Wilhelm Marr’s The Victory of Judaism over Germanism: Viewed from a Nonreligious Point of View

Wilhelm Marr (1819–1904) has gone down in history as the first racial anti-Semite. His signature work, The Victory of Judaism over Germanism: Viewed from a Nonreligious Point of View, expresses Marr’s views on the conflict between Germans and Jews in a strikingly modern manner.

The pamphlet is difficult to obtain, and there have been no English translations. Now the text has been translated by Gerhard Rohringer and is available online in pdf format. The following summarizes Marr’s ideas as presented in this translation of the 8th edition, first published in 1879.

Marr was a journalist, and his pamphlet is expressed in a journalistic style with all the pluses and minuses that that entails. Marr’s pamphlet contains a number of ideas that agree with modern theories and social science research on Jews, as well as some ideas that are less supported but interesting nonetheless. His ideas on future events are fascinating with the 20/20 hindsight of 130 years of history.

Marr describes his writing as “a ‘scream of pain’ coming from the oppressed” (p. 6). Marr sees Germans as having already lost the battle with Jewry: “Judaism has triumphed on a worldwide historical, basis. I shall bring the news of a lost battle and of the victory of the enemy and all of that I shall do without offering excuses for the defeated army.”

In other words, Marr is not blaming the Jews for their predominance in German society, but rather blaming the Germans for allowing this to happen. He sees historical hatred against Jews as due to their occupational profile (“the loathing Jews demonstrate for real work” — a gratuitously negative and overly generalized reference to the Jewish occupational profile) and to “their codified hatred against all non-Jews” (p. 8). Historical anti-Semitism often had a religious veneer, but it was actually motivated by “the struggle of nations and their response to the very real Judaization of society, that is, to a battle for survival…. I therefore unconditionally defend Jewry against any and all religious persecution” (p. 10).

Marr claims that Jews have a justified hatred toward Europeans:

Nothing is more natural than the hatred the Jews must have felt for those who enslaved them and abducted them from their homeland [i.e., the Romans; Marr seems unaware that the Jewish Diaspora predated the failed Jewish rebellions of the 1st and 2nd centuries]. Nothing is more natural than that this hatred had to grow during the course of oppression and persecution in the Occident over the span of almost two thousand years. … Nothing is more natural than that they responded using their inborn gifts of craftiness and cleverness by forming as ‘captives’ a state within a state, a society within a society. (p. 11)

Jews used their abilities to obtain power in Germany and other Western societies: “By the 19th century the amazing toughness and endurance of the Semites had made them the leading power within occidental society. As a result, and that particularly in Germany, Jewry has not been assimilated into Germanism, but Germanism has been absorbed into Judaism” (p. 11). More