Quotes from Götz Aly

they put their faith in their intellectual assets and attained material success with admirable speed. To speak in everyday language: they got somewhere in life.

In 1894, historian Theodor Mommsen wrote that the root cause of the anti-Semitic "affliction" was "envy and the basest instincts,… a barbaric hatred for education, freedom, and humanism.

Parents stress the importance of learning to their children and carefully monitor their progress. Not infrequently, those children are well ahead of their Christian schoolmates in terms of intellectual curiosity and persistent diligence.

Around the same time, it was reported from Odessa: "All the schools are full, bottom to top, with Jewish pupils, and to be honest, the Jews are always the best in their class."20 Thinking back on his

Jew hatred was overwhelmingly religious in nature and began to wane only in the age of enlightened absolutism in Western and Central Europe. Still, Gentiles and Jews had extremely limited contact in society. Jews had to live in ghettos in some cities and were entirely forbidden from even entering certain others.

To understand anti-Semitism within Germany's Gentile majority, one has to talk about the skills, educational fervor, and rapid social rise of striking numbers of German Jews. Only then will the contrast emerge between them and the relatively lethargic German majority, revealing why anti-Semitism could gain so large a foothold in German society. Only then can we see anti-Semites as people motivated in large part by jealousy and resentment.

From the perspective of Bismarck, conditioned as he was by power politics, all that the new empire required was "the biggest possible army, a military commander, a guiding hand, enough money, and that's it.