Chapman billy wrote in message m...
In article ,
says...
I have not yet come across any additional facts about Mendheim or Isaac
Hess. Yet I am pleased to find other people who may share some of my
interests in German Jewish history and culture....

Nick, Thanks for trying.

Dear Simon,

"Youth will be served, every dog has his day, and mine has been a fine one."
--George Henry Borrow (Lavengro)

You once asked me whether I have ever read "The Bible in Spain" by George
Henry Borrow (1803-1881). I have not, yet I do recall this passage from
from the novel "Sharpe's Rifles" by Bernard Cornwell:

"'So you're rich?' Sharpe could not help asking.
'Not I. But my aunt received a sufficiency to create trouble in the world.'
Louisa spoke very gravely. 'Have you any idea, Mr Sharpe, just how embarrassing
it is to be spreading Protestantism in Spain?'"

According to what I read today, most history undergraduates learn their
pre-university history from the TV; I hope this isn't true, as, IMO, there
are too many mavericks broadcasting unorthodox, to put it politely, views.

In a moderated professional forum for academic historians and independent
scholars, a lecturer at an American university posted some results of a survey
of undergraduates at the beginning of a course about the Second World War.
Most of the American students believed that the Soviet Union or China (or both)
had been enemies of the United States during that war. Nearly all of the
American students believed that the United States had won the war with little,
if any, assistance from any allied countries.

Some "historical documentaries" on television have many inaccurate "facts".
For example, one programme showed a map that claimed that Norway had already
been liberated from German occupation by the time of the D-Day invasion.
Around the 50th anniversary of India's independence, a major American news
source reported this "historical fact": British India had been partitioned
into three (not two) independent countries in 1947: India, Pakistan, and
Bangladesh. (Then what was the war in 1971 all about?)

"The nation acted to a threat from the dictator of Iraq. Now there are some
who would like to rewrite history--revisionist historians is what I call them."
--United States President George W. Bush (June 2003)

President Bush's denunciation of "revisionist historians" implies that there
already exists a completely accurate, balanced, and fair edition of history
that has been inscribed in stone somewhere (which Bush is privileged to read),
and that "revisionist historians" are those annoying people who pass by and
deface the sacred patriotic texts with scholarly graffiti.

Actually, any intellectually honest historian is in the profession of
'revisionism'. Reviewing and revising the current interpretations of
historical events is what historians are supposed to be doing.

As a general rule, professional historians are discouraged from becoming
engaged in public disputes with amateurs, who tend to feel qualified to do so
only because they have "read many history books". Having read many popular
books on health care does not qualify someone to be a doctor; having read many
popular books on history does not qualify someone to be a historian. A layman
might be able to observe an illness's symptoms without being able to diagnose
the underlying condition. Likewise, a layman might have memorized many
'historical facts' without knowing how to place them in a historical context
from which reasonable inferences could be drawn. And a reader of popular
history books tends to be quite unaware of their critical reputations among
professional specialists in that field.

For example, some American supporters of Israel continue to cite a 1984 book,
"From Time Immemorial: the Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine"
by Joan Peters (someone with no known scholarly credentials whatsoever).
"From Time Immemorial" was a work of pro-Zionist propaganda that was lavishly
promoted in the American media because it served a pro-Israeli political
agenda. It won the National Jewish Book Award. By 1985, the book began to
appear in editions overseas, however, and the critical reviews were damning,
including in Israel and the United Kingdom. Here's an excerpt from a review
by Albert Hourani, then an eminent historian at Oxford University:

"The whole book is written like this: facts are selected or misunderstood,
tortuous and flimsy arguments are expressed in violent and repetitive language.
This is a *ludicrous and worthless* book and the only mildly interesting
question it raises is why it comes with praise from two well-known American
writers."
--Albert Hourani (5 March 1985, The Observer)

An American scholar, Norman G. Finkelstein (a son of Holocaust survivors),
wrote a painstakingly detailed expose of Joan Peters's fraudulent methods,
"Disinformation and the Palestine Question", reprinted as a chapter of
"Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question"
edited by Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens.

In short, "From Time Immemorial" has been completely discredited in scholarly
circles, and yet the book continues to circulate among the general public.

"The historian has much to answer for. History--that is, written history--has
made and unmade States, given courage to the oppressed and undermined the
oppressor, has justified aggression and overridden law."
--C.V. Wedgwood (Velvet Studies, p. 154)

BTW, I share your view of G. It is a terrible thing to say, but he gives me
the impression that any dirt will do, even porky dirt.

"Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust" by
Daniel Goldhagen has been lavishly promoted and become a popular success,
complete with some endorsements from ignorant celebrities such as Stephen Fry
(whom I did like watching with Hugh Laurie in 'Jeeves & Wooster'). But the
book's standing among almost all academic historians of modern Germany is
quite low.

Here are some excerpts from a chapter, "The Past Distorted: the Goldhagen
Controversy" by Fritz Stern:

"The book is a deliberate provocation--I consider this a neutral judgment.
Provocations can shock people out of their settled, comfortable views; they can
also be self-promoting attacks on earlier work and professional standards....

Goldhagen's book comes in two related parts: the explanatory model, or 'the
analytical framework', as he also calls it, and the empirical evidence. The
parts are joined by a single intent: the indictment of a people. The duality
of presentation marks the style as well. Goldhagen depicts horror and renders
judgment in evocative and compelling phrases. He bolsters polemical certainty
with concepts drawn from the social sciences, relying on the vaporous, dreary
jargon of the worst of academic 'discourse'. Unintelligible diagrams distract,
even as horrendous photographs confirm....Astoundingly repetitive, the book
has 125 pages of notes but, regrettably, no bibliography, which would have
been a great convenience to other scholars.

To say it at once: the book has some merit, especially in the middle section,
which depicts three specific aspects of the Holocaust, and it has one
overriding defect: it is in its essence *unhistorical*. It is unhistorical
in positing that one (simplistically depicted) strain of the past, German
anti-Semitism, explains processes that the author strips of their proper
historical context; it is unhistorical in over and over again presenting
suppositions as 'incontestable' certainty. Sir Lewis Namier, a great English
historian, once remarked that 'the historical approach is intellectually humble;
the aim is to comprehend situations, to study trends, to discover how things
work: and the crowning attainment of historical study is a historical sense--an
intuitive understanding of how things do not happen'. Goldhagen's tone mocks
humility, and he seems to lack any sense 'of how things do not happen', of
how complex human conduct and historical change really are....

Goldhagen draws on the rich literature about German anti-Semitism even as he
dismisses it, distills what is useful for his thesis while ignoring whatever
might contradict or complicate it, and then celebrates the originality of his
own version. The result is a potpourri of half-truths and assertions, all
meant to support his claim that German anti-Semitism was unique in its abiding
wish to eliminate Jews, its 'eliminationist mind-set'. He suggests that one
needs to look at Germans as anthropologists look at preliterate societies;
they are not like 'us', meaning Americans or Western Europeans.

He considers but dismisses the need to compare German anti-Semitism to other
varieties, although we know that anti-Semitism was endemic in the Western
world....Goldhagen certainly knows that thousands of non-Germans were willing
executioners, willing auxiliaries to the Holocaust. But their motivation or,
indeed, their historical role is of no interest to him.

Even in his discussion of German anti-Semitism he fails to make the necessary
distinctions. There was a wide range of attitudes toward Jews, from those few
who did indeed see them as the enemy and chief corruptors of their society--as
'vermin' to be exterminated--to those men and women who welcomed Jews but
regretted what they saw as Jewish 'pushiness' or preeminence in some realms.
Goldhagen takes remarks out of context and treats almost equally the ranting
of the rabble-rouser and the private musings confined to a writer's diary.
Everything is grist for his mill.

A Goldhagen version of anti-Semitism in twentieth-century America might lump
Eleanor Roosevelt's early remarks about 'Jew-boys' in Franklin's law school
class with Henry Ford's championing of the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion'
or Father Coughlin's tirades. Only by summary judgment and indifference to
nuance can Goldhagen contend that in the nineteenth century 'German society...
was *axiomatically* anti-Semitic'...'It is *incontestable* that this racial
anti-Semitism which held the Jews to pose a mortal threat to Germany was
pregnant with murder' (my emphasis). Incontestable? I would say unprovable
and implausible....

It is generally accepted that the more the National Socialists tried to widen
their appeal, the more they muted their anti-Semitic theme. In one of Hitler's
key addresses in 1932, for example, he hardly alluded to Jews at all. Yet
Goldhagen insists: 'The centrality of antisemitism in the Party's world,
program and rhetoric--if in a more avowedly elaborated and violent form--
mirrored the sentiments of German culture.' Actually, it exposed the sentiments
of only *some* Germans. In the last free elections in 1932, some 67 percent
of the German electorate did not vote for Hitler, although there can be no
doubt that even among these were groups that harbored suspicion and dislike
of Jews. Perhaps many Germans had some measure of anti-Semitism in them but
lacked the murderous intent that Goldhagen ascribes to National Socialism.
Put bluntly: for Goldhagen, as for the National Socialists, *Hitler was
Germany.*"

--Fritz Stern (Einstein's German World, pp. 273-8)

For further reading:
"A Nation on Trial: the Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth"
by Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn

Many German historians and lawyers have done sterling service trying to get
at the truth: for instance the role of German historians in the lengthy
debate as to who was responsible for the Great War,

"Rathenau famously claimed that two hundred elderly men who knew one another
controlled the fate of Europe and the world. He should have added the old
truism that in war millions of young men butcher millions of other young men
who have done them no harm and whom they have never met--all on behalf of a
few old men who know one another only too well."
--Amos Elon (The Pity of It All, p. 302)

Yes, Fritz Fischer has become famous for writing "Griff Nach der Weltmacht"
and other critical works about Germany's policies and war aims (1914-18).

For further reading:
"In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from
the Nazi Past" by Richard Evans

Daniel Goldhagen, the American author of "Hitler's Willing Executioners", has
written that the German people generally have been significantly more ready to
face honestly the crimes of Germany's history than the American people have
been willing to face honestly the crimes of the United States's history.

and the psuedo-Darwinism that underpinned many of the beliefs of that time.

In April 1920, "The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy" by
Lothrop Stoddard (Ph.D. Harvard) was published by Charles Scribner's Sons
in the United States. The book became a bestseller, and it might well have
significantly influenced the passage of more restrictive immigration laws
and the adoption of more punitive racial codes in the United States.

"I stated: 'The world-wide struggle between the primary races of mankind--the
'conflict of color', as it has been happily termed--bids fair to be the
fundamental problem of the twentieth century, and great communities like the
United States of America, the South African Confederation, and Australasia
regard the 'color question' as perhaps the gravest problem of the future.'

Those lines were penned in June, 1914. Before their publication the Great War
had burst upon the world....To me the Great War was from the first the White
Civil War, which, whatever its outcome, must gravely complicate the course of
racial relations."

--Lothrop Stoddard (28 February 1920, The Rising Tide of Color, pp. v-vi)

Here's a link to the online text of "The Rising Tide of Color":
http://www.africa2000.com/XNDX/STODDARD.hmtl

In November 1998, "My Awakening: a Path to Racial Understanding" by David Duke,
an extreme right-wing American politician (formerly a leader of the Klu Klux
Klan), was published by "Free Speech Books" in the United States.

"Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose."

"It's not we who lord it over things, it seems, but things which lord it over
us. But that's only because some people make use of things in order to lord
it over others. We shall only be freed from the forces of nature when we are
free of human force. Our knowledge of nature must be supplemented with a
knowledge of human society if we are to use our knowledge of nature in a
human way."
--Bertolt Brecht (The Messingkauf Dialogues)

Fritz Stern, perhaps the foremost expert on this subject, has argued that
the history of the assimilated Jews of Germany was much more than the
history of a tragedy; it was also, for a long time, the story of an
extraordinary success: 'We must understand the triumphs in order to
understand the tragedy.' We must see the German Jews in the context of
their time and, at the very least, appreciate their authenticity, the way
they saw themselves and others, often with reason.
--Amos Elon (The Pity of It All, p. 12)

I take it you know that it was a Rothschild who used the words "Ost Juden".

I don't recall that citation. By the way, Emma Rothschild, the Director of the
Centre for History and Economics at King's College, University of Cambridge,
is married to Amartya Sen, the Master of Trinity College, University of
Cambridge, the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics.

Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht,
Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht.'

'I think of Germany at night
The thought keeps me awake till light.'

--Heinrich Heine (Nachtgedanken)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Thiers arranged for Heine, a very German, even
though Jewish, poet, to receive a French pension.

"He (Heine) claimed later that he had actually crossed the French border on
May Day (1831). This claim gave birth to the legend that the first of May
was chosen as the international workers' day (but it's not known as 'Labor Day'
in the United States) to commemorate Heine's escape to freedom. Heine's
stay in Paris was meant to be temporary. As it turned out, he remained there
until his death in 1856...

Heine very quickly won the admiration of France's leading writers--Victor
Hugo, Honore de Balzac, George Sand, Alexandre Dumas, Alphonse de Lamartine,
and Alfred de Musset....Dumas said, 'If Germany rejects Heine we will willingly
adopt him. Unfortunately, Heine loves Germany more than it deserves.'...

Heine loved Paris. He felt 'like a fish in water'...Interviews with Heine
continued to appear in the German press. His interviewers wondered endlessly
whether he was 'homesick'; the idea that so important a German poet preferred
to live in France mystified and disturbed them....

By 1835, the works of both Heine and Boerne--'evil, anti-Christian, blasphemous,
wilfully defying all virtue, humility, and honour'--headed the lists of banned
books in several German states....Although Heine and Boerne were the only Jews
among more than a dozen banned writers associated with Young Germany, it was
often derided as Young Palestine....

In France, Heine became the classic German poet of homesickness, an affliction
that during the first half of the next century would become widespread among
German Jews. He would now write his most beautiful poetry and his sharpest
critiques and satires of German politics and manners....He voiced the first,
most acute prophecies about German nationalism and militarism. His darkest
forebodings reveal a stunning, uncanny prescience. He warned his German
readers that they were their own worst enemies....

'A Winter's Tale' unleashed widespread criticism. Heine was accused of being
insolent, 'un-German from the bottom up'. The antisemitic historian Heinrich
Treitschke credited Heine with possession of a dubious gift shared by Frenchmen
and Jews alike, 'the graceful vice of making the mean and loathsome attractive
for a moment'. Yet his fame continued to spread inside Germany as well as
abroad, where he was swiftly becoming one of the great heroes of European
culture....

Heine certainly did not return to organised religion. He considered himself
the great Spinoza's Unglaubengenosse--his brother in disbelief--a term Freud
would later apply to himself. He continued to despise the 'rotten clergical
scum' of all faiths: rabbis, pastors, mullahs, and priests. He wanted no
Mass sung and no Kaddish said at his grave. On his tombstone he wished to
be identified only as a German poet. 'If I could walk with crutches, I'd go
to church, and if I could walk without I'd go to the whorehouse', he told a
visitor. He was still his own man, neither Jew nor Christian. His wife, whom
he had married in a Catholic ceremony only to please her, wept at his deathbed.
'Don't be afraid, my dear', he said. 'God will forgive me; that's his job.'"

--Amos Elon (The Pity of It All, pp. 140-8)

"In the German Imperial Reich, united under Prussian tutelage by Bismarck in
1871 after the defeat of the French, Heine was widely regarded as a subversive,
Francophile, and above all a Jew, three not inaccurate if somewhat
oversimplified characteristics, each of which the Teutomaniacal squareheads
increasingly dominant in the new country's cultural and literary establishments
construed as a capital crime....In fact, in came to a definite end in March
of 1933, when...all of Heine's writings were burned in public auto-da-fes all
over Germany. How many, among the millions watching those pyres on the town
squares, recalled the prophetic line from Heine's 'Almansor': 'Twas but a
prelude. For where books are burned, they end up burning people.'

The man who provoked controversy all his life has remained an embattled figure
in his native land ever since....Nietzsche called him the greatest lyricist
in the German language--'He possessed that divine malice without which I
cannot conceive of perfection.' Nor did the Final Solution prove all that
final for Heine; the troubles he caused in post-Nazi Germany, some of them
verging on the grotesque, demonstrate that unlike the certifiably Teutonic
Dichter und Denker of classical stature long since transformed into pigeon
roosts, he still retains the power to start riots, even in effigy. Attempts
to erect Heine monuments in several at the time West German cities led to
protest demonstrations and local government crises, and a proposal in 1953 to
rename the University of Duesseldorf, his hometown, after him was soundly
defeated after a long and acrimonious debate. In what used to be East Germany,
on the other hand, he was used as a totemic figure to legitimize the Communist
regime, a revolutionary exiled along with Marx and Engels as a resolute
opponent of the bourgeoisie. This process of more or less simplistic
politicization has tended to distort the core identity of the man, the more
so since his poetic reputation in Germany underwent an inevitable eclipse
with the rise of the modernist movement around the First World War."

--Ernst Pawel (The Poet Dying, pp. 192-3)

Hard to believe given that Frenchman's later brutal suppression of the Paris
Commune.

Wenn sich die Blutegel vollgesogen,
Man streut auf ihren Ruecken bloss
Ein bisschen Salz, und sie fallen ab--
Doch dich, mein Freund, wie werd ich dich los?

When leeches have sucked their fill of blood,
To get them off, some salt will do--
A bit on their backs and down they drop--
But friend, how shall I get rid of you?

--Heinrich Heine

By the way, Paul Verlaine was the press secretary of the Paris Commune.

On the origins of the Paris Commune of 1871:

"There were the appalling slums into which the workers were now concentrated
despite (and partly because of) the works of Haussmann; the vastly inflated
cost of living which had far outpaced wages; the long hours of work under
disgraceful circumstances; child labour still involving several thousands of
eight-year-olds in Paris alone; no security of employment, no sickness benefits,
no pensions; restrictions on the right to affiliate, on freedom of the Press,
and upon any means by which the workers might have achieved less intolerable
conditions. Rossel, a regular soldier of middle-class extraction who later
threw in his lot with the Commune, was moved by what he saw among the Parisians
under his command to exclaim: 'These people have good reason for fighting; they
fight that their children may be less puny, less scrofulous, and less full of
failings than themselves.' The workers' attitude to all the glories left by
the Second Empire was summed up simply by one who declared in Goncourt's
hearing: 'What is it to me that there should be monuments, operas,
cafe-concerts, where I have never set foot because I had no money?' As the
Communards would ultimately prove, there were those who would rather all these
glories of civilisation were expunged by fire than that the Parisian workers
should continue to forfeit their claims for a better life."
--Alistair Horne (The Fall of Paris, p. 295)

On the reprisals against the Communards and their suspected sympathisers:

"There seemed to be no end to the horror. Abroad it had already aroused
bitter comment. There were meetings of protest in London, addressed by
John Stuart Mill; and Thiers was not being entirely truthful when he claimed
that the British Press 'declared that greater humanity had never been displayed
toward greater criminals'. Exclaimed 'The Times' on May 29th:
'The laws of war! They are mild and Christian compared with the inhuman laws
of revenge under which the Versailles troops have been shooting, bayoneting,
ripping up prisoners, women, and children during the last six days. So far
as we can recollect there has been nothing like it in history....'"
--Alistair Horne (The Fall of Paris, p. 417)

On what someone concluded about why the Paris Commune was crushed:

"The proletariat stopped half-way; instead of proceeding with the
'expropriation of the expropriators', it was carried away by dreams of
establishing supreme justice in the country...institutions such as the Bank
were not seized....The second error was the unnecessary magnanimity of the
proletariat; instead of annihilating its enemies, it endeavoured to exercise
moral influence on them; it did not attach the right value to the importance
of purely military activity in cvil war..."
--Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (18 March 1908)

On some of the consequences of that conclusion:

"When the moment came for the revolution for which his whole life had been
a preparation, Lenin would not repeat the Commune's 'half-measures' and
'unnecessary magnanimity'. There could be no question of accepting, as the
Commune had demonstrated, 'the available ready machinery of the State', and
adapting it; everything had to be smashed and re-created in a new, proletarian
image. To Lenin and his followers, the supreme lesson of the Commune was that
the only way to succeed was by total ruthlessness....

To ensure that the revolution would not be frittered away by the paralysing
squabbles such as had arisen within so feebly democratic a body as the Commune,
Lenin split with his more moderate allies, the Mensheviks; then proceeded
remorselessly to crush the left-wing Constituent Assembly, until the extreme
Bolshevik dictatorship was complete. 'The Commune was lost', explained Lenin,
'because it compromised and reconciled'. His Red Army commissar, Trotsky,
criticised the Commune for not meeting the 'white terror of the bourgeoisie
with the red terror of the proletariat', and when civil war broke out in
Russia neither Trotsky nor Lenin was backward in the dispensation of terror.
How much of the ferocious brutality with which the Russian Reds fought for
survival was attributable to the ever-present memory of May 1871, may be judged
by the comment in retrospect of an old Bolshevik:

'In those grave moments, we said: 'Look, workers, at the example of the Paris
Communards and know that if we are defeated, our bourgeoisie will treat us a
hundred times worse.' The example of the Paris Commune inspired us and we
were victorious.'"

--Alistair Horne (The Fall of Paris, pp. 431-2)

Thomas Mo ...And no doubt it delights God to see splendour where He only
looked for complexity. But it's God's part, not our own, to
bring outselves to that extremity! Our natural business lies
in escaping--so let's get home and study this Bill.
--Robert Bolt (A Man for all Seasons)

--Nick