In the same year that Drumont published his editorial against the presence of Jews in the French army, the German Conservative Party included in its party platform a pledge to “do battle against the many-sided, aggressive, decomposing, and arrogant Jewish influence.” In this 1895 speech delivered before the Reichstag, Conservative Party member Hermann Ahlwardt (1846–1914) called on German lawmakers to close the borders against further Jewish immigration, particularly from Russia. As you read the speech, pay particular attention to the role of race in Ahlwardt’s argument. Why did he believe that a Jew could never become a real German?

It is certainly true that there are Jews in our country of whom nothing adverse can be said. Nevertheless, Jews as a whole must be considered harmful, for the racial traits of this people are of a kind that in the long run do not agree with the racial traits of the Teutons. Every Jew who at this moment has not yet transgressed is likely to do so at some future time under given circumstances because his racial characteristics drive him on in that direction. . . .

Experience in all fields of nature shows that innate racial characteristics which have been acquired by the race in the course of many thousands of years are the strongest and most enduring factors that exist, and that therefore we can rid ourselves of the characteristics of our race no more than can the Jews. One need not fight the Jew individually, and we are not doing that, by the way. But, when countless specimens prove the existence of certain racial characteristics and when these characteristics are such as to make impossible a common life, well, then I believe that we who are natives here, who have tilled the soil and defended it against all enemies — that we have a duty to take a stand against the Jews who are of a quite different nature.

We Teutons are rooted in the cultural soil of labor; each of us seeks to work for others and demands in return that others work for him. It is on this soil of culture that we have worked our way up from barbarity to our present state of civilization. It is different with the Jews. The Jews do not believe in the culture of labor, they do not want to create values themselves, but want to appropriate, without working, the values which others have created; that is the cardinal difference that guides us in all our considerations.

The Jews want to grab what others have produced by their work; we ourselves would be content, if we could only get what we have labored for. . . . Herr Deputy Rickert here has just expounded how few Jews we have altogether and that their number is steadily declining. Well, gentlemen, why don’t you go to the main business centers and see for yourselves whether the percentages indicated by Herr Rickert prevail there too. Why don’t you walk along the [main business streets] Leipzigerstrasse [in Berlin] or the Zeil in Frankfurt and have a look at the shops? Wherever there are opportunities to make money, the Jews have established themselves, but not in order to work — no, they let others work for them and take what others have produced by their labor. . . .

Gentlemen, the Jews are indeed beasts of prey, they work like beasts of prey. You cannot alter this fact. . . .

The Jews have an attitude toward us which differs totally from that of other peoples. It is one thing when a Pole, a Russian, a Frenchman, a Dane immigrates to our country, and quite another thing when a Jew settles here. . . . Once our [Polish, etc.] guests have lived here for ten, twenty years, they have come to resemble us. For they have stood with us on the same cultural soil of labor. . . . After thirty, forty years, they have become Germans and their grandchildren would be indistinguishable from us except for the strange-sounding names they still bear. The Jews have lived for 700 or 800 years, but have they become Germans? Have they placed themselves on the cultural soil of labor? They never even dreamed of such a thing; as soon as they arrived, they started to cheat and they have been doing that ever since they have been in Germany.

The Jews should not be admitted, whether or not there is overpopulation, for they do not belong to a productive race, they are exploiters, parasites. . . .

[Answering Rickert’s argument that it would be a shame if fifty million Germans were afraid of a few Jews, Ahlwardt continued,] Herr Rickert, who is just as tall as I am, is afraid of one single cholera bacillus — well, gentlemen, the Jews are just that, cholera bacilli!

Gentlemen, the crux of the matter is Jewry’s capacity for contagion and exploitation. . . . How many Germans have perished as a result of this Jewish exploitation, how many may have hanged themselves, shot themselves, drowned themselves, how many may have ended by the wayside as tramps in America or drawn their last breath in the gutter, all of them people who had worked industriously on the soil their fathers had acquired, perhaps in hundreds of years of hard work. . . . Ah, why were they foolish enough to let themselves be cheated? But the Germans are by no means so foolish, they are far more intelligent than the Jews. All inventions, all great ideas come from the Germans and not from the Jews. No, I shall tell you the national difference: The German is fundamentally trusting, his heart is full of loyalty and confidence. The Jew gains this confidence, only to betray it at the proper moment, ruining and pauperizing the German. This abuse of confidence on the part of the Jews is their main weapon. And these Jewish scoundrels are to be defended here! Is there no one to think of all those hundreds of thousands, nor of those millions of workers whose wages grow smaller and smaller because Jewish competition brings the prices down? One always hears you must be humane to the Jews. The humanitarianism of our century, this humaneness of beasts of prey is our curse. Why aren’t you for once humane toward the oppressed? You’d better exterminate those beasts of prey and you’d better start by not letting any more of them into the country. . . .

The Jew is no German. If you say, the Jew was born in Germany, he was nursed by a German wet-nurse, he abides by German laws, he has to serve as a soldier — and what kind of a soldier at that! let’s not talk about it — he fulfills all his obligations, he pays his taxes — then I say that all this is not the crucial factor with regard to his nationality; the crucial factor is the race from which he stems. Permit me to make a rather trite comparison which I have already used elsewhere in my speeches: a horse that is born in a cowshed is far from being a cow.

A Jew who was born in Germany does not thereby become a German; he is still a Jew. Therefore it is imperative that we realize that Jewish racial characteristics differ so greatly from ours that a common life of Jews and Germans under the same laws is quite impossible because the Germans will perish.

Gentlemen. . . . I beg you from the bottom of my heart not to take this matter lightly but as a very serious thing. It is a question of life and death for our people. . . .

We wouldn’t think of going as far as the Austrian anti-Semites in the Federal Council and to move that a bounty be paid for every Jew shot or to decree that he who kills a Jew shall inherit his property. [A reference to Ernst Schneider, a lieutenant of Karl Lueger in the Austrian Christian Social Party, who punctuated his speeches with this kind of humor.] We have no such intention. We shall not go as far as that. What we want is a clear and reasonable separation of the Jews from the Germans. An immediate prerequisite is that we slam the door and see to it that no more of them get in.

Source: Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer, eds., Antisemitic Myths: A Historical and Contemporary Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. 111–114.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER