In the few cases in which the Committee of the Congregation League has filed a complaint nonetheless, it has partly succeeded in effectuating punishment (some time ago) and partly suffered refusals by the public prosecutor’s office (in more recent times). According to the public prosecutor’s view, writings published in the capital at the time of the elections warning of Jewish members of the Reichstag did not contain any encouragement to violent acts; in their insulting reference to Jews in Galicia he did not detect the offence of inciting various classes of the German population, even though the writings in question were written in Germany and obviously meant only for Germans and obviously aimed only at Jews in Germany. The Jews, he continued, are not considered a religious community but a race and tribe. Mocking and sarcastic remarks are not to be confused with insulting statements.
Another public prosecutor refused prosecution of an article in which the Jews were attacked in the most ignominious way – a Jew’s oath of allegiance described as business formula, the brevet of the reserve officer as an object of Jewish business speculation – because an insult lodged against the Jewish tribe did not automatically affect every member of it.
Yet we Jews can best feel how antisemitic attacks threaten all of us, affect us all. And every Christian – both the biased and unbiased – will admit that these writings do not refer to the Jew Meyer but to the majority of all Jews.
If there is any truth in the saying calumniare audacter, semper aliquid haeret – slander boldly and something will always stick –, then this is certainly the case with the Jews. The roots of aversion run deep. They are tied to the earliest school memories; the spark smolders in the souls of the undiscriminating and the prejudiced and is nurtured by inflammatory writings like these.
Moreover, it lingers not only in the souls of the undiscriminating. If governments, if public prosecutors do not take vigorous action against these writings – even though unbiased attitudes and a sense of justice prevails among them, even though the highest authorities in the German Reich have repeatedly expressed their decisive disapproval of such diatribes – then precisely this proves the existence of reservations regarding the application of the full force of the law in the face of an overwhelmingly widespread prejudice.
By no means are these writings innocuous or harmless. Still, I deem those diatribes that already reveal themselves in their tone as pure products of hatred, envy, and the basest passions, or even as pure speculation, as proportionally less dangerous than those of a pessimistic, ultramontane, agrarian, and Christian-Socialist character. They founder on their own exaggerations. Even their intended audience, the great majority, still has, despite all prejudice, enough feel for justice and good sense to eventually tire of this agitation.
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