Part 1: The German Socialism of Eugen Dühring[1]

Eugen Dühring (1833–1921) was born in Berlin the son of a Prussian bureaucrat. He studied law, philosophy and political econ­omy at the University of Berlin. Although he began his career by practicing law (1856–59), he was forced to give up this profession at the age of twenty eight when he was blinded through a congenital defect.

However, Dühring accepted his fate heroically declaring that “[this catastrophe] did not dampen but increased the enthusiasm with which I had sketched out for myself even previously a human vocation of intellectual scope—my goal was my consolation—of all the thoughts that remained remote from me. In my later life it has been up to now the remotest to complain about my blindness.”

Dühring took his doctorate in 1861 at the University of Berlin with a dissertation entitled De Tempore, Spatio, Causalitate atque de Analysis Infinitesimalis Logica (On Time, Space, Causality and on Infinitesimal Logical Analysis). In 1863 he became university lec­turer in philosophy and national economy. His earliest published works were national economic ones influenced by his reading of the German-American economist Friedrich List (1789–1846) and the American Henry Charles Carey (1793–1879) who were both in fa­vour of organic economics with a strong emphasis on protectionism and national interest.

Dühring’s economic doctrines are detailed in Kapital und Ar­beit (Capital and Labor) (Berlin, 1865), Careys Umwälzung der Volkswirtschaftshehre (München, 1865), Kritische Grundlegung der Volkswirtschaftslehre (Berlin, 1866), and Die Verkleinerer Careys (Breslau, 1867). Already the ethical orientation of his economic studies was revealed in his early publication of a work entitled Der Wert des Lebens (Breslau, 1865). Two further philosophical publications (Natürliche Dialektik, Berlin, 1865, and Kritische Geschichte der Philosophie, Berlin, 1869) were followed by yet other works on national economy, the Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie und des Sozialismus (Berlin, 1871), and the Cursus der National- und Sozialökonomie (Berlin, 1873). A fuller elaboration of his philosophical system was presented in the Cursus der Philosophie (Leipzig, 1875).

While Dühring’s lectures were very successful, he adopted from the start a critical attitude to the university and its institutions, and the improbability of his acquiring a professorship as a result of this conflict only sharpened his attacks. Finally, in 1877, under the pres­sure created by his attacks on German universities and their pro­fessors as well as those on Helmholtz in his Kritische Geschichte der allgemeinen Principien der Mechanik, (Berlin, 1873), Dühring was removed from the university.

This dismissal was later attributed by him to the machination of the Jewish elements in the university and of their influential agents in the press. His later publications as a private scholar — including two works on literature, Die Überschätzung Lessings und dessen Anwaltschaft für die Juden (Karlsruhe, 1881) and Die Grössen der modernen Literatur (Leipzig, 1893), as well as Die Judenfrage (Karls­ruhe, 1881), an intellectual autobiography, Sache, Leben und Feinde (Karlsruhe, 1882), and a work on religion, Der Ersatz der Religion durch Volkommeneres (Karlsruhe, 1883) — represent his comprehen­sive treatment of the problem of Jewish involvement in European society. His major interest in social and political economy however is reinforced in his last works, a second edition of Capital und Arbeit entitled Waffen, Capital, Arbeit (Leipzig, 1906) and Soziale Rettung (Leipzig, 1907), which are consolidations of his economic and phil­osophic positions.

Dühring battled for reform in all fields of life, being exceptionally qualified to comment in an expert way on most of them. And it must be noted that, while the Jewish mentality is emphatically located as the root of the evil of society in his later works, his anti-Judaism was evident long before his dismissal from the university, in his earliest economic and philosophical works. His social ideal was based on a moral cultivation of the individual spirit which would liberate the personality from all external and internal hindrances and permit it to form a vital culture. To this end Dühring founded a journal called Der Personalist und Emanzipator in 1899, designed to strengthen the human-individual spirit in its opposition to the external powers of nature as well as to those of exploitative social groups, especially the Jews.

Unlike most of the other philosophical anti-Semites, such as Fichte and Schopenhauer and Chamberlain, Dühring was not an idealist but a realist. He dismissed metaphysics as being one of the sources of the superstitious errors of mankind and his mathemati­cal denial of infinity was reflected in his stern view of human life as being empirically and socially determined. However, even in this realism, Dühring retained a vestige of metaphysics since he posited behind all temporality a “primordial being” from which the universe evolves. Only, for human beings in their terrestrial condition, the actually present is far more valuable than speculations regarding the ulti­mate source of reality.

What takes the place of metaphysical ques­tions in Dühring’s work is the Socratean imperative of morality. For, all life, while materially manifested, is informed with vitality and activity, categories which cannot be reduced to matter. Man-made institutions like religion are to be removed only because they are invariably encrusted with superstitions and act as a stumbling block to the full realization of the human personality.

In economics, the Marxist view of class-warfare is to be similarly considered as a dangerous superstition which obscures in convolut­ed dialectic the real sympathy that should and could exist between employers and workers and which alone forms the basis of a healthy social ethos. In this, Dühring was one with the other ‘German socialists’, in­cluding Oswald Spengler (Preuβentum und Sozialismus) and Wer­ner Sombart (Deutscher Sozialismus) who paved the way for Na­tional Socialist economic theory.

Like the anti-democratic thinkers of the Weimar Republic, both Conservative and Socialist, Dühring considered parliamentarism as an outmoded and dangerous system. The Eng­lish Parliament he characterised as a “Repräsentation des Raub- und Raffsystems” (representation of the system of robbery and money-grubbing), since the Tory and Whig parties were nothing but the representatives of belligerent and colonial robbery and capitalis­tic-commercial rapacity. The French parliament was even more basely bourgeois in its representation of financial and stock-ex­change interests. In Germany, parliamentarism receives its hateful stamp from the swaggering Junker and Hebrew bourgeois elements of the so-called Social Democracy in which “one cannot speak of a real rejection of slavery, but which on the contrary uses the traditional familiarity of the masses to slavery to subject them to a party despotism and an exploitation by the parties.”[2] Parliamentary legislation too must be effectively curtailed in its attacks on the workers and their living conditions. Rather, he pro­posed free associations between the concerned parties that resemble economic communes and corporations.

Unlike Marx, Dühring did not consider the reformation of social relations as something that will arise through dialectical necessity from the increasing weakness of the working classes in an industrial society, for this is tantamount to expecting a miracle from the ex­ploitative tendencies of the capitalists. On the other hand, the workers themselves must strive to strengthen themselves through coalitions so as to achieve self-suffi­ciency. The coalitions or communes formed by workers will guaran­tee access of all to property and means of production. The focus is thus shifted away from the concept of personal property altogether to the personal use of this property. Thus owners of property can only own their property according to their individual capacity to do so and if they avoid all tendency to exploitation.

The precondition for the success of such workers’ coalitions, however, is the direction of all their efforts on behalf of the interests of the whole, of the public as a totality, and this can be effected perfectly only when the state enters in their support. The state must act as the mediator between the several socio-economic interests of the pop­ulation, especially since the latter cannot be adequately represented by political parties, which are not truly democratic at all but oli­garchic groupings in which “a considerable part of the people has a place only as a ruled and mostly anonymous mass.”[3] The leadership of the state can be accomplished only by the prevalence of another sense than that of profit-making such as is directive in the British political economy and in that of its followers on the continent.

The prime consideration of the state must be the totality of the as­pirations of the people. Dühring’s Socialitarian economics therefore is nation-bound and not an international economic one. Dühring commends the protective tariff economics of List and Carey, which, as opposed to free-trade economics, is an organic one and

more compatible with the logical consequences of the so­cialist instinct. The tariff party is conscious everywhere of a national interest; it is conscious of a genuine po­litical economy; it does not break up into atomism and individualism that benefit only exploiting individuals.[4]

The Socialitarian principle is thus essentially the replacement of the egoistic individualism of force with the harmonious operation of the sovereignty of the individual. The remedy of the present deplorable situation can be accom­plished therefore only when society is first revolutionized on an an­ti-egoistic basis.

In his discussion of the Jewish question, Dühring makes clear that this revolution may be identified with a revolution against the Jews, as the racial embodiment of self-interest, and points out that “In the country of origin of the French Revolution, in Judaized France, one hears the declaration that the next Revolution will be one against the Jews.”[5]

The fact that parliamentarism has increasingly been dominated by the influence of the Jews and the socialistic proletariat, that is, of those racial and social elements which are the most egoistic, leads Dühring to call for the overcoming of the “Jewish progress and Jun­ker reaction” which represent the system of avarice and rapacity. This can be accomplished only by a transitional dictatorship which gives political expression to the anger of the people. Dühring con­ceives of the bearer of such a dictatorship as an intellectually and morally outstanding person whose power is consolidated by armed force and by an elite of like-minded persons filled with the same sense of social justice. The task of this regime would be to create a fertile ground for true justice so that, even after its passing, the society may continue to develop itself in future through its purified spirit and will.

Thus, although Dühring began as a student of socialist doc­trines, he later rejected all forms of collectivism and maintained that true progress proceeds only from individual powerful personalities. Even where groups seem to be the bearers of creative activities, in the final analysis it is individuals at the head of those organisations in whom the entire association achieves its characteristic effect.

The state as an association itself is to be valued only as a check on the various economic associations active in society so that none exploits or damages the other. Dühring’s increasing reliance on the individual personality caused him in his later years to identify the classification of society according to property and interest as a result of the differences of opportunities for development of personal ca­pacity and character which are propagated through the generations by tradition and inheritance.

Unlike the socialists, Dühring considered all property related to personal accomplishment as vigorously to be defended against the acquisitive grasp of socialistic measures. All Marxist denials of social classifications are thus utopian, since a conflict of interests is indivisibly linked to the natural differences between man and man. Only one sort of differenti­ation is to be rejected, that based on violence. The Jewish socialist propaganda of class-warfare is only a result of the introduction of injustice into these natural differences. This injustice is concocted, in the final analysis, not from economic sen­timents but from the original opposition between a powerful warri­or nobility and a powerless slave group such as the Jews themselves have always been.  It is not surprising that the Jewish economy transvalues econom­ics through the subordination of the higher to the lower aspirations of the people.

The vital importance of the self-emancipation of the individual is reinforced in Dühring’s doctrine of morality freed from all superstitious religion. Considering the Judaic concept of Yahweh as that of a God of “transcendental terrorism,” Dühring sought to replace the Judeo-Christian ethos by a new social and economic feeling for justice. This entails the rejection first of all of all sorts of exploitation whereby the individual is exposed to harm from the robber-types of the society. The latter are directed by the desire for increasing indi­vidual profit, that is, by the cultivation of a ruthless egoism.

The true concept of justice therefore depends on the substitution of egoism by a radical antiegoism. Only on the ground of this sort of justice can a healthy society and culture develop, a social order in which “entire members would be bound by legal interests and would not aim at basing their own existence and power on the re­duction and destruction of other lives.”[6]

The reform of social justice, however, does not mean the simplis­tic socialist demand of equality for all, since rewards are always directly related to performance; what is to be avoided at all cost, however, are unjust encroachments on personal freedom and in­tegrity which represent the mastery of the exploitative members of the present society.[7] The reform of the “intellectually motivated will” to a better and nobler personal disposition will, in its anti-egoism, be naturally restrained in its inter-personal dealings and its partici­pation in the nexus of economic interests.

That the major representatives of the exploitative economy are Jews Dühring never once doubted. In the Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie und des Sozialismus, he comments on the commer­cial ethos of the present:

It denies in no way its Semitic relationship and, even though the discernment that we have to bring to the settling of the question of egoism is clear, we cannot attribute an understanding of this to those who, by virtue of their unchangeable egoism, seem to have no organ for scientific reason and for nobler motives in this direction.

This “theoretical obtuseness” of the Jews is an intellectual fortifi­cation “behind which has been entrenched up to now the apotheosis of egoism, the glorification of the art of cheating, and, in general, the entire celebration of the celebration of the fine strategy of cunning exploita­tion.”[8]

In his Cursus der Philosophie, he reiterates the commercial and financial role appropriated everywhere by the Jews after the fall of their own state and their parasitical infiltration into other nations. The historically attested “cruelty and crass egoism” of the Jews has thus seeped into the public through the press and even into legis­lation, which have been increasingly dominated by them. Indeed, “even parts of science which are especially ventured into by the Jews on account of their exclusion from others already reveal in many ways the stamp of the new form of business directed to profit.”[9] At first agreeing to a subordinate position in exchange for the privilege of making money through underhanded means, and then gradually currying favour with the power-holders through their increasing fi­nancial advantages, the Jews have inexorably developed a mastery in their host societies. “To be a slave or to make slaves—that is the alternative of the peoples disposed to lack of freedom.” The “slave-form of religion” is thus the characteristic and influential contribu­tion of the Jews to intellectual history.

At the time of writing this work on philosophy, Dühring still be­lieved that socialism itself would be sufficient to counter the egoistic system of the Jews since it is based on the organic sensibility of the people which itself is radically opposed to the alien character of ex­ploitative Jewry. In fact, Dühring still hoped that, when society removed the sup­ports for the material egoism and exploitative activity of the Jews, the latter would be forced to live on their own work and not para­sitically on that of others. Moreover, he thought that, since his form of socialism, or Socialitarianism, would guarantee the economic in­dependence of women as well as men, the former would not enter into marriages of economic convenience with Jewish men any longer since, according to Dühring’s belief, there could be no “personal in­clination” thereto.[10] This would preclude ‘’the danger that the Jewish elements may exert some hateful influence on the physiology of the national character.” The removal of opportunities for the exploitative activity of the Jews would at the same time make possible in the long run “a grad­ual improvement of the ways of thought and feeling” of the Jews and equip them for “functions freed of egoism.”

This generous optimism of 1875 was, however, soon replaced by a more realistic understanding of the impossibility of the ethical im­provement of the Jews. Dühring’s, increasing concentration on the Jewish problem since the first publication of the Judenfrage in 1881 led to an increasing annoyance with the destructive alien element in European society until, in the final editions of the Judenfrage, he clearly maintained that, since the Jewish character was an un­changeable one, the only means that would be effective against them would have to be of a violent nature.

In the last edition of Judenfrage (1901), Dühring even suggested that all the specific social and political remedies proposed by him against the Jewish evil in the earlier editions were bound to be inadequate in the long run and must necessarily be reinforced by stronger means which do not permit the possibility of Jewish existence within European communities any longer. As he explained in Sache, Leben and Feinde, the Jewish mentality is a criminal one and its effect on the rest of society is that “the corruption of the senses and the spirit comes first and the lowering of the feeling for justice paves the way for the material ravaging and devouring. For this reason the answer to the Jewish question belongs not merely to economics but in general to life and to existence, in all contexts.”[11]

He now considered the Jewish question not merely in racial terms but in terms of the question of estates, especially those bearing arms and those those that are derived of them. This included the Junkers as a target of Dühring’s criticism, since they represented a segment of the exploitative population that would naturally have to be overcome: “Junker and priest, Jew and bourgeois, were to be analysed from different viewpoints but still in a similar way. . . . Crime has no right to existence and must be destroyed in its embodiments—that is the axiom from which I start everywhere, thus even in the questions of race and estate.”[12]

His animus against the Junker ruling class is due to his convic­tion that militarism and exploitation are the characteristics of an exploitative stratum that harms the peaceful occupation of the peas­ant: “the real peasant is directed to peace from his occupation it­self and . . . the unjustified belligerent disturbances throughout the world are based primarily on a weapon-bearing estate which has lived throughout history only by the sword, thus on the robbed or forced work of others.”[13]

He naturally concedes that even the working class could become degenerate and unworthy of consideration: “Even a working class that has degenerated in its estate can have forms which forfeit the right to existence as much as any other section.” Dühring’s final effort was to raise his reformatory idea to the status of a world-historical principle. The case of the Jews, however, was the “most serious”[14] since it revolved on “original natural defects and criminal natural creatures.”[15] The Jewish eman­cipation is meaningless since the Jews will never be free, for a

true emancipation worthy of the name is accomplished only where the personal freedom and integrity is established and secured fundamentally and in all contexts, but especially in the individual. Therefore, the emancipation of the Hebrews is the real and decisive one for man­kind; for, to remain exposed to the powers of lies and exploitation, of intellectual and material deception, indeed to fall victim to them to a certain degree through the laws themselves and for the sake of justice, so to speak, means to be not free. . . . To be free or not to be is our solution in all things and for all.[16]

Go to Part 2.

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[1] This essay is taken from the Introduction to my edition of Eugen Dühring, The Jewish Question as a racial, moral and cultural question, with a world-historical answer, London: Ostara Publications, 2019.

[2] Waffen, Capital, Arbeit, p. 73.

[3] Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie and des Sozialismus, p.486.

[4] Ibid. p.489.

[5] Die Judenfrage, (posthumous edition, ed. H. Reinhardt), Leipzig: O.R. Reisland, 1930, p.134.

[6] Soziale Rettung, p. 181.

[7] Thus Dühring also occasionally called his Socialitarian system an ‘Antikratic’ one (as opposed to an ‘Anarchic’ system).

[8] Ibid., p. 453.

[9] Ibid., p. 391.

[10] This was of course written a century ago, when the natural sense of the Europe­an peoples was still relatively uncorrupted by liberalistic indoctrination.

[11] Sache, Leben and Feinde, p. 281.

[12] p. 282.

[13] p. 512.

[14] p. 284.

[15] p. 283.

[16] p. 508f.

Postscript to The Three-Thousand-Year-Old Enigma

Igor Shafarevich

____________________________

Editor’s note: The following is Rolo Slavski’s translation of Igor Shafarevich’s “Postscript to The Three-Thousand-Year-Old Enigma.” The original citation is: Igor Shafarevich (2009), “Posleslovie k Trekhtysiacheletnei zagadke.”Nash sovremennik, No. 11. Nash sovremennik is a Russian literary magazine. Both footnotes were added by the editor.

I re-read my book on Jewish history (The Three-Thousand-Year-Old Enigma) and the feeling I experienced was one of dissatisfaction. Since the author (myself) has taken a stab at shedding light on such a broad historical phenomenon, I thought, he could have made more specific observations that shed light on the current situation and the possible future of the world. That’s what I want, to some extent, to try to make up for here. In this case, all the facts (including quotes) are taken from my book. Naturally, the conclusions I come to, to some extent, repeat the book (or are a refinement of the thoughts expressed there).

First of all, from all the facts collected in my book, it follows that no matter what peoples the Jews live among, they are always considered by these peoples to be dangerous strangers.

Of course, the relationship between the rich man and his debtor, the landowner and the peasant, etc., cause friction and often lead to ethnic conflicts. But it is striking that, along with the Armenian-Azerbaijani contradictions, friction between Russians and Ukrainians, etc. (throughout the entire period from which we have reliably dated sources), this other nation (or religious group? ) comes up. After all, this tension can be observed for about three thousand years! So it should be the subject of serious historical reflection. In periods of drastic change in the conditions of life, the same nation (or religious group?) often participates with unprecedented energy in these changes, and always as part of the more radical camp. (As could be seen in Germany during the “revolutionary situation” in the 1920s, and as happened in our country three times in the twentieth century: during the revolution of 1917 and its intensification, during the period of collectivization around 1930, and during time of “perestroika” in the 1990s). Moreover, as a result of such radical changes in life in our country, many millions of people died each time: peasants who defended their land, or peasants who no longer resisted, or just people (including children) who had not learned to “play by the new rules.”

The presentation of the facts itself can occur on various levels — from statements that are not substantiated and based on nothing (for example, Diodorus Siculus’s[1] and Manetho’s claim that the Jews are Egyptians infected with some kind of skin disease and expelled from Egypt) to a more correct, competent, albeit very cautious, discussion of a particular situation, like Walt and Mearsheimer’s work, The Israel Lobby, but where the same basic question is implied. The “question” is that a small part of the country’s population determines the most important aspects of its life. Actually, a similar point of view is confirmed by the most ancient (from reliably dated) Jewish religious texts. A wide range of means are being used around the world (at different times) to counter discussion of this “issue”: prisons, courts, executions, journalism and the media are used. The fact that the majority of peoples who have encountered Jewry perceive it as a potential source of danger is explained by the words of a contemporary (and published in Russia) author, D. Furman: “Everywhere, all over the world, the role of Jews in progressive and revolutionary movements has always been completely disproportionate to their share in the population. That is (in accordance with the point of view expressed in my book) fundamental changes in society are carried out according to certain general laws, and Jews cannot be considered their initiators in any way. But when the course of history leads to the breakdown of tradition, to a sharp change in life, then “progressive and revolutionary movements” arise, in which the role of the Jews “has always been completely out of proportion to their proportion in the population.”

As the material collected in my book shows, in the last few centuries the influence of Jews around the world has increased dramatically — this, in recent decades, is associated with a process called “globalization.” It seems that the theses of the German publicist W. Marr, who wrote (in the 19th century) in the book The Victory of Jewry over Germanism: “We are subdued, and besides, we are forbidden to talk about it,” seem to have been proven. How will other peoples of the world exist in such a situation? (After all, from many of the facts given in my book, it is clear that vindictiveness is an essential feature of Jewish psychology and their participation in “progressive and revolutionary movements” was often stimulated by the desire for revenge for obstacles to the transformation they desired.) Therefore, it can be assumed that the victory of that “progressive movement,” which is now led by Jews all over the world, will lead the world to terror, similar to that which raged in our country in the 20s and 30s of the last century. It seems that humanity has no strategy to counter this. But it seems to me that such a way is possible. I wanted to talk about it here — this is the main content of this work.

To assess the whole situation, it is important to note that the “Jewish question” existed, as it is explained in my book, about as long ago as can be traced using written sources. More precisely, in the era in which mankind existed in the form of states. (And we are not going to discuss a broader historical epoch.) Thus, a number of ancient authors refer to the Exodus from Egypt, which the Bible tells us about, as “exile”. In any case, that era can be considered the first manifestation of the “Jewish question” recorded in writing. Since then, it was by no means “resolved”, as evidenced by the entire subsequent history of Jewry. Already in our (at least in my) memory, Hitler spoke more than once about the “final solution of the Jewish question,” but what this “final solution” consisted of, as is often the case when discussing Hitler’s plans, was not clear. After all, most of the Jews were then in America, and Hitler could not influence their fate in any way. This is the historical range of the “Jewish question” — the range in which it manifests itself. From this (and other facts collected in my book) we can conclude that the “question” is in principle unsolvable (at least in the era of peoples existing in states). This thesis is discussed in more detail in my book. That is, at least in the coming centuries, we are doomed by history to live with the Jews, and they with us. In other words, the reasonable way out is to learn to live with this question, which, apparently, cannot be “resolved” in the present historical conditions (just as, for example, it is impossible to completely “eradicate crime”, although it is possible to take measures to so that crime does not ruin our lives. The “question” for us then, is how, in this coexistence, we can preserve our national identity.

A hint of a way of dealing with the problem that could satisfy these conditions is contained in a remark by V.V. Rozanov. In an obvious connection with the same “question,” he draws attention to the fact that a similar situation exists in the animal world. Namely, most animals known to us are either herbivores or carnivores. Moreover, as Rozanov notes, herbivores unite in large herds, and the number of carnivores is somehow kept at a relatively low level. This analogy between non-Jewish herbivores and Jewish carnivores is supported by many arguments.

Firstly, this is the argument of the number, as indicated by Rozanov. Indeed, even during the period of enjoying a dominant position in any society (for example, in our country in the 1920s or now in Israel), the Jews, despite their well-known “fertility,” are kept within strict limits by some unknown force, while the surrounding people continue multiplying, although they are in worse material conditions.

Secondly, the fundamental role of carnivores and herbivores in life is quite similar. Actually, it is plants that ensure the existence of all animals, because they turn sunlight into nutrients. Herbivores eat plants, while carnivores eat herbivores. But still, herbivores are part of the process of nutrition, which is used by carnivores and without which they could not exist. In confirmation of the analogy under consideration, I would like to draw attention to the fact that the Jews are active and often useful in their activities, but they are only able, so to speak, “to work on an already plowed field.” For example, Mendelssohn, Mahler and Berg were undoubtedly talented musicians. But they were able to express themselves only when Western music was created — by Gabrielli, Schutz, Bach, Haydn, etc. Or, in Russia, Jews were very active in recent centuries (we will not discuss the difficult question of whether it was for good or to the detriment of the natives), but in any case, this became possible only after the country was plowed up and the Russian state was created. And it is the same with any kind of activity, as detailed in my book. But the main contribution to world culture usually attributed to Jewry is the creation of a monotheistic religion. However, this was the direction in which the thought of all mankind was moving to in those centuries! So, Homer often has the expression “Zeus and Fate decided so.” In Plato, instead of the words “Gods” we often meet — “the higher Deity.” Finally, the most radical step towards monotheism was the reform of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, about 1350 BC. It clearly had a decisive influence on the religious thinking of the entire Near East. So here we meet a manifestation of the same feature.

Yes, finally, I myself have come across this phenomenon. I had many Jewish students. And a number of Jews from whom I studied. They were talented and (what is especially important) hardworking mathematicians. But we must not forget that the very physical and mathematical concept of the world, within which we all worked, was created by the Western European (Romano-Germanic) peoples. And representatives of other nations — Jews, Russians, Chinese, Indians, etc. — are only continuers of an already established tradition.

The third argument in favor of the aforementioned analogy is that carnivores (predators, for example, cats) can exist and hunt only if they are hardly noticeable. In particular, they must lick themselves all the time, eliminating the smell (this remark belongs to a friend of mine). This can be related to the hostility of the Jews to the discussion of the “Jewish question.” For example, in my book, V. Toporov’s book Double Bottom is quoted several times. In the preface, the author describes his paradoxical position of being “not among his own” in any national group, which gives his observations a peculiar interest. In particular, speaking of the “Jewish type of behavior,” he writes: “among the identifying signs, one must undoubtedly point out a painful reaction to the very formulation of the Jewish question, which is often inherent in people of non-Jewish origin who are married to a Jew or Jewess, especially if there are children.”

There is a direct connection between these comparisons and the real problems that humanity is now facing (or will face in the next century). Let us pay attention to the fact that the influence of Jews throughout the world (in the development of capitalism, in the socialist movement and in the post-socialist era) has become especially noticeable in recent decades, coinciding with the period of dominance of European (or, as it is sometimes called, Western) civilization in the world. But in several of my works (published for the last 10 years) I have made arguments indicating that this civilization is now on the decline. The current economic crisis is just one of the confirmations of these thoughts. Probably, Western civilization will be able to somehow get out of this crisis, but it is only a rehearsal for its global collapse. One might think that the inevitable (as it seems to me) collapse of the dominance of Western civilization over the whole world will provide an opportunity to build relations between Jewry and other peoples in a new way. Actually, the Jews themselves are also interested in this, since other peoples must first “plow the field,” in which, as noted above, the Jews are able to work. But it is unlikely that they themselves are able to realize it. In their “genetic program” there is firmly embedded the belief that they are called to be “teachers of mankind.”

In other words, (only when this change happens) will a change of attitudes become possible. But whether this actually happens depends on our behavior (and the behavior of our descendants). Here comes to mind the thought expressed by Dostoevsky in a rough draft: “All these parliamentarisms, all the civil theories now professed, all the accumulated wealth, banks, sciences, Jews — all this will collapse in an instant and without a trace — except, perhaps, the Jews, who will adapt; what can be done to put them to work?”. (Sobr. soch. M., 1984. Vol. 26, pp. 167–168[2]). This statement now sounds rude due to the use of the word “zhid,” which is currently abusive. But when Dostoevsky wrote, it was not like that. It is worth replacing this word with any synonym in use now, and we will get a strikingly accurate prediction of what really happened in Russia, formulated forty years before the predicted events.

In such a situation, it is natural to recall the discussed analogy. After all, both herbivores and carnivores have existed on Earth for many millions of years. And, using this analogy, one can notice forms of possible coexistence of Jews and other peoples that do not encroach on the national existence of these “other” peoples. After all, one must believe in the lessons of life!

In particular, herbivores exist by grouping together in large herds. Parallel to this, it can be assumed that the peoples of the Earth are able to ensure their autonomous existence in the form of more or less nationally homogeneous states, which is a phenomenon that has been happening throughout history (modern Russia is an example). Nations, united in such states, must develop in themselves the understanding of the phenomenon of the “predator,” which is dangerous for their national existence. Peoples, following the instinct of self-preservation, should strive to push them out of positions that are essential for the life of the nation. They must protect the nation from the penetration of “foreigners.” I came across an example of such behavior when I once walked around the Moscow region (outside the city) in the company of my dog. The dog clearly reminded the cows of a wolf and fit neatly into their “image of the enemy.” Therefore, when they saw her, the cows united in a herd lowered their heads and, putting out their horns, stepped on the dog. Once, as a shepherd I met told me, they even trampled a small dog. This technique seems to be effective — it allows wild herbivores to protect themselves from predators. For example, as zoologists say, wolves rarely attack a deer inside the herd, otherwise they risk being killed by the horns or hooves of the deer. More often, wolves bully a sick deer that has lagged behind the herd.

Thus, a number of techniques developed long ago by nature serve to maintain the number of the herbivore populations at a constant level. These same methods, with appropriate modifications, can serve (and have long served) a similar goal in the social life of mankind. Of course, changes will take place — after all, Homo sapiens has existed for thousands of years in the more developed state of mankind. A difference between modern nations and a herd of cows must have developed in this time!

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[1] From Diodorus, Book 34:

King Antiochus besieged Jerusalem. The Jews withstood the siege for some time; but when all their provisions were used up, they were forced to send ambassadors to him, to seek terms for a truce. Many of his friends urged him to storm the city, and to root out the whole nation of the Jews; for they only of all people hated to mix with any other nations, and treated them all as enemies. They suggested to him that the ancestors of the Jews were driven out of Egypt, as impious and hateful to the gods: for seeing that their bodies were infected with white marks and leprosy, by way of expiation the Egyptians gathered them all together, and expelled them out of their county, as profane and wicked wretches. After they were thus expelled, they settled around Jerusalem, and were afterwards united into one nation, called the nation of the Jews; but their hatred of all other men descended with their blood to their posterity. And therefore they made strange laws, and quite different from other people; they never will eat nor drink with any of other nations, or wish them any prosperity. His friends reminded him that Antiochus surnamed Epiphanes, after subduing the Jews, entered into the temple of God, into which none was allowed to enter by their law except the priest. When he found in there the image of a man with a long beard, carved in stone sitting upon an ass, he took it to be Moses, who built Jerusalem and brought the nation together, and who established by law all their wicked customs and practices, abounding in hatred and enmity to all other men. Antiochus therefore, abhorring their antagonism to all other people, tried his utmost to abolish their laws. To that end he sacrificed a great swine at the image of Moses, and at the altar of God that stood in the outward court, and sprinkled them with the blood of the sacrifice. He commanded likewise that the books, by which they were taught to hate all other nations, should be sprinkled with the broth made of the swine’s flesh. And he put out the lamp (called by them immortal) which burns continually in the temple. Lastly he forced the high priest and the other Jews to eat swine’s flesh.

When Antiochus’ friends had spoken about all these things, they earnestly advised him to root out the whole nation, or at least to abolish their laws, and compel them to change their former manner of living. But the king, being of a generous spirit and mild disposition, received hostages and pardoned the Jews: but he demolished the walls of Jerusalem, and took the tribute that was due.

[2] This refers to a 1984 Russian edition of the complete works of Dostoevsky.

Go to Part 1

That which speaks against the Jews, apart from the atavism and racial arrogance that by themselves force one to an unqualified rejection of the Jews, is first of all their internationalism. It is not true that the German, French, English, Russian Jews feel that they are members of the country in which they live; wherever possible they appear on the scene as sons of the Jewish nation and thereby they are the enemies of every European nation. Their declamations that things are different is believed by nobody. They stand on the same platform as the Jesuits and the Social Democrats: they are without a fatherland.

The second thing that speaks against them is their desire to bring in fellow racial comrades wherever possible. Wherever a Jew has set foot there are, in a short time, twenty Jews, and where there are twenty they rule, because members of cultured nations disdain the means used shamelessly by the Jews to acquire influence and because they are too considerate to express themselves freely and do not have the courage to act.

What thirdly turns the entire world against them is their usury, the term usury taken in the wider sense. I shall let men speak for me to whom nobody will deny the faculty of judgement, first Napoleon and then an advisor to a Prussian ministry. I became acquainted with Napoleon’s speeches and decrees only very recently but found to my great joy, however, that the man, who was truly perceptive, already in 1806 thought in the same way that any respectable German without exception thinks in 1887, in a radically anti-Semitic manner, in the sense of a double-sided humanity. I wish to help my countrymen through the printing of the speeches and decrees of Napoleon to help them to find the courage to say what they think and to translate it into deeds:

Meeting (of the Council of State) of 30 April 1806.[1]

Legislation is a shield that the government should carry everywhere where the public welfare is attacked. The French government cannot regard with indifference that a nation vilified, degraded, capable of every baseness, possess exclusively the two beautiful administrative departments of ancient Alsace; the Jews must be considered as a nation and not as a sect. It is a nation within the nation; I would like to remove from them, at least for a specific time, the right to take mortgages, for it is too humiliating for the French nation to find itself at the mercy of the vilest nation. Entire villages have been expropriated by the Jews; they have replaced feudalism; they are veritable flocks of crows. We saw them at the battles of Ulm[2] rushing from Strasboug to buy from the marauders what they had pillaged.

One should prevent, by legal means, the arbitrariness which one will find oneself obliged to employ with regard to the Jews; they would risk being massacred one day by the Christians of Alsace, as they have so often been, and almost always by their own fault.

The Jews are not in the same category as the Protestants and the Catholics. They should be judged according to political rights and not civil rights because they are not citizens.

It would be dangerous to let the keys of France—Strasbourg and Alsace—to fall into the hands of a population of spies who are not attached at all to the country. In the past, Jews could not even stay overnight in Strasbourg; it will perhaps be appropriate to decree today that there will not be more than fifty thousand Jews in the upper and lower Rhine; an excess of this number would spread at will into the rest of France.

One could also forbid them commerce based on what they have corrupted of it through usury and cancel their past transactions as tarnished by fraud.

The Christians of Alsace and the prefect of Strasbourg have brought to me many complaints against the Jews during my travel to this land.

Meeting of 7 May 1806

It has been proposed to me that the migrant Jews who do not merit the title of French citizens be expelled and the tribunals be invited to use their discretionary power against usury; but these means would be insufficient. The Jewish nation, since Moses, has been constituted in a usurious and oppressive way; it is not the same with the Christians: usurers are the exception among them and have a bad reputation. It is thus not with metaphysical laws that one will regenerate the Jews; here we need simple laws, laws of exception; one can propose nothing worse to me than to drive out a great number of individuals who are men like others; legislation can become tyrannical through metaphysics as through arbitrariness. Judges do not have discretionary power at all; they are physical machines by means of which the laws are implemented just as the hours are marked by the needles of a watch: driving out the Jews would be a weakness, correcting them would be a strength. One should prohibit commerce to Jews because they abuse it, just as one prohibits his profession to a goldsmith when he makes false gold. Metaphysics has misled the writer of the report to the point of preferring a violent measure of deportation to a more efficacious and gentle remedy. This law needs to be matured; one should assemble the general estates of the Jews, that is, summon fifty or sixty of them to Paris; I wish to have a general synagogue of Jews in Paris on 15 June.[3] I am far from wanting to do anything against my glory and that could be disapproved of by posterity—as they represent me as wanting to do in the report. My entire council gathered together cannot make me adopt a thing that would have this character; but I do not want the welfare of the provinces to be sacrificed to a principle of metaphysics and egoism. I state again that people do not complain of the Protestants or the Catholics the way they do of the Jews; it is that the evil that the Jews commit comes not from individuals but from the constitution of these people themselves; they are caterpillars, locusts that ravage France.

On 30 May 1806 appeared the famous decree through which Napoleon I summoned an assembly of individuals professing the Jewish religion and inhabiting the French territory to Paris; I extract the following from the official Bulletin des lois de l’empire franςais, 4,4 (1806), No.1631:

Based on the account that has been delivered to us that in many northern departments of our empire certain Jews, exercising no other profession but that of usury, have by the accumulation of the most immoderate interests thrown many farmers of these lands into a state of great distress,

We have thought that we should come to the aid of those of our subjects that an unjust cupidity has apparently reduced to these vexing extremities;

These circumstances have made us at the same time learn how urgent it was to reanimate, among those who profess the Jewish religion in the lands subject to our allegiance, the sentiments of civil morality which unfortunately have been weakened among too large a number among them by the state of subjection in which they have languished for long, a state that is certainly not our intention either to maintain or renew;

For the accomplishment of this design we have resolved to unite in an assembly the leaders of the Jews and to have our intentions communicated to them by commissioners who we will nominate to this end and will obtain, at the same time, their vows regarding the means that they estimate the most expedient to encourage among their brothers the exercise of the arts and of useful professions in order to replace by an honest industriousness the shameful resources to which many of them have delivered themselves from father to son for several centuries;

For these reasons,

In connection with the chief justice of the Ministry of Justice and our Minister of the Interior, Our Council of State included

We have decreed and decree the following:

First article:  There is a stay of a year, counting from the date of the present decree, of all executions of judgements or contracts other than through simple protective action against the non-trading farmers of the departments of the Sarre, the Roer, Mont-Tonnerre, the Upper and Lower Rhine, of Rhin-et-Moselle, of the Moselle and the Vosges, when the debts against the farmers have been agreed upon by them in favor of the Jews.

One will find it understandable that this precise knowledge of their character excited the Jews. I point to unimpeachable evidence—of the geographer Karl Ritter—Bericht über die Aufnahme, welche Napoleon als Messias in Frankfurt am Main fand.[4] These Jews did not prostitute themselves before a “foreign potentate” since the Grand Duchy of Frankfurt under a Freiherr von Dalberg belonged at that time to the Rheinbund;[5] they immediately resorted even at that time to [HEBREW TERM], the presumption characteristic of their race—expressed so repugnantly in Heine and the press Jews of our age.

I cannot have the report cited in full which the Senior Privy Councillor Thiel made on “Usury in the provinces” of Prussia in the Farmers’ Club in Berlin on 1 March 1887; the material at the basis of the report will appear in an official publication; for the time being it is sufficient to point to the Vossische Zeitung of 3 March 1887; I deliberately cite a democratic newspaper that is friendly to the Jews. According to Thiel, in Alsace and Lorraine, about whose Jews Napoleon complained already so bitterly, it had become worse than it had been in the previous centuries. I have heard hair-raising things a long time ago—from a very insightful and benevolent party, a very highly-positioned man who was unreservedly candid with me—about the usurious Jews of the two provinces. For the conditions in the administrative district of Cassel it is significant that, in the first electoral district of Hesse, the long-serving Conservative representative was recently ousted by a newcomer who was able to gain the sympathies of the country people through fanatic anti-Semitism. It is a matter, besides, not only of money and credit usury but also of cattle usury, real estate usury, commodities usury. In the Bitburg district there are 91 professional cattle-lenders who have sold 1000 units of cattle to small folk. In Kreisbach district there are 700 loaned cows; the yearly turnover in the cattle loan business amounts to 105,000 Marks, the profit of the lender 35,000 Marks, thus around 34 percent, often 100 percent. The practitioners of usury are everywhere the same; the Senior Privy Councillor describes them, though actually every worldly-wise man knows about them. You may investigate or observe how many percent of these usurers are Jews! Where, in many places, I myself have been asked for help I have constantly found Israelites in my quest: once, at my request, a rich Jew, the father of one of my students, helped me kindly against the Jews.

It would take a heart of the hardness of crocodile skin not to feel compassion for the poor Germans sucked dry and—what is the same thing—not to hate the Jews, not to hate and despise those who—out of humanity!—make a case for these Jews or who are too cowardly to squash this usurious vermin. One does not negotiate with trichinae and bacilli, trichina and bacilli are also not educated, they are destroyed as quickly and fundamentally as possible.

In the summer of 1853, Prince Adam Czartoryski[6] came with his family to London. He was spied on by a Russian Jew whom I helped to expose. Since this Jew is still alive, and is a man of the upper class, I wish to remind him that he lived at that time in Jermyn Street (I think no. 23), that he was introduced by Baron Berg to the Alfred Club, that he had, at a matinée ball of an aristocratic house that he had sneaked into uninvited, insulted Prince Félix Salm-Salm,[7] and that he had disappeared as a result of a conversation that a woman of the English aristocracy conducted with the Russian envoy Baron Brunnow, at a party of the Marchioness of Breadalbane. Since 1853 I have never heard of a spy of the poisonous political sort who was not a Jew; today, when I write this, I am informed from a German capital of two new examples of this vermin.

How the Jews stand in relation to the press I do not need to tell anybody. The whole world knows that the majority of the reviewers of the political press of Europe, like the majority of the impresarios, are Jews. That these Jews do not express and disseminate the views of the peoples of Europe but those of the Jews is doubtless. Their success has become so great that they have been able to praise to the heavens a long series of Jewish and half-Jewish scholars, writers, musicians, actors, politicians but that they have also silenced or thrown dirt upon everything that did not bear la tarla giudiaca [the Jewish woodworm], that through them even the worldview of the educated people of Europe has been transformed from a European and Christian to an Asiatic and heathen one; for, ever since the Old Testament gave way to the New Testament and the Christian Church arose, the Jews are, in spite of the papier-maché monotheism, heathens.

In closest relation to the press stands the stock-exchange. To substantiate this, I refer to two articles of the Vossische Zeitung.

The above-mentioned newspaper wrote on the evening of 27 January 1887 from Paris:

It is an old trick of thieves to shout out the alarm-signal, “Fire!,” in a crowded theatre hall or church in order, in the midst of the frightful confusion that unfailingly ensues, to rake in a rich harvest of wallets and items of jewellery. That in the process dozens, sometimes even hundreds of men, are crushed, trampled upon, killed or made cripples for life is a matter of indifference to the criminals. The chief thing is that they can steal. Now then; it seems that there are nefarious stock-exchange speculators somewhere in the world who imitate this time-tested trick of rogues. At a moment when Europe is already nervous they suddenly shout out the signal “Fire!”; a wild panic seizes all stock-exchanges, the prices tumble like towers in an earthquake, families are thrown to the ground within an hour, assets disappear, bankers shoot a bullet in their head, an entire continent suffers an earthquake from which it cannot recover in weeks and which exercises its after-effects for a long time on the working life of nation; the rascals however who have wrought this calamity rake in millions that a timely discharge of all possible securities has yielded to them and are ready at the next suitable opportunity to repeat the scoundrel’s trick with greater force.

There is no other explanation for the crazy anxiety that gripped all European stock-exchanges yesterday but most of all the local ones. The notorious message of the London Daily News identified the relations between Germany and France as extremely menacing, declared that an imminent outbreak of war was most likely and concluded with the following words: “The first action will apparently come from the German side which will, in a short while, demand explanations from France about the recent troop movements at the German border.” There can be no doubt that this message came from stock-exchange circles and had the sole purpose of conjuring up a stock-exchange panic.

The same newspaper then declared solemnly, in the morning of 2 February 1887, that the belief that the member of the English parliament, Labouchère, had caused the message regarding an imminent war between Germany and France to appear in the Daily News for the sake of a dishonest stock-exchange speculation was erroneous. And, on 15 February 1887, the Vossische Zeitung returns to a similar story with the statements:

The well-known war-like article of the Post against Boulanger[8] supposedly owes its origin to a stock-exchange fiddling and yielded six million for its initiator.

The Deutsche Adelsblatt is supposed to have made this discovery and publicises it in the following manner:

Not only in England and France but also in Germany there are heinous stock-exchange speculators and we are assured by the best sources that the last article on ‘War in sight’ of a local newspaper was initiated and inspired not, as one would like people to believe, by the government or by diplomatic circles but by a local banking house which, one may remark by the way, is supposed to have earned six million thereby. It is the peculiar relationships, both of the intellectual initiators and of the abused—as we wish to assume without further ado—newspaper, that place on all who are named therein the inescapable obligation to delve into the causal connections ruthlessly and to draw the guilty to justice in the sharpest manner.’

In this context we may mention that the Kreuzzeitung explains that it was in no way edified by this, that the ‘stock-exchange rats’ made as if to move to the Conservative party.  It threatens: ‘We will be able to get them off our back once again after 21 February. Court Chaplain Stöcker[9] has stated that on the 11^th of this month in the most definite manner and we agree with him.”

In well-informed circles—that is clear from these articles that have not been troubled by any complaints from those affected and are therefore not to be attacked—one considers it possible that in the Daily News and in the Berliner Post, thus not in the gutter press, articles of the character described in the Vossische Zeitung can be slipped in. One who knows the history of the last Berlin Reichstag elections will find the thought process of the Vossische Zeitung in its article from 15 February fully clear: the article names the person without mentioning any name.[10]

I cannot believe that any respectable German can be interested in this way of gaining money and creating values. Only, I must conclude from the writing of the Privy King’s Counsel, Mr. Goldschmidt, full professor of mercantile law at Berlin University, thus certainly an expert, that stock-exchange businesses are conducted on a wide scope in Germany. I thought I knew that already a quarter of a century earlier; now I demonstrate the rightness of this fact with a quote from that Mr. Goldschmidt’s article on the “Reichstag elections,” 56:

All classes whose members wish to become rich without work take part, as is well-known, in the stock-exchange game, as in the at least as dangerous and corrupting house speculations and the like.

Through Bethel Henry Strousberg[11] the ‘speculations’ acknowledged by a professor of mercantile law have come into the highest circles of German society, and through a great host of other Jews—whose strenuously distributed offers, even to railway conductors, are known from hearsay by the whole world—have come among the so-called small folk. When Eduard Lasker, now buried among the pious in the synagogue in Weißensee, poured out a Niagara of outrage in the Prussian state parliament against the initiators, people thought at first that his fury was genuine; it soon emerged that his investigation stopped short of his friends, that the entire melodrama was only the legally authorized form of assassination of political opponents; but the fact that Germans placed in the highest positions in society speculate is also admitted by Lasker, indeed proven. I know a small city in which the Gründerzeit[12] cost the inhabitants around four and a half million Marks and scattered the percentages of this organised robbery to the Jews advising and helping in the enterprises and speculations, who alone gained in the economy, both in the formation and in the dissolution of businesses.

If the reader should not be satisfied with the Privy King’s Counsel Goldschmidt as a witness, I direct him to O.M.—everybody knows who O.M. once was in the National Zeitung—who is heard speaking in the weekly Im neuen Reich, 1876, 2,401–413. A highly positioned official (such is the one who speaks) cannot express himself more roughly than in the sentences written—judging from the style—in wild indignation:

This was precisely one of the most hateful and repulsive aspects of the recent German swindle era that the divide that separates honest folk from commercial criminality was blurred through a thousand golden bridges of profitable stock-exchange manoeuvres. … All shame disappeared; neither rank nor position nor good reputation, deterred one from dancing around the stock-exchange lists arm in arm with the riff-raff of fund speculators, stock-exchange jobbers, con-men.

The stock-exchange is also a curse for nations because it makes it possible for those working in it to gain wealth of previously unimaginable extent that is completely detached from any duty to serve any others than the one who owns it. A manorial lord requires, the greater his property is, the more men to work it; the financier can satisfy himself with heaping interest upon interest without having to give the least to anybody other than his broker. Even when he feasts and squanders he does not give. But he forces a number of men to the foolish desire, and the even more foolish attempt, to imitate the stock-exchange people in gluttony and pretensions, without a stock-exchange, from the yield of a small amount of money or from a salary: in the hearts of the unemployed, who are not yet taken to good colonies in well-arranged trains, such stock-exchange wealth awakens the desire, already often expressed, to kill the Jews. Woe to a nation in which such thoughts occur. We officials have in a way unthinkably high salaries; the stock-exchange causes that, as a consequence of the development of wealth made possible by the speculations of this temple of Baal, even a minister or a commanding general is no longer equal to the demands of society with that which the state provides him. It is, in my eyes, equally shameful—as apparently happened in Berlin 25 years ago—to give a servant maid little pay and declare then that, after 9 p.m., one should make no more demands on her, as to say to a scholar, if he cannot manage with his salary, that he should marry a rich Jewess or speculate in the stock-exchange. Do not act as if it were not so: this is not the place to be abashed.

The world owes the cloaca of stock-exchange speculation and of stock-exchange influence to the Jews.

Go to Part 3.

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[1] Lagarde: Pelet de la Lozère, Opinions de Napoléon (Didot, 1883), 213–217.

[2] The Battle of Ulm took place in 1805 between the armies of France and Austria. Napoleon succeeded in forcing the latter’s surrender.

[3] The Grand Sanhedrin of Jewish notables convened by Napoleon I took place in Paris between February and April 1807.

[4] Lagarde: “Report on the Reception that Napoleon Found in Frankfurt am Main as a Messiah,” in G. Kramer, Carl Ritter, ein Lebensbild, I (1870), 107; Janssen, Zeit- und Lebensbilder, 20–24. Somewhat later the Jews in Poland “of average salary” served their Messiah as “providers or informers”; Guizot, Revue des deux mondes, 70 (1867).

[5] The Rhenische Bundesstaaten was formed by Napoleon in 1806 as a confederation of protectorate German states that simultaneously left the Holy Roman Empire. It was disbanded in 1813 after the defeat of Napoleon in the Battle of Leipzig.

[6] Prince Adam Czartoryski (1770–1861) was a Polish nobleman who served as foreign minister to Tsar Alexander I when Poland was partitioned by Russia, Prussia and Austria.

[7] Prince Félix Salm-Salm (1828–1870) was a Prussian military officer who served in several armies including the Prussian, Austrian, the Union army in America, and the army of Maximilian I in Mexico.

[8] Georges Boulanger (1837–1891) was a French general whose staunch nationalism helped to foster anti-German sentiment (“revanchism”) in France after the latter’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871.

[9] Adolf Stoecker (1835–1909) was the court chaplain to Kaiser Wilhelm I and a leading anti-Semitic agitator of his day. He founded the Christlich-soziale Partei in 1878 to counter the growing influence of the Marxist Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) and participated in the international anti-Semitic congress in Dresden in 1882.

[10] LaGarde: That the Post can be mentioned in this connection is so much more regrettable as this newspaper occasionally also issues very important exposés. In it there appeared, on 8 April 1875, the famous article “Is War in Sight?” that one can read in the book of Mr. L. Hahn, Fürst Bismarck, 2, 774–776. In the Post there appeared also, on 10 September 1886 (No.247), the article signed by a retired Prussian officer and doctor of philosophy from Sofia:

Everybody familiar with the local conditions knew that the present Russian military attaché of the consulate general whom Court Chaplain Koch mentioned in his well-known “Dispatch from Lemberg” was the organiser of the conspiracy; I could have conveyed this to the Post even in my first letter to the Post. But since this attaché is an active Russian officer, I did not do this for obvious reasons and mentioned rather the Bulgarian-born lieutenant colonel Kesiakoff discharged from the Imperial Russian military service who in person publicly led the instigation of the masses after the departure of the legitimate prince.

[11] Bethel Henry Strousberg (1823–1884) was a German Jewish industrialist who, already early in his career, embezzled clients’ funds while working as an agent for some societies in Germany. He was convicted and imprisoned for this crime but was later involved again in dubious manipulations of stocks during his career as a major railway entrepreneur in Germany.

[12] Literally, the Period of the Founders, i.e., the period in the last quarter of the nineteenth century during which many new industries were founded in Germany.