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Old June 4th, 2011 #6
Karl Radl
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Default Erich Bischoff contra Hermann Strack: A Forgotten Chapter in anti-Semitic History

Erich Bischoff contra Hermann Strack: A Forgotten Chapter in anti-Semitic History


Like most students of the jewish question I am well aware of Professor Hermann Strack; Protestant theologian and specialist in Hebraica, who wrote the classic defence of jewry against the charge of ritual murder or the ‘blood libel’. (1) This eloquent and learned defence has often been; and continues to be, quoted and cited in jewry’s defence on this score. (2)

What I was unaware of however; and I haven’t seen any reference to this in literature so I can only presume it has been either left out or has been forgotten over time, was that Dr. Erich Bischoff; the anti-Semitic academic expert on theology and jewry, who argued that jews could read some of their own works; most notably certain passages in the Zohar, as injunctions on behalf of collecting gentile blood for ritual purposes, was in fact a disciple and student of Strack’s. (3)

We can see this in one of Bischoff’s first published works that I have been able to locate; ‘Jesus and the Rabbis’, (4) which takes a detailed look at jewish traditions concerning Jesus. (5) In it Bischoff is not injudicious towards the jews, but takes; much as Strack himself did, strong offense about the various claims made about Jesus by the jews and points out that such traditions can be overcome, but not easily. Bischoff however tells us that his relationship with Strack was that of disciple with his master (6) and it is further confirmed by Strack’s contribution of an afterword to the work. (7) It also happens to have been published as part of a series of monographs by Strack’s own Institutum Judaicum in Berlin!

It seems that between 1906 and 1922; the year of Strack’s death, that Bischoff further developed his thought regarding the jews and seemingly unencumbered by Strack’s need to convert jews to Protestant Christianity by being friendly with them. Bischoff went somewhat further and argued that the jews had rendered themselves; via serving their own interests, contrary to Germans and Germany. (8)

It is quite possible; even probable, that the pivotal event in Bischoff’s scholarly development towards an actively anti-Semitic position in regards to jews was the first world war. As this helped to fuel the fire of German nationalism and the flowering of anti-Semitic thought in the wake of the Protocols of Zion and the Bolshevik revolution was helped along by this increasingly strident nationalist sentiment among gentiles as well as the rapid spread of militant forms of Zionist and Marxist ideology among the jews. (9)

We can see the culmination of Bischoff’s anti-Semitic intellectual development regarding the issue of jewish ritual murder in the publication of his forgotten demolition and critique of his mentor Strack’s case for the defence: ‘Das Blut in jüdischem Schriftum und Brauch’. (10) This makes sense of Bischoff’s later appearance as the principal witness for the defence in the attempted libel suit against Julius Streicher and ‘Der Stürmer’ for arguing that jews have committed; and do commit, ritual murder for religious reasons. (11)

Bischoff’s standing as an highly-qualified expert and his then recent publication of a work that argues just what Streicher had done tells us why the German court dismissed the case against Streicher without resorting to the standard intellectual cop-out of arguing that the judge/court was anti-Semitic or ‘biased’ in some way used by some authors to make up for a lack of research on their part. (12)

The reason that Bischoff seems to have been forgotten by anti-Semites seems to be, because his writings on the subject of jews were only ever available in German and because of a considerable gap in the literature on anti-Semitism of this period relating to Hermann Strack, Julius Streicher and Theodor Fritsch: Erich Bischoff has simply been largely forgotten. (13)

It is somewhat bemusing to note that Alan Steinweis in his recent defamation of anti-Semitic scholars of this particular period seems not to even have known of Bischoff’s existence even though he discusses work in which Bischoff’s work is cited on numerous occasions! (14) That said his work has fortunately been noticed by the odd specialist. (15)

I will be commenting extensively on Bischoff’s work in the future and quite possibly translating some of it into English. Bischoff was certainly one of the very best anti-Semitism has ever had to offer; along with Karl Georg Kuhn and Gerhard Kittel, on the subject of the inhumanity and insanity of Judaism.

He deserves to be remembered as one of the greatest minds that anti-Semitism has ever produced rather than being simply consigned to obscurity.

References


(1) Hermann Strack, Henry Blauchamp (Trans.), 1909, ‘The Jew and Human Sacrifice: An Historical and Sociological Inquiry’, 1st Edition, Bloch: New York
(2) For example in Jonathan Frankel, 1997, ‘The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840’, 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York, p. 468
(3) Arnold Leese, 1938, ‘My Irrelevant Defence’, 1st Edition, Imperial Fascist League: London, p. 5
(4) Erich Bischoff, 1905, ‘Jesus und die Rabbinen’, 1st Edition, Schriften des Institutum Judaicum: Berlin
(5) Peter Schäfer, 2007, ‘Jesus in the Talmud’, 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton echoes many of Bischoff’s judgements however implicitly and sometimes against his own explicit reasoning.
(6) Bischoff, ‘Jesus und die Rabbinen’, Op. Cit.
(7) Ibid, pp. 104-107
(8) I infer this from Bischoff’s association with Theodor Fritsch after the First World War as this was Fritsch, the Reichshammerbund and Hammer Verlag’s general position on the matter. I can see nothing in Bischoff’s corpus of work to suggest otherwise.
(9) See for example Albert Lindemann, 1997, ‘Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews’, 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York, pp. 100-101; Robert Lougee, 1962, ‘Paul de Lagarde 1827-1891: A Study of Radical Conservatism in Germany’, 1st Edition, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, pp. 245-252
(10) Erich Bischoff, 1929, ‘Das Blut in jüdischem Schriftum und Brauch’, 1st Edition, Hammer Verlag: Leipzig
(11) Leese, Op. Cit., p. 5
(12) Randall Bytwerk, 2001, ‘Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Anti-Semitic Newspaper Der Stürmer’, 1st Edition, Cooper Square Press: New York, pp. 126-130
(13) E. Klauke, 2011, ‘Theodor Fritsch (1852-1933): The ‘Godfather’ of German Antisemitism’ in R. Haynes, M. Rady (Eds.), 2011, ‘In the Shadow of Hitler: Personalities of the Right in Central and Eastern Europe’, 1st Edtion, I. B. Tauris: London has realised much as I did a few years ago that Fritsch has barely even been studied (although he has been noticed and commented on in passing by specialists such as Peter Pulzer, Fritz Stern and Richard Levy) by scholars of anti-Semitism in spite of his central importance to giving it much of its intellectual basis and popularising it as well as his important role in helping the NSDAP achieve power and enhancing Goebbels’ anti-Semitism for example. Klauke has promised a biography of Fritsch, which should make interesting reading although it will be no easy task considering the amount of correspondence Fritsch had and also how much he himself wrote in his periodicals.
(14) Alan Steinweis, 2008, ‘Studying the Jew: Scholarly anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany’, 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton
(15) David Biale, 2007, ‘Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians’, 1st Edition, University of California Press: Los Angeles, pp. 132-135

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This was originally published at the following address: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...nn-strack.html
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