After a long struggle, Jewish emancipation was formally completed in Germany in 1871, when Wilhelm I abolished religious discrimination across the entire Reich. Yet the very same decade witnessed a new wave of antisemitism, one more vicious and virulent than anything before. At its centre was what is known as -The Berlin Antisemitism Controversy-. How can this rise of antisemitism be explained when further liberal reform was expected? Can it help us understand the tide of antisemitism that was to engulf Germany fifty years later?
In this outstanding book by a leading scholar of German philosophy, Frederick C. Beiser argues that to understand modern antisemitism we must go back in history. Beginning with the background of the controversy and examining the most important antisemitic thinkers of the 1870s and 1880s, he brilliantly analyses the beginnings of modern antisemitism in Germany. Beiser challenges received scholarship that the rise of antisemitism was caused by a failure
