This query reaches out to different dimensions of the past. The prehistory of Nazidom as well as the first years of Hitler’s regime have been scrutinized by historians for signs indicating a readiness on the part of the Nazi movement to implement a program of destruction, or a resolve on the part of Hitler to carry out such a program in the simple, physical sense. Next, the spotlight has been turned on German antisemitism of the last decades of the 19th century, and its forerunners in the romantic nationalism of the early 19th century, there to detect the seeds of Nazism and its ideology of Jew-hatred. Some have gone further, attempting an analysis of the German mentality as reflected in typical representatives of the German Geist like Luther, Hegel, Wagner, or Nietzsche, and meaning to reveal an innate tendency toward tyranny, totalitarianism, and social intolerance. Indeed, the inquiring mind has not stopped at the German border. The teachings of the Christian churches since the Middle Ages, and Jewish-Gentile relations since antiquity, have been examined for an answer to the frightening riddle of the present. Though a connection between past history and the climax represented by the Holocaust has not always been explicitly asserted, virtually no contemporary historical, sociological, or philosophical analysis of early antisemitism ignores the symbolic presence of the six million dead of Auschwitz and Treblinka.

Now, remoteness in time does not of itself exclude a possible connection between two phenomena, and there can be no doubt that the history of Jewish-Gentile relations since antiquity does have a bearing on the Holocaust—in what sense, we shall explore later on. Still, the antinomy persists between the feeling of having been taken by surprise by the events of the Holocaust when they occurred and the inclination, after the fact, to reconstruct those events in such a way as to make them appear inevitable. This antinomy is often overcome by asserting that some people, at least, had foreseen the events in question, but then-warnings went unheeded.

In 1945, when the horrors of the Holocaust were already fully known, I heard Arnold Zweig quoting what he himself had told the Zionist leader Menahem M. Ussishkin during a visit to Jerusalem in 1932, when the ascendance of Hitler seemed imminent—namely, that this would lead to the total destruction of German Jewry. Yet the book written by Arnold Zweig shortly after Hitler’s rise to power, Bilanz der deutschen Judenheit [“The Balance Sheet of German Jewry”] attests that his real views at the time were not so clear-cut. Zweig did fear the downfall of German Jewry, and saw a danger to leftist intellectuals like himself, but he believed that a man like Martin Buber still had a chance to fight for the ideal of religious socialism in Germany, and Zweig strongly enjoined Buber to continue his work. Zweig himself left Berlin and settled in Haifa in 1934; from Palestine he commented (in the newly-published correspondence between him and Sigmund Freud) on the events in Europe, taking every setback in Hitler’s advance as a sure sign of his pending downfall. In quoting what he later claimed he had said to Ussishkin, I am by no means suggesting that Zweig in 1945 was not telling the truth. What often occurs in such cases is that statements uttered under certain circumstances assume, in retrospect, a weight they were far from having carried in their original setting.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, leader of “right-wing” Zionism in the pre-State era, is often credited by his followers with having had a remarkable prescience of the catastrophe awaiting European Jewry; it is he who is said to have coined the phrase, “Liquidate the Galut [Diaspora] or the Galut will liquidate you.” Indeed, rereading Jabotinsky’s speeches from the years preceding World War II, one comes across sentence after sentence that sounds like an apprehension of coming doom. But what did these warnings mean in their original context? This great patriot tried to prod his audience into a more activist Zionist stance than the Jewish leadership at the time thought possible, or even contemplated. In the late 30’s he urged the “evacuation” of Polish Jewry, and would not have hesitated to enlist the help of the antisemitic Polish government in implementing his plan. Jabotinsky pointed to the plight of German Jewry, then leaving Germany because of the pressure of anti-Jewish legislation. as evidence of the urgent necessity of his scheme, and he used phrases that seem to us to indicate foreknowledge of the Holocaust.

Why did no one realize that European Jewry was doomed, as we today, looking back, know it to have been?

But what Jabotinsky actually had in mind in speaking of a worsening of the Jewish position was the aggravation of economic, social, and political measures against the Jewish community in Poland itself, not the possible conquest of Poland by the Nazis. Together with many Jewish intellectuals he shared a conviction that Nazi rule was fragile and would crumble through internal difficulties or at the first clash with a foreign power. How unaware he was of even the near future is clearly demonstrated in the very idea of “evacuation”: he suggested transferring a million-and-a-half Polish Jews to Palestine over the course of the next ten years. Jabotinsky’s vision, inspired though it was by a deep passion for the welfare of his people, was as limited as anyone’s by the impenetrability of the future.

Analysis of these two instances confirms once again the intrinsic dichotomy between past and future: only in retrospect do statements made about the future assume the nature of prophecy. Nevertheless, instead of solving our problem, this observation only succeeds in placing it in sharper focus. Why should human reason be incapable of reaching a proper conclusion about the logic of events in advance of their culmination? Why did no one realize that European Jewry was doomed, as we today, looking back, know it to have been?

Up to January 1933 one could know only that Hitler might come to power, one could not know that he would—even though, in retrospect, the historian may present the Fuehrer’s accession as a chain of events following each other with the force of inevitable necessity. In November 1932, Hitler’s fate still seemed to depend on the votes of millions, and indeed the elections of that month indicated a diminishing trend in his popular support. The economic crisis, one of the main factors through which Nazi propaganda appealed to adherents, had passed its peak; the number of unemployed was clearly decreasing. There were defections from the party and Hitler was having difficulty keeping it solvent and retaining his authority over the various internal groupings. That power fell into his hands nevertheless was due to the condition of the other political parties in Germany, which, split between the Left and the Right, were incapable of establishing a working majority. It was at this juncture that President Hindenburg charged Hitler with forming a coalition government together with the non-Nazi right wing, which accepted the deal out of the belief that it could keep him in check.

In retrospect Hindenburg’s decision to call upon Hitler to form a government is rightly regarded by historians as one of the most fateful decisions not only in the history of Germany and of the Jewish people, but also in the history of the world community. Yet the very expression “fateful” indicates that the full significance of the step was bound up with its future consequences. Contemporaries may have felt it to be decisive but could only speculate where it might lead. Some leftist intellectuals, it is worth remembering, conspicuously represented by Jews like Leopold Schwarzschild, the editor of the influential Tagebuch, had long recommended that Hitler be allowed to come to power and thus be given the opportunity to fail and seal his doom. But even disregarding such fancies (typical of the too-clever intellectual), the significance of the event could only be assessed according to what was inherent in its time.

This was momentous enough, to be sure. The Nazi accession to power meant the domination of Germany by a party that denied the principles on which the former government and the established order had been founded: the principles of democracy, parliamentarianism, racial tolerance, and equality before the law. Instead, the Nazi party avowed the principle of leadership, i.e., government by a self-appointed elite that owed allegiance to one man whose command was law, and this man had given indication enough of his irrational visions and his passionate hatred of his enemies, and especially of Jews. Even so, public declarations by even the most revolutionary parties have never been taken as actual guidelines to be used in implementing practical policies. In this case, even those who supported Hitler very often did so with the tacit assumption that although he might indeed reverse some of the trends of postwar Germany, he would relinquish his more radical ambitions and become more restrained as he assumed responsibility for the conduct of affairs of state.

How could people have been so foolish as not to have seen what was in store for them at the hands of Adolf Hitler? After all, he did nothing but execute what he had said he would do, in so many words, in Mein Kampf. The answer to this frequently asked question is not that people did not read the Fuehrer’s voluminous treatise; whether they did or not, there was ample opportunity to learn his declared intentions through other channels during the propaganda years and from occasional utterances during the first years of his rule. Nor does the answer lie in the well-documented phenomenon of partial apperception or the selective acceptance of what reaches one’s senses and understanding. The fact is that an essential difference exists between announcing an intention and resolving to act upon it. Nobody, including Hitler himself, could know whether he would ever have the opportunity to carry out his intentions and how far he would go. Only in retrospect does this essential difference tend to become blurred, and thereby contribute again to misjudgments of the past.

This whole complex of problems can be illuminated by an episode during Hitler’s bid for power. In the winter of 1926 an exclusive club of well-to-do, conservative-minded citizens of Hamburg, the Nationalklub, invited Hitler to give an address on his political philosophy. Hitler was then in the first stages of reorganizing the party after the failure of the 1923 putsch, which had landed him in prison and placed him in temporary political eclipse. He was not yet free to make public speeches everywhere in Germany but had succeeded in attracting attention as a consistent opponent of the ruling parties of the country and, indeed, a radical detractor of the republic itself; in that respect he conformed to the principles avowed by the members of Hamburg’s Nationalklub. His two-and-a-half hour speech to the club was taken down in stenogram, but remained unpublished until 1960.

As Professor Werner Jochmann, who edited the text, has observed, it is a most revealing document, not only for what it shows about Hitlerite propaganda, but even more for the way in which that propaganda was received. In his speech Hitler attributed the weakness of postwar Germany exclusively to the influence of Marxism, which, he held, had undermined the former strength of the country, and the eradication of which he saw as the highest national goal, worthy of the support of his listeners. The Hamburg patricians shared with Hitler a resentment of the prevailing social-democratic order, although few if any of them could have wished to replace it with an even more radical order, of an even less aristocratic character; nevertheless, a common ground was created between them, enabling the speaker to secure the future support of at least some members of his audience.

Now, Hitler’s speech as it has been analyzed by Professor Jochmann clearly reveals all the radical elements of his program and points the way to its execution. Properly understood, the speech should have frightened away the conservative audience of the Nationalklub.

Professor Jochmann, puzzled by the divergence between what the speech contained and what the audience apparently took from it, theorizes that the listeners paid attention only to what was in harmony with what they themselves felt and thought but neglected and overlooked what would have repelled them had they understood it properly. This explanation may be correct as far as it goes; the trouble with it is that it draws once again on a knowledge of events since 1926 and attributes to Hitler’s words a weight absorbed, so to speak, from later history. Thus, for example, although Jews are not mentioned in the speech at all, one cannot help thinking gruesomely of Auschwitz as one reads Hitler’s remarks on the Darwinian struggle between the strong and the weak, and his assertion of the natural right of the former to overpower and eliminate the latter. Yet this, from the historian’s view, is an impermissible predating of notions and events. We may well recognize in the Hamburg speech the potentiality of Hitler’s later deeds, but we must not disregard the ever-present fact of contingency, on which the realization of his intentions rested.

To deny the possibility of foreseeing the course of events is not to imply there is no way of assessing a situation and its potential dangers in a more or less intelligent fashion. Such an appraisal has to be based on an analysis of factors at work in the present that take into account the chance of possible shifts and changes in the future. In the case of German Jewry, obviously no real agreement was reached either on a diagnosis of the situation or on a prescription for action. Contradictory recommendations were made and conflicting decisions taken by different people on the basis of their respective evaluations of the situation: to emigrate or not to emigrate, choosing instead to weather the storm until the Nazis moderated their attitude toward the Jews or fell from power; to cooperate with the regime in order to facilitate emigration and save as many Jewish possessions as possible—the line taken by the official leadership of the Jewish Agency—or to support instead a worldwide boycott of German wares in order to hasten an economic debacle—the passionately defended position of the Revisionists. The records of the Nazi period, especially in its later phases of ghettoization and deportation, are full of even more frightful dilemmas; in extreme cases, the decision to send some people to death in the hope of saving others depended upon an assessment of what was in store for all concerned.

The historian who wishes faithfully to record and judge the struggle of those involved has first of all to explain people’s behavior on the basis of what they themselves knew at the time; whether a particular decision was rational, judicious, moral, must be determined by whatever yardstick the participants themselves would have been ready to submit to. Naturally, people will be found to have acted on different levels of rationality, and where moral considerations are involved, they will be found to have possessed different degrees of courage and character. But moral judgment can only be pronounced on individuals when we have fully imagined the plight they were in, and that is why any such moral judgment has to be preceded by a reconstruction of the situation as exact as the historical sources will permit. To my mind the basic fault of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem lies in her having skipped the stage of historical reconstruction in her rush to pass judgment on the actors. Lacking a concrete conception of what happened, and exploiting the wisdom of hindsight, she assumed a stance of moral superiority to which nobody who was not tested in the situation could possibly have a claim.

This prognosis, though supported by logic, was only partially fulfilled. If the index of integration was the disappearance of peculiarly Jewish choices of profession, or patterns of family and communal life, or cultural traits, the prophets of total assimilation had reason to be disappointed. For the Jewish minority, even where it had been granted formal emancipation at one stroke, as in France and Holland, remained a clearly recognizable subgroup even after the lapse of three or four generations. It distinguished itself through concentration in certain fields of economic activity, through the tendency to endogamy, through communal solidarity, and of course through religious nonconformism. Jewish social existence, in other words, still presented a problem, possibly an even more perplexing one than heretofore, when accepted theological conceptions had sufficed to explain Jewish origin and character, had justified Jewish apartness and inferior social status, and had looked forward to an ultimate Jewish conversion to Christian truth. Once the elements of this old ideology were confuted by rationalism, a new theory was needed to account for Jewish peculiarity.

Such a theory was provided by rationalism itself, and was based on an ethnological conception of history spelled out most eloquently by Voltaire. According to this theory, the conduct and fate of tribes and nations could best be understood through a study of their literary and other cultural productions. Jewish religion, and especially its literary fountainhead, the Bible, remained the clue to understanding Jewish history, but not in the traditional way of seeing the Jews as the chosen people forsaken because of their religious failure, but rather as a documentation of Jewish character. Voltaire was convinced that, by exposing the immoral, indeed the barbaric, character of biblical figures, he had found the clue to the behavior of Jews in his own time and throughout the ages. In effect he simply took over from the Christian tradition its centuries-old stereotype of the Jew, finding an explanation for it that accorded with his own philosophic outlook.

Here we come to the crucial point of transition from Christian to post-Enlightenment antisemitism. Jews entered the modern world under the auspices of rationalism, a doctrine positing that neither national origin nor religious affiliation should bar the way of the individual in state and society. Jews were given a chance to rehabilitate themselves, to move away from their marginal position in society and thus dispel the prejudices that clung to their image and their very name. Such rehabilitation indeed took place more or less completely in some countries. In Holland, for instance, where, as elsewhere, Jewish emancipation was regarded apprehensively and strong arguments were marshaled against it, emancipation once achieved was scarcely ever questioned; Dutch Jews were able to find their place in the social structure while retaining a good deal of their ethnic and cultural make-up. In Britain, social barriers against Jews remained strong for a long time; still, their status as legitimate citizens became firmly established in time and negative reflections on Jewish status and character, though sometimes strongly voiced, never really gained ground.

In France, Austria, and Hungary, and most conspicuously in Germany, on the other hand, initial misgivings on the subject of Jewish emancipation were never wholly silenced. From the very beginning, public opinion wavered between the utopian expectation of absolute assimilation through the effacement of Jewish characteristics, and a disbelief in Jewish willingness or ability to shed real or alleged character traits. The first generations of emancipated and half-emancipated Jews were exposed to permanent scrutiny to see whether they would live up to expectations or, on the contrary, end by confirming the skeptics in their conviction of the futility of this social experiment.

Among opponents of Jewish emancipation, the anti-Jewish sallies of a Voltaire were only one of many varied ideological arguments to be drawn upon. Voltaire’s anti-Jewish remarks were themselves a sequel or byproduct of his anti-Christian campaign, yet in combination the two offered a prototype for a kind of pagan antisemitism that made Judaism responsible even for the evils caused by Christianity.

At the other end of the scale was the combination of Jew-hatred with a revived interest in Christianity itself, the attempt to salvage Christianity from the historical and rationalistic critique of the Enlightenment. All such reconstructions of Christianity as a religious Weltanschauung or system of morality took Judaism as a foil to demonstrate the superiority of the religion that had supplanted it. Even where Christian dogmas and traditions were denied or ignored, the inferiority of Judaism was taken for granted, and this inferiority could then be ascribed by transference to those living individuals who were attached to Judaism if only through their racial origin. Diluted Christianity thus served as one of the most fertile grounds of antisemitic theories; as the historian Simon Bernfeld has observed, “Even those Christian scholars who maintain that Jesus never existed concur that the Jews crucified him.”

The main arena for antisemitism of this kind was Protestant Germany, but it existed in Catholic countries as well. In France, the politician and journalist Edouard Drumont, the central figure of French antisemitism, embraced Catholicism not out of a conviction of its religious truth but rather because it was, he held, a central part of French mentality—a frame of mind to which he declared Jews incapable of conforming even if they were to convert. Thus were explicit notions of race smuggled into the discussion, giving ideological support to the assumption of a deficiency in the Jewish character that had long been implied in the theological traditions of Christianity and in popular European culture.