ABSTRACT
If one wants to answer the question of how the relations between Jews and Gentiles on the person-to-person level developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up to the final catastrophe of the Holocaust, one must be cognizant of the dialectical tension between the actual Jew whom he encounters in day-by-day contacts and the image of the mythical Jew which permeates these contacts. The tension is epitomized in the story that has been told about a Jewish storekeeper in a small town in Germany shortly before Hitler’s seizure of power and his Gentile neighbor of many years who one day started wearing the sign of the swastika on his lapel. “We have always been good neighbors,” the storekeeper is supposed to have said in amazement, “so why are you now turning against me?” The neighbor assured the storekeeper that he bore not the slightest grudge against him as a person but that he was unalterably opposed to “international Jewry.” In other words, what was happening was that the actual Jew was well enough liked, but that he was slain to exorcize the perceived threat of the mythical Jew with whom nobody could come to grips. Moreover, if we confine our observations to Central Europe, where the decisive development took place, we shall see that human relations in the early period of the emancipation were uneasy at best and frequently of a hostile nature while they took on an increasingly more integrative character in the later period, especially after the turn of the century. Yet, the uneasiness was merely neutralized, not removed. The process of integration turned out to be deceptive because the phobic image of the mythical Jew had grown to monstrous proportions at the same time. In subtly transitory stages, the actual Jew attained more and more the coloration of the mythical Jew. In the end, mass psychosis overwhelmed even the best intentions. We must now try to unfold the story in greater detail.
