Offenders or Victims?

Antisemitism is generally thought to derive from chimerical images of Jews, who became the victims of these projections. Some scholars, however, allege that the Jews own conduct was the main cause of the hatred directed toward them in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Olaf Blaschke takes up this provocative question by considering the tensions between German Catholicism and Judaism in the period of the Kulturkmpfe. Did Catholic resentments merely construct their secular Jew? Or did their antisemitism in fact derive from their perceptions of the conduct of liberal Jewish offenders during a period of social stress? Blaschkes deeper look at this crucial period of German history, particularly as revealed in the Catholic and Jewish presses, provides new and sometimes surprising insights.