The "Jewish parasite" is an antisemitic trope based on the myth that the Jews of the diaspora are incapable of forming their own states, and would therefore attack and exploit states and peoples. The stereotype is often associated with the accusation of usury, and the separation of productive capital and financial capital ("High Finance").
In the Nazi period, it served to legitimize the persecution of Jews, up to the Holocaust. Some representatives of Zionism also took up the motif. They regarded a "parasitic" way of life in other cultures as an inevitable consequence of the diaspora, and contrasted it with the establishment of a Jewish state as an ideal.
History From the Eighteenth Century to Holocaust
The earliest evidence of the antisemitic myth of a "Jewish parasite" can be found in the 18th century. Precursors were found by the German-Israeli historian Alexander Bein, in the medieval myth of the "usurious Jew" and the ritual murder legend according to which Jews would use the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes. In addition - for instance in Martin Luther's anti-Jewish writings - the idea can be proven that Jews are only guests in Europe, that Christians are their hosts, from which later the idea of the host people afflicted by parasites developed. The French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778) explicitly denied the Jews the ability to achieve their own cultural achievements and to achieve lasting statehood: as evidence he cited the construction of the first temple, for which Solomon with Hiram of Tyre had had to engage craftsmen from Lebanon, and the double exile (first the Babylonian Exile after 597 BC and then the Diaspora after the expulsion by the Romans in 135 AD). The entire Torah would have been borrowed from ancient Oriental sources.
The German theologian and philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), an important representative of Weimar Classicism, wrote in the third part of his ideas on the philosophy of the history of mankind in 1791:
A very similar passage can also be found in the fourth part. Since Herder, an outstanding expert of the Old Testament and ancient Judaism, is considered a philosopher of the Enlightenment, the interpretation of these passages is controversial: According to the antisemitism researcher Léon Poliakov, Herder "anticipated the statements of the racists of future generations". The German literary scholar Klaus L. Berghahn believes that Herder's sympathy was only for ancient Judaism: On the other hand, he had, opposed the Jews their presence. The Polish Germanist Emil Adler, on the other hand, considers it possible - also in view of the positive remarks on Judaism a few pages before or after - that Herder only wanted to set an "apologetic counterweight": Also in other places of the ideas he had contrasted critical enlightenment formulations with conservative Orthodox thoughts and therefore weakened them in order not to endanger his position as General Superintendent of the Lutheran Church in Weimar. The Germanist Arndt Kremer points out that such language images in the 18th century were "not yet per se instrumentalized for antisemitic purposes". He contrasts them with Herder's argumentation that the alleged misdemeanours of Judaism could be explained by the anti-Jewish legislation of his time, which he described as "barbaric": "No völkisch antisemite of later times would argue like this".
In 1804, the reviewer of an anti-Jewish work by the German Enlightenment writer Friedrich Buchholz (1768–1843) picked up on the metaphor of the Jew in the Neue allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek as "a parasitic plant that incessantly clings to a noble bush, nourishes itself from the juice". In 1834, the metaphor was directed against Jewish emancipation in an article in the journal Der Canonische Wächter: The Jews would be “a true plague of the peoples parasitically surround them”. In his polemic against Jewish emancipation, the Protestant pastor Robert Haas expressed which parasitic plant was concretely meant by this in his polemic:
Economic antisemitism in the 19th century
The idea of social parasitism, in the figurative sense, has long been present in socialism. It was adopted from the physiocracy of the 18th century, which called urban merchants and manufactory owners "class stérile" in contrast to the supposedly only productive farmers. The French early socialist Charles Fourier (1772–1837), for example, described the majority of all servants, women and children as "domestic parasites", to whom he added the "social parasites", namely merchants and sailors. To these "anti-productive" populations Fourier also counted the Jews. In his 1846 work Les Juifs, rois de l'époque : histoire de la féodalité financière, his pupil Alphonse Toussenel (1803–1885) defined "the despised name of the Jew" as "any money dealer, any unproductive parasite who lives from the substance and work of others. For me, Jews, usurers, and money dealers are synonyms".
The early socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) pointed to Fourier's antisemitism and charged him with further stereotypes. He therefore accused the Jews of crucifying Jesus Christ, of founding the Roman Catholic Church which was rejected by Proudhon, of striving for world domination and of being a "human race" that could not be assimilated. He relied here on the philosopher of religion Ernest Renan (1823–1893), who held the view that the Hebrew language was incapable of abstract conceptualization and therefore of metaphysics. All in all, Proudhon saw the Jews as symbols of capitalism, which he criticized. He wrote in 1860:
From this he concluded in 1847 that the Jews would either have to be expelled to Asia or destroyed.
The French socialist Albert Regnard (1836–1903) saw parallels in 1890 between the antinomies of the capitalist and the proletarian on the one hand and the Jew and the Aryan on the other. The Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) called the Jews "an exploitative sect, a people of leeches, a single-eating parasite" in 1871. They were commanded either by Karl Marx or by the Rothschilds, who was equally despised by Bakunin. According to the political scientist Klaus von Beyme, this shows that Bakunin's antisemitism was not racially motivated, but anti-capitalistic.
While the British Chartist movement in general supported the Jewish demand for equality, the situation was different in terms of its economic role. Jews were denounced by Chartists as parasites and embodiments of exploitation, who would join forces with other enemies of the working class.
Merge with racial antisemitism in the 19th and early 20th centuries In the right-wing political spectrum, the stereotype of the "Jewish parasite" was much more widespread than in the rest of the political spectrum. The political right-wing used the stereotype with a racist rather than an anti-capitalist thrust, although both motives were present. Each time it had the function of dressing one's own antisemitic suspicions in a scientific and therefore apparently objective concept. The Ottoman-born writer Frederick van Millingen wrote in 1873 in his conspiracy-theoretical work The Conquest of the World by the Jews that Jews were "largely unproductive parasites". When more and more Jews fled from Eastern Europe to Germany and Austria in the 1880s, the depiction of the Jewish parasite and disease vector became the topos of antisemitic literature. In 1881, in his social Darwinian work Bau und Leben des sozialen Körpers, the German national economist Albert Schäffle unfolded the concept of the "social parasite", who took advantage of the labor and wealth of his "host" without contributing anything to it himself. As a particularly dangerous part of this social parasitism, he described the "proliferating" Jews as active in the credit System. The meaning of the metaphor changed with the idea of a "peoples body", into which the Jewish parasite penetrated in order to harm him. If originally meanings from botany were added to it (as with Herder), it was increasingly associated with zoology or infectiology: Now one had to imagine leeches, lice, viruses or even vampires under "Jewish parasites", which would have to be fought ruthlessly.
The domestic chaplain Adolf Stoecker (1835–1909), founder of the Christian Social Workers' Party, in an 1880 debate in the Prussian House of Representatives wanted only to grant the Jews a "parasitic existence" in Christian Europe and compared it with "leeches". In the following period he even considered a racial struggle and the use of force.
The German national economist Eugen Dühring (1833–1921) wrote in his 1881 work, Die Judenfrage als Racen-, Sitten- und Culturfrage (The Jewish Question as a Question of Races, Morals and Culture) that Jewish parasites would feel particularly at home in an "already corrupted peoples body". The power of this "inner Carthago" would have to break the modern populous. In the posthumously published 6th edition of 1930, he pointed out this statement even further and called for a war against the Jews:
Theodor Lessing referred to a statement by Dühring according to which Nordic people were obliged "to exterminate the parasitic races, as we exterminate threatening poisonous snakes and wild predators." The librarian and folk song researcher Otto Böckel (1859–1923), who sat in the Reichstag for the German Reform Party from 1887 to 1903, publicly stigmatized Jewish traders as "Jewish parasites" who had "eaten themselves into the German being".
In a similar way, the German Orientalist Paul de Lagarde (1827–1891) called in 1887 for a "surgical intervention" to remove the "mass of pus" that would have accumulated in Europe as a result of the infestation with Jewish parasites: "Trichinae and bacilli are not negotiated with, nor are trichinae and bacilli educated, they are destroyed as quickly and thoroughly as possible". Whether Lagarde was thinking of a physical extermination of the Jews is controversial in research. In Alexander Bein's view, however, these are all still biologistic comparisons and metaphors: Lagarde had not yet spoken out in favour of the extermination of the Jews, he had spoken out in pictorial language for the expropriation of the Jews. Such natural metaphors were also used in the nineteenth century without antisemitic intentions, as for example by the ancient historian Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), who described the ancient Jews as the "ferment of decomposition", that the formation of larger state entities beyond ethnic boundaries have allowed. The Austrian political scientist Michael Ley, on the other hand, assumes that Lagarde strived for the annihilation of Jews; for him, it was in the sense of a redemption antisemitism "a necessary step on the way of salvation of the German people".