Disraelia: A Counterfactual History, 1848-2008by Walter LaqueurApril 1, 2008 :: Number One ... Counterfactual history is...a reaction to the extreme de-personalization and determinism of current historical studies, with their emphasis on social history opposed to events and personality-driven history. —WikipediaHeinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, vol-ume 8, preface.Great were the hopes and expectations of European Jews when the walls of the ghet-toes came down. It was a long drawn-out process, and conditions varied from country to country. In Britain it began with the read-mission of the Jews under Cromwell. In France, the Revolution and Napoleon pro-ceeded with the emancipation of the Jews which had come underway at the time of the absolutist kings and the Enlightenment. In Eastern Europe, the decline and eventual dis-appearance of Poland hastened the process—but it did not go very far, Jews were limited to a Pale of Settlement in Russia and to cer-tain professions, they could not study and own land, and many professions were closed to them.The number of Jews greatly increased be-tween 1750 and 1850 and their life expec-tancy was considera-bly higher than that of non-Jews. They streamed to the major towns from the coun-________________________________________________________________________________Walter Laqueur :: Disraelia: A Counterfactual History 1 Middle East Papers :: Middle East Strategy at Harvardtryside where they had only a very meager living; even in Germany about one-third were peddlers and about the same number had no known source of income but de-pended on alms given by their coreligionists who were better off. The economic situation of the Jews in Poland and Russia actually de-teriorated during this period, hence the in-creasing migration to the West. As the Jews moved to the cities, they came into conflict with the merchants and artisans, and this cre-ated new tensions.The educated classes advocated in principle the emancipation of the Jews, but the great majority would still have favored that they left Europe. The Jews were aliens in Chris-tian societies. Among the thinkers of the En-lightenment, anti-Jewish feeling was quite strong, and the great philosophers of the later period were not quite sure whether the Jews, being a miserable people, could be rehabili-tated. Fichte suggested cutting off their heads and giving them new ones. The attitude of the Romantics yet one generation later was equally negative.Among the Jews, many of the educated em-braced Christianity in Western and Central Europe. This affected not only outsiders like Heinrich Heine but large sections of the Jew-ish establishment, the leading members of the community.Soon after the Napoleonic wars had ended, a great many books and pamphlets were pub-lished in Germany and France, but also in Eastern Europe, discussing what could be done about the Jews, and in 1819 there were the first sporadic anti-Jewish riots.The attitude of the Churches was ambivalent. They welcomed the baptism of so many Jews, but a growing number of influential churchmen began to resist it. They doubted whether the conversion was genuine; the Jews did not truly believe in Christianity, but regarded it (as Heine had put it) as the en-trance ticket to European civilization. They still felt solidarity with other Jews all over the world; Jews still looked like Jews and behaved like Jews. Their character could not be changed by the act of baptism. Some churchmen suggested making intermarriage mandatory (the philosopher Schopenhauer had also suggested this).Others believed in the purity of Christian blood, just as Catholicism in Spain had in the 16th and 17th centuries. There was some-thing in Judaism beyond the religion which could not be changed by baptism—except perhaps over many generations. According to them, Judaism was a tribe, a race, perhaps even a nation of sorts. And so anti-Judaism (the term anti-Semitism was to be coined only three decades later by Wilhelm Marr) became a major force in European politics and public opinion. In Western Europe, Jews were hated because a growing number was getting rich; in Eastern Europe where most of them lived, they were hated and despised be-cause they were poor and useless.Anti-Judaism manifested itself in steadily spreading pogroms beginning with the Hep Hep riots in Germany in 1819. They were mostly locally confined but they continued on an ever-growing scale year by year. They spread to Austria, Hungary, even upper Italy and above all to Poland, the Ukraine and Rumania. Local police forces did not at first intervene but advised the Jews to stay in-doors as much as possible, especially on Sundays and Christian holidays. This ap-________________________________________________________________________________Walter Laqueur :: Disraelia: A Counterfactual History 2 Middle East Papers :: Middle East Strategy at Harvardproach worked for a while, but in 1823 big-ger and more aggressive mobs attacked Jew-ish houses and shops and put them on fire. The number of fatalities was relatively small but in some instances (Frankfurt and Buda-pest 1823, Kalisch, Poznan and Galatz 1824) the fires went out of control and caused con-siderable damage to non-Jewish houses and businesses. As a result, smaller Jewish com-munities were advised to move to bigger cit-ies where, the authorities argued, it would be easier to maintain public order. However, there was growing opposition to this influx on the part of the city councils and other in-terest groups. They suggested that the only reasonable way was the return of the Jews to the ghettoes, but there was much dissension over where the ghettoes should be located. Other heated debates concerned the fate of the Jews who had been baptized: Should they be kept for at least for a generation or two in special ghettoes as a kind of purgatory?Britain and France (with the exception of Al-sace) were relatively free of pogroms in view of the small number of Jews in these countries, but the mass attacks in Szegedin, Regens-burg,