1848 (27 page)

One of the central problems with nationalism in 1848 - as in more recent times - was that it posed difficult questions about the relationships between nationalities and about the relationship between national aspirations and political liberties. Where these two questions fused was in the issue of Jewish emancipation. Many European nationalist ideologies had little difficulty in accommodating (on paper at least) a Jewish minority into their visions of new, liberal states. Indeed, a good rejoinder to those interpretations that see modern German history as a current flowing inexorably towards the Nazi gas chambers is that, for all its flagrant expansionism and sometimes illiberal undercurrents, in 1848 German nationalism gave rise to little anti-Semitism. Many German states had given Jews full civil rights several decades before (Prussia in 1812). The fact that both Heinrich von Gagern's successor as president of the Frankfurt parliament, Eduard Simson, and its vice-president, Gabriel Riesser, were Jewish (or of Jewish origin) attests to the prevailing lack of prejudice among the deputies; and Riesser was a vocal advocate of Jewish rights. German Jews from Bohemia also distinguished themselves by standing up for German interests in Bohemia against the Czechs: Ignaz Kuranda was editor of the
Grenzboten
, a newspaper that was particularly strident in its expressions of German nationalism.
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Article 13 of the Basic Rights in the German constitution abolished religious requirements for civic rights, which essentially enfranchised the Jews. In the debate on this article, one liberal, Moritz Mohl, certainly tapped into classic anti-Semitic currents when he fretted that because of the international connections of the Jews, they could never be fully assimilated into the German people. While they should not be denied political rights, Mohl argued, the new Reich should have powers to pass laws that regulated their economic activities and encouraged Jews away from ‘usury' into agriculture and other wholesome occupations. Significantly however, Mohl's speech was interrupted by hissing from all sides of the chamber and his motion received very little support. When Riesser (who sat on the centre-left) rose to reply immediately, he was supported by a Catholic centre-right deputy from Prussia, a Catholic jurist from Hesse and the Protestant spokesman for the parliament's constitutional committee. This was no aberration: support for Jewish emancipation cut across confessional and political divisions.
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This is not to say that anti-Semitism was unknown in German society; far from it. The half-million-strong Jewish population in Germany had been subjected to violence at the hands of rioting workers and peasants, their motives a coarse mix of religious prejudice and economic distress: in eighty towns across southern Germany, Jewish businesses were attacked,
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since Jews were thought to cheat consumers with high prices (though, of course, the agrarian crisis was the real cause) and to be money-lenders who ruined impecunious peasants with punitive interest rates. This violence, however, was not supported by liberal opinion in Frankfurt. Indeed, one of the reservations expressed in the parliament about Article 13 was not that it was wrong in itself, but rather a concern over how it would go down among the wider, less enlightened populace. Yet the deputy who raised this anxiety - a Catholic priest named Georg Kautzer - still applauded the article and claimed that Jewish emancipation would start a process whereby popular prejudices would be eroded.
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In the Habsburg monarchy, Jews had been subject to discriminatory legislation, including the obligation to pay a special tax in return for being ‘tolerated' in the empire and a ban on holding landed property. In Vienna only resident Jews could engage in business: others were allowed to stay in the capital for only three days at a time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, many Jews took the lead in the revolution in the capital: the young doctor whose inspirational speech had fired up the Viennese crowd on 13 March, Adolf Fischhof, was Jewish, and he emerged as one of the leaders of the revolution, becoming president of the Committee of Safety established after the 15 May uprising. Yet the revolutionary efforts of his co-religionists were often mocked by the Viennese, many of whom still regarded the Jews as usurers and petty tradesmen. Pamphleteers offered anti-Semitic counter-blasts to Jewish petitions for emancipation. In the outburst of working-class violence that set the industrial suburbs ablaze in the March revolution, Jewish businesses were attacked. In other towns Jewish lives were physically threatened: only the timely arrival of the student militia prevented a full-blooded pogrom in Raab. In Prague the collapse of censorship brought anti-Semitic propaganda flooding on to the streets, which encouraged workers' attacks on Jewish retailers through the spring, climaxing on 1-2 May, when rioting was unleashed against Jewish shopkeepers accused of overcharging for their wares.
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Understandably then, when Prague's June insurrection came, the residents of the Jewish quarter barricaded their streets not to support the uprising but to protect Jewish neutrality in the struggle between the revolution and the counter-revolution.

Such were the openly visceral currents of anti-Semitism in the Austrian Empire that when Baron Franz Pillersdorf 's original draft of the constitution of 25 April guaranteed freedom of religion to all people he was urged by the Lower Austrian Estates to limit this provision only to Christian denominations, ‘not on principle, but on account of popular feeling'.
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It was to be left to the parliament itself to decide on the rights of non-Christians, but that proved to be too short-lived to address the issue. When the constitution was torn up after the reaction, the provisions guaranteeing religious toleration were retained, but they still excluded the Jews, who had to wait until 1868 before they were liberated from all restrictions in Austria.

In Hungary the April Laws failed to enfranchise the Jewish population, reflecting elite anxieties over a dark wave of popular anti-Semitism that swept the country in the spring of 1848 - and much of the violence was committed by workers against Jewish premises, forcing the authorities to bring out the National Guard to protect their owners. The spark was the proposal in the Hungarian Diet on 21 March to give the franchise in municipal elections to anyone who was sufficiently wealthy, regardless of religion. Anti-Semitic violence was unleashed in Pressburg, where Jews were beaten up and their shops smashed. The rioting then spread to other towns, climaxing in early April. The consequence was that most liberals in the Diet reluctantly agreed - over Kossuth's protests - that to pacify this popular rage the enfranchisement of the Jews should be delayed.
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There were, however, further outbreaks soon afterwards: in Budapest on 19 April (miraculously) no one was reported killed, though plenty were wounded when ‘the lower classes of the people armed with sticks, knives and axes' fell on the city's Jews, with the apparent aim of expelling them from the city. In Pressburg some ten Jews were lynched and a further forty wounded. Although both Batthyány and Kossuth were horrified, they also felt that further concessions to the mob would save lives: as Kossuth put it, any more pressure for emancipation would send Hungarian Jews to the slaughterhouse. On 25 April, therefore, Jews were ‘excused' from military service - in other words, their services were not required for the National Guard. This was a reversal of the more radical Budapest Committee of Public Safety's rejection on 18 March of an anti-Semitic petition demanding that Jews be expelled from the militia. Led by Petőfi, the radicals simply formed a special battalion for Jews. They accused the Germans (the ‘the blind tools of the overthrown regime') and the dregs of the working class of being behind the anti-Semitic violence. These were judgements prompted by embarrassment and a strong sense that the pogroms were casting the revolution into disrepute; or, as Petőfi put it, throwing ‘mud at the virgin flag of 15 March'.
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While it is true that Germans did take the lead in some of the violence, there is no evidence that the anti-Semitism was motivated by counter-revolution or that it was merely carried out by an underclass of the urban poor. Rather, it was economically motivated and committed by otherwise respectable members of the artisanal guilds who resented the quiet immigration of Jews into the towns, setting up shop alongside and in competition with their Magyar and German-speaking rivals. Jews would in fact prove to be fiercely loyal to the liberal regime in Hungary - so much so that Slavs for years afterwards would equate Jews with rampant Magyar nationalism.

Ultimately, in 1849, while Jews were among those fighting for Hungarian independence, the Diet would be true to its own ideals and fully emancipate them. Kossuth saw the Jews no differently from the other ethnic minorities of Hungary: they would be content with their status as free citizens in a state where they shared exactly the same rights as all the others. In such circumstances, they would have no need of special treatment as a separate national or religious group. As Kossuth put it, the Jews themselves must prepare for their own emancipation by agreeing that living under separate institutions governed by Mosaic law was not, after all, an essential part of their identity.
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This was much the same as the German liberal view, but Jewish emancipation and assimilation into the liberal state created something of a crisis within their own communities, where more traditionally minded Jews feared that their separate sense of identity would be gradually erased.
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The year 1848 in Central Europe therefore posited one of the great dilemmas of the modern, liberal state: should ethnic or religious minorities be obliged to assimilate fully into the political order, effacing in public life any sense of identity other than that of being a citizen, or should the state rest on pluralism (or multiculturalism), which allows all groups to express their own sense of separateness fully, but within a consensus that is supposed to guarantee mutual respect and the rule of law? There is no easy answer: the first option threatens to ride roughshod over religious and ethnic sensibilities; the second raises the spectre of a fragmented civic order. French republicans, however, had no doubts: since Jews had been fully emancipated in 1791, they were also citizens of the new republic. Nevertheless, one of the traditional flashpoints of anti-Semitism - Alsace - still flared up. This region was exceptional in France for this type of violence in 1848; it arose due to the peasants and workers identifying Jews with usury and economic competition. As a frontier province, it was also an area where people were on a particularly short fuse during the economic distress because they witnessed the ease with which food was still being exported
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- and Jews were unfairly blamed for that. In early March peasants in upper Alsace ransacked and burned Jewish homes and synagogues, forcing their occupants to take refuge in Switzerland. In Altkirch there was evidence that the local elites turned a blind eye and even actively encouraged the violence. According to one of the Jewish leaders, the root cause was

 

A cluster of Jewish refugees in Porrentruy appealed, successfully, to the republican values of the new regime: ‘If there was ever a time for tolerance and legal protection for all religions, as well as respect for people and for property . . . it is certainly at the present time, now that the Nation has just constituted itself freely and spontaneously as a Republic.' Adolphe Crémieux, now minister of justice and religions, promised material help to the Jewish refugees and to pursue the authors of ‘those savage assaults'. To the provisional government's commissioner in Colmar, he wrote: ‘I am stupefied to learn that in France, in old Alsace, in a country so full of patriotism, that there should be enough miserable people who can attack citizens whose only crime is to be Jewish.' To the Jews, he promised that they would find justice in the law courts, but the government also sent in the army, for ‘the government has no greater desire, no more pressing interest, than in protecting the property and lives of citizens'. The column that repressed the anti-Semitic violence in Altkirch was led by a certain Louis Eugène Cavaignac, a general who had impeccably republican credentials but who in the summer would gain some notoriety.
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While most of the revolutions, with varying degrees of success, sought to grant civil equality to the Jews, they also went some way to emancipation in the colonial empires. The most important measure was the definitive abolition of slavery in the French Empire. Slavery had been decreed illegal once before - by the First Republic in 1794 - but Napoleon Bonaparte had bowed to planter interests in the French Caribbean colonies and tried to reimpose it in 1802. He was successful in the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, but signally failed in Haiti, where the emancipated slaves fought victoriously for their independence. With the revolutionary example of Haiti (and that of the British islands, where slavery had been abolished in 1833), the persistence of the institution in the remaining French colonies was harder to justify to its opponents. Under the July Monarchy, which upheld slavery as a ‘property right', republicans like Victor Schoelcher and Ledru-Rollin had made anti-slavery one of their causes. The former wrote eloquently against the institution, while the latter delivered a thunderous speech in favour of abolition in April 1847. Schoelcher became the Second Republic's minister of the navy and, through that, had responsibility for the overseas colonies. On 27 April he carried the decree freeing the slaves in the French Empire: 87,000 on Guadeloupe, 74,000 in Martinique. These people joined the colonial elites, which included the whites and the free blacks (who, though educated and relatively prosperous, still faced racial discrimination), in formally becoming French citizens, with the right to vote. In the first elections Schoelcher would lead the list of candidates on both islands - and be elected in all six seats.
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