Germany’s Hep! Hep! Riots
The Beginning of Modern Antisemitism
The success of the far-right in elections recently has led German politicians to warn that the country risks returning to its dark past. By dark past they probably mean the horrors of the Nazi years. But, like many other countries in Europe, Germany’s dark past began long before the events of the last century.
Throughout the Middle Ages, antisemitism in Europe was expressed in religious terms. Jews, so the Church believed, were responsible for the death of Jesus and, until they recognised the error of their ways, they were condemned to suffering and persecution. The expulsions and massacres of Jews, the blood libels, the accusations of well-poisoning and of spreading plague were all based on one thing: on perceived Jewish perfidy in refusing to convert to Christianity.
The Church treated the conversion of the Jews to Christianity as a priority; without it they believed the world could not experience the final redemption. It was necessary, therefore, to keep them alive and, in the hope that they would soon convert, to grant them certain rights. In the year 598 a bishop in Sicily seized a synagogue and consecrated it as a church. Pope Gregory insisted this was illegal and ordered the bishop to pay the Jewish community the value of the property he had stolen. He wrote that “there ought to be no licence for them to do anything in their synagogues beyond what is decreed by law, so neither damage nor any cost ought to be brought upon them, contrary to justice and equity”.
This time however, in many places the riots were started by the middle classes, even by students and their professors.
As reason and science progressed, as the centrality of religion subsided, the nature of antisemitism began to change. We see it even in the Merchant of Venice where Shylock is portrayed, not in religious terms as a Christ-killer, but economically, as a usurer (actually it is more complicated than that, as you will know if you’ve read my book, Shylock’s Venice). By the early 19th century, antisemitism had almost completely stopped being about religion. Instead, it was driven by resentment, by a nonsensical belief that Jews were all rich, powerful and secretly in control of the world. By and large, it remains the same today.
One of the earliest occurrences of this new, modern antisemitism was in Germany in 1819. It came in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat and the 1815 Congress of Vienna, a conference of nations held to create a post-war political settlement in Europe. Jews in France had already been emancipated during the French Revolution and Napoleon had carried the spirit of emancipation across Europe. After his defeat, Jewish communities feared that their rights would be taken away from them. They persuaded the Congress of Vienna to pass a resolution in favour of Jewish emancipation.
Germany in those days was not a single country, it was a mosaic of many different states and principalities. The resolution at the Congress of Vienna specifically forbade these German states from once again restricting Jewish rights, as they had done before Napoleon.
The Congress of Vienna took place at a time of great economic hardship. A famine in 1816 had left many German peasants in debt, unemployed and with the cost of bread rising sharply. Rather than enabling Jews to live freely in the German states, as the Congress of Vienna had intended, the hardships led to an anti-Jewish backlash.
In 1819 a wave of riots broke out in the city of Würzburg, in the German state of Bavaria. For three days mobs ran about the city, attacking Jews, looting and destroying Jewish premises. Two people were killed and around 20 wounded. As they ran, crazed, about the streets the rioters chanted Hep! Hep! The cry is probably an acronym, formed from a chant used in the Crusades, when mobs of crusaders terrorised Jewish communities, screaming Hierosolyma est perdita (Jerusalem is lost).
The Jews in Würzburg fled in terror, hiding for days on end in the countryside. Meanwhile the riots spread, first to other towns in Bavaria and then across Germany, among them Frankfurt, Mannheim, Hamburg, Beyreuth and Cologne. Then disturbances broke out further afield, as far as Copenhagen in Denmark, Cracow and Danzig to the east, and southwards to the Styrian city of Graz. Often the police and army stood by and watched, or intervened reluctantly. In those places where the police reacted with vigour, the riots soon stopped.
No satisfactory explanation has ever been given as to why the Hep! Hep! riots, as they are now called, broke out in Würzburg. There was nothing particularly different about the town that made it erupt in hostility towards the Jews. Jews in Germany were not rich, 90% of them were said to be very poor, many were beggars. There were many more rich Jews in Prussia than in Bavaria, yet no riots took place there.
However, there was something notably different about the riots themselves. In the past, riots and disturbances had been peasant-led: impoverished, unhappy people rebelling against their lot. This time in many places the riots were started by the middle classes, even by students and their professors. The very fact that their slogan Hep! Hep! was Latin in origin suggests an intellectual dimension to the riots.
The Hep! Hep! riots were the most serious outbreak of anti-Jewish unrest since the Middle Ages. And they appear to have been wholly economic and social, they had nothing whatsoever to do with the Church. They were modern, not medieval, antisemitism.
The Jewish reaction to the riots is similarly hard to explain. The Frankfurt Jewish magazine Shulamit ignored them altogether, even though the Jews of the town had suffered badly during the violence. Others spoke of the riots as if they had been directed against different sorts of Jews, as they hadn’t been directed against them. Denial was as ubiquitous as fear and anger.
The only constructive response came from a small group of Jewish intellectuals. In 1822 the 25 year old philosophy graduate, Eduard Gans, a young man from a privileged, wealthy background in Berlin, published a report on behalf of the Society of the Culture and Science of the Jews, a group of which he was one of seven founding members.
In his report he asked what the role and purpose of Jews in contemporary European society was. Europe, he argued, was made up of many nationalities and classes, yet there were no firm dividing lines between groups, each interacted with each other. Every European, he said, lived within their own class, yet remained in touch with every other class of society. The only exception to this, he argued, was the Jews. United only among themselves, they were on the outside of European society. Unintegrated, they were, in his words, obstinately, self-centeredly independent. The Hep! Hep! riots, he inferred, may have looked like “incomprehensible hatred and re-awakened barbarism”, but they were nothing of the sort. They were in fact, he argued, the symptom of a struggle, of a demand by Europe that Jews integrate into wider society. “For precisely this struggle is the full triumph of world history’s necessary development.”
Gans argued that those Jews who remained outside European society, thereby impeding the flow of history, would not endure. Those (who he assumed would be the majority) who would integrate would be richer for it, not poorer. Yet, despite his desire for Jews to integrate into European society, and his willingness to do so himself, he found himself obstructed. He tried to get a job teaching in a German university but he could not, because he was a Jew. Nor could he get one in Belgium, France or England. In frustration he converted to Christianity in Paris. He immediately got a job.
Gans had wanted to integrate into European society but European society demanded more of him. It required him to abandon his identity as a Jew altogether. It turned out that the modern antisemitism which he had seen merely as a necessary prelude to Jewish integration, was far more insidious than he had imagined. As we now know.
The Hep! Hep! riots were not the symptom of a struggle by Europe. They were the prelude to far worse to come. The question is still moot as to whether modern Germany risks returning to its dark past. What is certain, though, is that its dark past began long before the 20th century.