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not be fully emancipated, Bauer maintained, if it refused to be liberated from its ancient particularism. Jews could be free and equal partners only in a purely secular society; all traditional religion had therefore to be abandoned. Marx’s answer moved on an even higher level of abstraction; he was not really interested in the Jewish question as such but in the social order in general which had to be overthrown; Judaism symbolised the profit motive, egoism. Marx’s aperçus , too, would hardly be remembered today but for the person of the author. There was often an extra edge of animosity in the comments of the philosophers that cannot be explained by the general aversion to religion that was fashionable in the age of the Young Hegelians and Feuerbach. Even a radical change in the political outlook of an author did not necessarily affect his attitude towards the Jews. Bruno Bauer’s essay in the 1840s was written from a left-wing position; twenty years later he had turned into a pillar of the conservative right, but his views on the Jews became even more extreme. They were the white Negroes (he wrote), lacking only the crude and uncouth nature and the capacity for physical labour of their black brethren. Some of these attacks were not devoid of real insight into the Jewish problem and the difficulties of assimilation. Constantin Frantz, writing in 1844 from a religious-conservative point of view, compared the Jewish people with the eternal Jew of the medieval folk tale: dispersed over the whole globe, they found no peace anywhere. They wanted to mingle with the people and to surrender their own national character (Volkstum) , but were unable to do so; only with the coming of the Messiah would full integration be possible.
    During the 1840s there was a temporary decline in antisemitism, but the revolution of 1848 was accompanied by a fresh wave of attacks all over central Europe; in some villages in south Germany the local Jews were so intimidated that they actually relinquished their newly won political rights, afraid that this would create even more ill-feeling.
    The Jews were puzzled by these outbreaks of antisemitism; they regarded them as a mysterious atavism, a ghost from the Middle Ages which, with the spread of education, would gradually be laid to rest. They believed that by being exemplary citizens they would convince the antisemites of the erroneousness of their views. If they had weaknesses these were the residue of centuries of oppression and economic constraints. They angrily rejected the argument that social ostracism and persecution had left ineradicable traces in their national character. Given fifty years of educational effort and peaceful development, they would show the world how well they fitted into civil society. Heine indeed predicted that their contribution to civilisation might be greater than that of other people. Jews were indignant when an antisemite like Rühs argued that they still constituted one nation (‘they are somehow one nation from Brody to Tripoli’). They and their ancestors had been born in Germany, and they emphasised on every occasion their attachment to the country that continued to treat them like step-children. Only a few expressed doubts about the future relationship of Jews and Germans. A Jewish writer in Orient who argued in 1840 that ‘we are neither Germans nor Slavs nor French’, and that the southern Semitic original tribe (Urstamm) could never merge with the racial descendants of the north, was looked upon as an oddity. The lightning-rod theory of antisemitism was the one most commonly accepted: the Germans, being latecomers among the nations of Europe, still lacked a true national consciousness; they had to prove their patriotism by persecuting others and they blamed the Jews for the misfortune besetting them.
    Börne thought that Judaeophobia was originally economic and social in character. His conclusions were pessimistic; it was pointless to try to refute