berkowitz

Overview

The Crime of My Very Existence investigates a rarely considered yet critical dimension of anti-Semitism that was instrumental in the conception and perpetration of the Holocaust: the association of Jews with criminality. Drawing from a rich body of documentary evidence, including memoirs and little-studied photographs, Michael Berkowitz traces the myths and realities pertinent to the discourse on "Jewish criminality" from the eighteenth century through the Weimar Republic, into the complex Nazi assault on the Jews, and extending into postwar Europe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520251144
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	09/03/2007
Series:	The S. Mark Taper Foundation Imprint in Jewish Studies
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Michael Berkowitz is Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London. He is author of The Jewish Self-Image, Western Jewry and the Zionist Project, and Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War, and has co-edited, most recently, Fighting Back? Jewish and Black Boxers in Britain.

Read an Excerpt

The Crime of My Very Existence

Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality

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By Michael Berkowitz

University of California Press

Copyright © 2007 The Regents of the University of California
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-25114-4

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Chapter One

Above Suspicion? Fact, Myths, and Lies about Jews and Crime

Being perceived wrongly is no less painful than being treated wrongly: FRANCE ROSENZWEIG

FOR MANY GERMANS THE LINKING of Jews with criminality might have seemed less speculative than "scientific racism" as a basis for Nazi policies. Although some scholars detect the roots of racial anti-Semitism in pre-Christian antiquity, for the sake of illuminating the Holocaust, it suffices to begin with the broad Christian background. In European Christendom a rationale for discriminating against the Jews, accompanying the apparent incompatibility of the Jewish and Christian belief systems, was that Jews were socialized toward criminality and overrepresented in the realm of criminals. This conviction long predated the rise of racism, although sometimes the persecution of Jews based on heredity, such as during the Spanish Inquisition, is characterized as racist. To be sure, racial theories developed since the eighteenth century buttressed and embellished the connection between Jews and crime. Yet a notion of Jewish criminality could exist-and even thrive-without knowledge of or belief in "racial science" and its various offshoots. As Raul Hilberg and other scholars have demonstrated, National Socialism often elicited "Christian" and "Reformation" persecution of the Jews as a precedent. The Nazis made an effort to demonstrate the good sense of their anti-Semitism by showing that discrimination against the Jews was part of the normal business of every modern state that wished to defend itself. Simultaneously they sought to prove that their actions were consistent with the development of Christian theology and even with the history of nations such as England and the United States. A huge pseudoscholarly tome, reissued at least three times, expounds on the idea that anti-Semitism has been a major theme of English history, and there were efforts to "prove" that Benjamin Franklin attempted to thwart the acceptance of Jews in the founding of the United States. Although the decision to recast Franklin as an anti-Semite was not quite as absurd as the Nazi campaign to identify the gangster Al Capone as a Jew, it was a poor example. In fact, Franklin is well remembered for his design for the official seal of the United States, which pictured "Moses standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head and a Sword in his Hand. Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds reaching to Moses, to express that he acts by Command of the Deity." Even more inappropriate for Nazism was Franklin's "Motto": "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God." Germans, however, did not fare so well in his estimation. Considering "the German settlers in the hinterland of Pennsylvania" in 1764, Franklin wrote: "Should the Palantine Boors be suffered to swarm into our settlements, and by herding together establish their language and manners, to the exclusion of ours?" A reputed anti-Semitic diatribe of Franklin's cited by the Nazis (still circulating on hate-mongering web sites), was easily revealed as a fake, not least because it assigned the incorrect date to the Continental Congress.

On more conventional grounds the Nazis portrayed the inception of Christianity as the watershed of Jews' supposed revelation of their "criminal" character. Through Judas's betrayal of Jesus in the Christological drama, it is possible to render Judas as the prototypical Jewish criminal-for allegedly undermining the nascent church and threatening Christians as individuals. The assumption that Jews are deceitful, following the example of Judas, is one of the most dogged anti-Semitic tenets. If one assumes that Jewry had been willfully obstinate in its ongoing refusal to accept Christianity, as was pronounced in church authorities' "disputations" in the Middle Ages, it is not a giant leap to suppose that Jews are more inclined toward criminality than Christians. Martin Luther expounded on the "treachery" of Jewry in his "little book" On the Jews and Their Lies (1543), after it was clear that the Jews could not be enticed to his movement en masse. For the most part he fulminated against Christians who had permitted the Jews' practice of "usury" to become transformed into acceptable "thievery": "Moreover, they are nothing but thieves and robbers who daily eat no morsel and wear no thread of clothing which they have not stolen and pilfered from us by means of their accursed usury. Thus they live from day to day, together with wife and child, by theft and robbery, as arch-thieves and robbers, in the most impenitent security."

Luther blurred the distinction between "thieves and robbers" in a literal sense and Jews engaged in the legal pursuit of money lending who were nonetheless "guilty" of "robbing" unwitting Christians. "Usury" as a nefarious trade of the Jews was a major theme of Jud Süss (1940), a hugely popular Nazi film loosely based on the legend of an eighteenth-century "Court Jew" who served as an adviser and financier to the duke of Württemberg. The professed necessity for "Aryanization," which was little more than institutionalized theft of Jewish property and assets, was that any and all Jewish economic relations with "Aryans" were destructive and duplicitous and therefore had to be eliminated.

One of the initial campaigns against Jews as criminals-which did, unlike the vast majority of anti-Semitic allegations, have some basis in reality-was a reaction to the involvement of Jews in prostitution. Charges that Jews were procurers of prostitutes had been lodged in Venice in the early fifteenth century. This activity was seen as part and parcel of a community that was prone to no good-one that fenced stolen goods and took undue advantage of Gentiles through pawnbroking. Prostitution did not, however, continue to be identified with Italian Jewry, as "white slavery" was primarily seen as spreading from the most impoverished quarters of Eastern Europe to Berlin, London, Paris, New York, and Buenos Aires, especially in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Thus, it came to be associated with the international traffic in both willing and coerced women. Jews overwhelmingly regarded this practice as abhorrent and managed to virtually eliminate it as soon as they developed their own "policing" savvy in the early twentieth century in their own communities and by undermining global networks. Yet the highly sexualized "racial pollution" charge could also have appeared more plausible when mixed with the white slavery canard-which did contain a kernel of historical truth. When the Nazis wrote about the phenomenon in 1939, they failed to attach more than a handful of names, and no pictures, to their accusations. Nevertheless, the charge that white slavery was esteemed and protected by Jewish communities was wildly overstated in the 1930s and 1940s, with anti-Semites conveniently ignoring Jews' protests against the practice and their successful efforts to eradicate it within their community. Other criminal activities of individual Jews were noted beginning in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries as real and imagined niches of Jewry. At the time, many segments of European Jews faced guild-based discrimination, property-owning restrictions, and chronic poverty that severely undermined their range of livelihoods. Some Jews, it is true, turned to crime. Early modern Italian history includes swashbuckling Jewish outlaws, and Northern and Central Europe were beset by mixed "robber bands" of Jews and non-Jews who treated one another as equals and often accepted Jews as leaders, as noted by the pioneering scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem. The robber bands became a staple of discussions whenever the issue of "Jewish criminality" came up. Smuggling, kidnapping, and arson became common charges against Jews in the mid-sixteenth century. Modern Jews knew of these premodern gangs through academic books but mostly from the popular play Die Räuber (Robbers), by the non-Jewish German writer Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), which included Jews as leading figures. In the late nineteenth century there were at least four Yiddish translations of the play, which was a staple of the Yiddish stage in Eastern Europe, London, and America; many Jews also read it in the original German.

German history in particular had encountered the specter of "Jewish criminality" mainly in four guises. First, it was commonly known that some Jews had been notorious, flamboyant criminals in the time of the robber bands of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Second, beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the debates over Jewish emancipation frequently engaged the notion of "Jewish criminality." This idea was revived when anti-Semites sought to curtail Jewish rights in the 1870s. Third, the association of revolutionary socialism, communism, and anarchism with "lawlessness" sometimes evinced anti-Semitic manifestations. The response to social unrest and upheavals, such as in the wake of the attempted revolutions of 1848 and 1918 in Central Europe, often prompted anti-Jewish recriminations and violence. Fourth, a number of Jewish individuals were convicted of small- and large-scale malfeasance during the First World War and early years of the Weimar Republic. Several of these incidents were fodder for long-running, highly publicized, and politicized scandals. Concomitantly, the "cultural war," which the Nazis and other right-wing conservatives believed they were waging against sexual promiscuity and liberal thought, such as in literature, the arts, and public entertainment, was deemed to be a battle against sinister, "criminal" Jewish forces.

Before the Nazi rise to power, therefore, Germany and other European states had had a long history of recognizing the phenomenon of "Jewish crime." But not all the commentary on Jews and crime was of a crude anti-Semitic variety. From the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, Jews themselves had occasionally written of this curious legacy, which by the late 1920s had been reduced to a statistically minute aspect of Jewish existence overall-despite the well-known exploits of "Jewish gangsters" in the United States that reached their peak around 1935.17 Indeed, the identification of Jews with crime has a long and complex history that is not often recalled, in large part because many scholars would not think to ask. This blind spot is also a result of reticence or censorship on the part of historians who believe it impertinent to even deal with the subject, especially in the wake of the Holocaust.

Theories about Jews and crime were articulated in debates about Jewish emancipation and the extension of Jewish rights in the German states beginning in the late eighteenth century. These expressions departed from earlier polemics because their authors tended to present themselves as largely detached from religious motives. Christian Wilhelm von Dohm's Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (Berlin, 1781) reveals the widely accepted view that Jews are "guilty of a proportionally greater number of crimes than the Christians; that their character in general inclines more toward usury and fraud in commerce." Still, in what was regarded more as a defense than a reprimand of Jewry, Dohm contended, "Everything the Jews are blamed for is caused by the political conditions under which they now live, and any other group of men, under such conditions, would be guilty of identical errors."

In his attempt to undermine Dohm's plea to enhance the standing of the Jews, Johann David Michaelis responded that "reports of investigations of thieves" had shown that half the members of gangs of thieves were Jews. This finding was alarming, he contended, because Jews comprised no more than "one-twenty-fifth of the total German population." The nation's "riff-raff," he concluded, was overwhelmingly Jewish.

Moses Mendelssohn, the illustrious forerunner and proponent of Jewish emancipation, felt compelled to address the issue. He incisively ascribed the deeds of Jewish criminals to their abominable social position and described the turn to thievery by a small number of Jews as a transitional, rather than a permanent, aspect of their vocation. For the most part, Jews in his time had not, Mendelssohn argued, been involved in crimes such as "grand theft," murder, sedition, arson, prostitution, adultery, and infanticide. He did concede, however, that there was more than a smattering of "thieves and receivers of stolen goods" among the Jews. But

this number should not be viewed in terms of that people's proportion of the entire population. The comparison should rather be made between traders and pedlars among the Jews on the one hand, and among other peoples on the other. I am sure that such a comparison would yield very different proportions. The same statistics, I do not hesitate to maintain, will also show that there are twenty-five times as many thieves and receivers of stolen goods among German pedlars as among Jewish. This is aside from the fact that the Jew is forced to take up such a calling, while the others could have become field marshals or ministers. They freely choose their profession, be it a trader, pedlar, seller of mouse-traps, performer of shadow plays or vendor of curios.

Mendelssohn acknowledged that "quite a number of Jewish pedlars deal in stolen goods." He believed that only a few among them, however, were "outright thieves." And those who were, unequivocally, "thieves," were shunted into this line because they were "without refuge or sanctuary anywhere on earth." But even these men did not see thievery as a means of sustaining themselves in the long term:

As soon as they have made some fortune they acquire a patent of protection from their territorial prince and change their profession. This is public knowledge; when I was younger I personally met a number of men [Jews] who were esteemed in their native country after they had elsewhere made enough dubious money to purchase a patent of protection. This injustice is directly created by that fine policy which denies the poor Jews protection and residence, but receives with open arms those very same Jews as soon as they have "thieved their way to wealth."

Mendelssohn charged Michaelis with "blaming the victim"-in this case, impoverished Jews. Mendelssohn refused to accept that Jews were "bad people" or that criminality was an indelible stain on their character. "Among the Jews," Mendelssohn wrote, also taking a swipe at the Jews who had elevated themselves into respectable society, "I have found comparatively more virtue in the quarters of the poor than in the houses of the wealthy."

Mendelssohn was aware that "a number of Jews existed in Central Europe who supported themselves by both stealing and trading," as Jason Sanders has written. "These thieves benefited from both activities that mutually reinforced each other. Salesmen on the roads seem to have found ample opportunities to steal, and theft augmented some traders' meager income. Such Jews were frequently recent immigrants from Eastern Europe who had not yet secured the right to live in a German city. As a result, they attempted to earn a living on the road by trading, begging, and sometimes stealing. Banditry provided an alternative for the poorest of the poor Jews who had difficulties sustaining themselves in low-income, or irregular occupations." It enabled them to gain a permit to engage in lawful business. To accuse the Jews of immorality, Mendelssohn lamented, was to "confuse cause and effect."

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments

1. Above Suspicion? Facts, Myths, and Lies about Jews and Crime
2. The Construction of “Jewish Criminality” in Nazi Germany
3. The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of the Ghettos
4. Inverting the Innocent and the Criminal in Concentration Camps
5. Re-presenting Zionism as the Apex of Global Conspiracy
6. Lingering Stereotypes and Jewish Displaced Persons
7. Jewish DPs Confronting the Law: Prescriptions, Self-Perceptions, and Pride of Self-Control

Epilogue: The Estonia Enigma
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Making excellent use of rich archival resources, Berkowitz has constructed a tightly argued study. . . . A worthwhile, suggestive investigation that belongs in every library."—Choice

Editorial Reviews

Making excellent use of rich archival resources, Berkowitz has constructed a tightly argued study. . . . A worthwhile, suggestive investigation that belongs in every library.

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