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 Kulturkämpfe. 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? Blaschke’s deeper look at this crucial period of German history, particularly as revealed in the Catholic and Jewish presses, provides new and sometimes surprising insights.

Olaf Blaschke is an assistant professor of modern history at Trier University in Germany. He was a visiting scholar at Cambridge University, England, as Feodor Lynen Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, 2001–2, and a visiting fellow at Lund University, Sweden, 2004–5. He is the author of Katholizismus und Antisemitismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 2nd ed.

"Blaschke's work is as deeply research as it is valuable and suggestive."—William D. Rubinstein, Journal of Jewish Studies