For Jews, the sense of prewar angst was at once mitigated and animated by
the ebb and flow of anti-Semitism, illustrated by the trials of two Jews during
the early 1910s: Mendel Beilis and Leo Frank. Mendel Beilis was a Jew in
Kiev who was accused in a blood libel in 1911. Though the local authorities,
judge, and jury were slanted against him, he was eventually acquitted. Leo
Frank was a Jewish factory manager in Atlanta, Georgia, who was accused of
raping and killing Mary Phagan, a teenage girl who worked in the factory.
Frank was arrested, tried and convicted of murder, and sentenced to death.
The governor commuted his sentence, but before he was released, a lynch
mob hanged him. Seen side by side, the acquittal of Beilis in Russia and the
killing of Frank in America, albeit in the American South, underlined an ele-
ment of unpredictability in the spread of anti-Semitism prior to the war.
The fin de sièclewas not a Jewish movement, but Jewish intellectuals and
literati were conspicuously and disproportionately represented in it – mainly
because a disproportionate number of Jews were urban and educated. As these
embryonic feelings of discontent matured and expanded during and after the
war, there was a sense that the Jewish critique of prewar civilization had con-
tributed to the demise of this world after the war. This was ironic given that
the bourgeoisie, the main target of this critique, was also seen as being largely
Jewish. Like the apposition of Fischhof and Rothschild into a single Jewish
target for all forms of political anti-Semitism, the juxtaposition of the Jewish
bourgeoisie and the Jewish cultural critique of the bourgeoisie would become
an important foundation stone for the postwar surge of anti-Semitism.
The Great War
The course of the war was surprising almost from the outset. Most military
and political leaders presumed that the war would end with quick victories
and minimal casualties – hence the waves of excitement when the war began.
There was also a misconception that technological advancements would make
war faster with less harm to human life; such notions did not anticipate the
defensive power of new weapons such as the machine gun, and underesti-
mated the amount of punishment an ordinary foot soldier could withstand,
even in the trenches of the Western Front. Most socialist leaders had opposed
the war as a capitalist nationalist venture and had promised neutrality. When
push came to shove, though, the socialists joined right in. In 1914, Frederick
Ebert, the leader of the German Social Democrats, voted for war credits; the
power of nationalism overwhelmed international socialism.
Jews were equally swept up by this tide of nationalism. Jews defended
their own country even when this meant fighting against other Jews, thus
fulfilling a central condition of emancipation. At the same time, Jews who
fought for the Central Powers regarded the struggle against Russia as a way of
liberating Russian Jews from tsarist tyranny. Zionists, too, shared this per-
ception of the war.
From renewal to devastation, 1914–45 205