ABSTRACT
Comprehensive studies of how the state of Israel came into being and of its social, cultural, and political condition generally include accounts, however brief, of the often troubled history of Jews in their various lands of exile, of the kinds of hostility, ranging from vilification and discrimination to expulsion and murder, visited by gentiles on Jews. The German anti-Semites who said that Heine smelled—devilish Jews have not only the horns, tail, beard, and sexuality, but also the smell, of the goat—found confirmation of their views in Heine’s own depiction of the Polish Jew with “his lousy beard, with his garlic breath, and his bad German.” Jewish enlighteners such as Moses Mendelssohn shared the belief of their gentile fellow enlighteners that sectarian religious strife was the world’s besetting evil, and that the antidote to fanaticism was the exercise of and devotion to reason.
