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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
In October 1873, a stock market crash changed this state of affairs in one blow. The economy had heated to the boiling point, a result of billions in French war reparation payments. The crash affected the entire Continent and came in the wake of feverish speculation in several European countries by reckless promoters with close political connections. Although the various governments had been warned of these machinations, they had done little to restrain them. The bubble burst first in Austria. F rom there the panic spread to Germany and the rest of Europe. In Germany alone, tens of thousands of middle-class and aristocratic families lost everything. The crash provoked a wave of anti-Semitic agitation unlike anything Germany -- or France-had seen since the Crusades or the Black Death. Jews were said to be "inferior" and "immoral"; their successes over the preceding two or three decades were due entirely to devious, even criminal manipulations. It was not an accident that so many stockbrokers happened to be Jews. At whose expense had they been enriching themselves?
Nine months earlier, in a sensational speech in the Reichstag, the Jewish liberal Eduard Lasker had sounded a first dire warning.'' Lasker exposed the ruthless activities of Bethel Henry Strousberg, a Prussian rai
lroad tycoon and converted Jew, revealing Strousberg's notorious system, of winning government concessions by lining the pockets of parliamentarians a nd high officials. Strousberg had played a major role in the German economy for years. 'That fellow will one day soon be emperor of Germany," Engels had written Marx in September 1869. "Wherever you go, everybody speaks only of Strousberg." His enormous i ndustrial and railroad holdings collapsed even before the general crash. For the sake of his aristocratic partners-who included the Silesian dukes of Ujest a nd Ratibor, the Prussian count Lehndorff-Steinort, and a Prince Wilhelm zu Putbus (soon dubbed Kaputbus) -- Bismarck, with Bleichroder's assistance, made a last-minute effort to stave off their bankruptcy with state funds. In his characteristic style, Bismarck told the French ambassador: 2 dukes, I general, half a dozen ladies in waiting, twice that many chamberlains, 100 owners of coffeehouses and all the cabmen of Berlin found themselves totally ruined. The emperor took pity on the dukes, the aide de camp, the ladies in wait
i ng and charged me with pulling them out of trouble. I appealed to Bleichroder, who on condition of getting a title of nobility, which as a Jew he very much valued, agreed to rescue the duke of Ujest and General Count Lehndorff. Two dukes & an aide de camp saved-frankly this is worth the "von" we bestowed on the good Bleichroder,"?I
n the event, they were not really "saved." Beyond the monetary losses, several Reichstag deputies and dignitaries of the royal court were seriously compromised by Lasker's revelations. As for Lasker himself, his disclosures of the swindl es and corruption catapulted him overnight into the first rank of public figures. The Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums wrote that the name of Eduard Lasker should be added to that of Moses Mendelssohn and other great Jews in history." But little was done to put an end to the c orruption Lasker exposed. His warning of an impending general crisis went unheeded, leading only to the appointment of a commission of inquiry into Strousberg's alleged system. It did not lead to concrete monetary and legal reform. In the absence of a clear political will it could not. The Reichstag had no power to subpoena generals, noblemen, and high government official. who would not in any case have been held accountable by a commission of mere middle-class parliamentarians. A feverish rush for scapegoats ensued.
For all intents and purposes both the financial structures forming the backbone of the Zionist Virtual Colonial Motherland and also the links from Jewish and non-Jewish power brokers and power centers were fully in place in the 1870s before the 1881 pogroms, from which the beginning of the Zionist movement is usually dated.
Not only did Strousberg then like Madoff today prey on corrupt Jewish networking and non-denominational greed, but the 19th century financier probably hastened the initiation of Zionist colonialism.
[Note that The Pity of It All is fun to read, but it is bad as a history of German Jews.
The book starts with Moses Mendelsohn's entry into Berlin (1743). Why? 1648 would have made more sense. Then Elon could have explained the economic mess of the German countryside during the 18th century and its relationship to a reformulation of Jewish-Gentile relations within German-speaking territories.
One would never have know that the Kulturkampf took place from reading the book. It had immense effects on German Protestant-Catholic-Jewish relations.
Elon never discusses how the Prussian government effectively created a Jewish economic elite by its policy of only allowing the most entrepreneurial of Polish Jews to immigrate into Prussia or non-Polish Prussian-ruled territories, and practically all Elon's claims about Czarist anti-Semitism are tendentious or flat-out wrong.
Elon leaves out all discussion of the development of Modern Orthodoxy and its relationship with Zionism. Shimshon Rafael Hirsch and Isaac Breuer definitely deserved some mention. Breuer is very much a Tariq Ramadan-like figure in terms of reconciling Western philosophy and religion.
Breuer became an important political figure in the Zionist settlement of Palestine and created the groundwork that made it possible for non- and anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews to participate in Israeli governments that have relentlessly pursued policies of ethnic cleansing and the murder of unarmed women and children.
Modern Orthodoxy should have been an important subtopic within Elon's book, for it was as much a result of acculturation and assimilation as secularization and conversion. By compromising with Zionism it was drained of any ethical or moral content that could have been salvaged from pre-modern Judaism.]
