ABSTRACT
Throughout the Weimar years, complacency, combined with a sense of helplessness, encouraged some German Jews to adopt a sanguine view of racism. Not a few saw anti-Semitism as a positive boon that alone could keep the Jews from gradual amalgamation with the larger society and ultimate disappearance as a distinctive religious group. Few Jews had been the targets of personal attacks, but virtually all knew anti-Semites, most of whom they described as punctiliously correct or even friendly in their personal relations with individual Jews. The simple truth is that in most cases anti-Semitism was as abstract to the Jews as Jews were to anti-Semites. Racial prejudice was the inevitable and justifiable response of one people to attempts by another to make it share in the formation of its destiny. It was an instinctive response independent of reason and will, and hence common to all peoples, the Jews included.
