The Man who Ridiculed an Antisemite
How Joseph Bloch fought for a more tolerant world
Joseph Bloch spent his life fighting antisemitism. Not just against antisemitic incidents or individuals. He also strove to find a political solution that would put an end to antisemitism once and for all. Astonishingly, it brought him into conflict with other Jews, both Zionists and with liberals, who had their own solutions and didn’t agree with his.
Joseph Samuel Bloch was born in 1850 in the Galician town of Dukla, now in the south of Poland. He studied to become a rabbi and was appointed to a congregation in Austria, in a suburb of Vienna. He first came to public attention in 1882 when he was sued for libel by August Rohling, a Christian professor of Hebrew archaeology at Charles University in Prague. Rohling, an avowed antisemite, had claimed, at a sham trial of 15 Jews accused of murdering a 14 year old girl, that he could prove from the Talmud that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals.
Bloch took up the cudgels against Rohling. He accused him of making up quotes from the Talmud. He declared that Rohling didn’t know how to read the Talmud, that he could not understand its complicated mix of Hebrew and Aramaic languages nor understand its arguments. He drove his point home by publicly challenging Rohling to translate a single, randomly selected page from the Talmud, offering him 3,000 florins as an incentive for doing so. Rather than accepting the challenge, exposing his ignorance and subjecting himself to public ridicule, Rohling sued Bloch for libel.
The preparations for the trial went on for two years. Bloch prepared a document containing 319 quotations from the Talmud that he translated into German, while his lawyer wrote a manual for the defence, showing how these quotations disproved Rohling. The media took an interest; one newspaper in Vienna published a special edition containing Bloch’s refutations of Rohling; 300,000 copies were sold in one day. Although antisemitism was rife in Austria at the time, the level of interest in the trial showed that Bloch had tremendous support. Two weeks before the trial was due to open, Rohling called it off. Bloch had won.
Bloch was now famous He saw an opportunity to use his victory to bring the fight against antisemitism into the political arena. He gave up his position as a rabbi and founded the Austrian Weekly, a newspaper that he hoped would strengthen Jewish self-respect and spread knowledge of Jews and Judaism, both amongst the Jewish community and in the outside world. A year later he was elected to the Reichsrat, the upper house of the Austrian parliament.
In 1884 he was instrumental in creating the Austria-Israelite Union, a national body to combat antisemitism and defend Jewish rights. The Union’s members promoted the idea that one could be both proudly Jewish and a full participant in Austrian society.
Unlike the Zionists, who argued that the only solution to antisemitism was an independent Jewish state, and the assimilationists who believed in Judaism as just another religion within modern society, the Union wanted the best of both worlds. They campaigned for a political solution that would allow Jews to be loyal and active Austrian citizens while remaining committed to their Jewish identity.
The tension between assimilation and Zionism, or Jewish nationalism, was a feature of late 19th century Europe. These days, most diaspora communities have found a middle path, very similar to Bloch’s ideal; we are fully involved as citizens in the culture, events and politics of the lands in which we live and at the same time we identify and behave as Jews, according to our various interpretations of what that means. But in the 19th century, a period when Jews in many lands were still fighting for civil rights, Bloch provoked the anger of both the Zionists and the assimilationists. The Zionists, saw him as a traitor, opposing the idea of independent Jewish nationhood. The assimilationists believed he was impeding their chances of being fully accepted by the Austrian people. The only options that most people could see to the problem of antisemitism were at the extremes, either full blooded Jewish nationalism or abandoning one’s identity altogether and becoming just like everyone else. A middle way did not seem possible.
Joseph Bloch was motivated by antisemitism but the campaigns he conducted were not just dedicated to the problems experienced by Jews. Austria at the time had a nationalist Catholic government that considered its own people superior to those of neighbouring, Protestant Germany. In response Germany was developing its own nationalist ideology. Bloch argued that in the multinational, multiethnic Austria-Hungarian Empire, the belief among one set of people that they were superior to another was a threat that endangered every minority, not just Jews. He insisted that to concentrate exclusively on the problems that Jews faced, as the Zionists and assimilationists did, was ultimately self-defeating.
This was not the time, he told his newspaper’s readers, to focus on any one specific ethnic or religious group. All minorities were in the same boat. He argued that if every nationality saw those from a different background as “an inferior being on account of his race, language and descent, as an individual who does not count . . . . with whom you carry on a life or death struggle, why should the Semites enjoy exceptional immunity?” He said that Jews, who lived in every country in the Austria-Hungarian empire, would always be at risk, along with all other minorities, unless nationalism as an ideology was defeated. As long as Germans, Austrians, Czechs or anyone else saw themselves as superior, they would never accept people who were not from their nationality as equals. He declared that, “It follows then as a logical conclusion as well as a command of political wisdom that we must take up a position outside of all national parties.”
The solution for Bloch was the creation of a multiethnic Austria, not dominated by any religion or nationality that regarded people from a different ethnicity or religion as less Austrian. This was necessary, not just for Jews, he believed, but for the very survival of Austria-Hungary, in a Europe that was increasingly fracturing into racial and nationalist groups.
For most of his political and editorial career, Joseph Bloch fought an uphill battle. Nationalism and factionalism continued to grow in Europe, while in the Jewish sphere, amid rising antisemitism and pogroms, Zionism or integration seemed to be the only choices. The world was not ready for Bloch’s ideas. It wasn’t until the outbreak of World War I that he felt optimistic; at last, it seemed to him, Austria would coalesce around a single unifying fact, everyone united in the battle against the enemy.
He was wrong. The defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary led to the dismantling of the Empire and the rise of a nationalism in Germany on a scale never seen before. Rather than becoming a multiethnic land not dominated by any religion or nationality, Austria willingly succumbed to Nazism. Bloch lived just long enough to understand what was happening; he died in 1923, his dreams in tatters. It was only in the late 20th century that his vision of tolerant multiethnic societies began to appear possible. Today, with the renewed surge of hard-right nationalism, who knows how long the possibility may last?