Deutschlands Prophet

Lagarde (1827-1891), a renowned Orientalist at the University of Göttingen, was a bitter critic of modernism and liberalism with which he identified contemporary Jews. In countless articles and two volumes of essays, "Deutsche Schriften", he advocated a vague "national religion", in which Jews had no place. His antisemitism was Christian, cultural, and nationalist - against the Jewish "state within the state". He occasionally expressed racist views, although, especially in his early life, he believed in the possibility of the full integration of Jews who converted to Christianity. In later life, he made his famous assertion that the only way to deal with bacteria and with Jews was to exterminate them. Generally quarrelsome, he was particularly contemptuous of Jewish scholars. Describes the libel suit of 1886 brought by the chief rabbi of Marburg against Ferdinand Fenner of the antisemitic Böckel movement, in which Lagarde submitted an opinion for the defense. In his lifetime and after, Lagarde had many admirers. He became newly popular in the 1920s, especially (but not only) in the völkisch movement. Alfred Rosenberg considered Lagarde's "national religion" the basis of Nazi ideology. Hitler formed his worldview before reading the "Deutsche Schriften" in 1934; but the heavy underlinings in his copy (facsimiles of three pages appear on pp. 342-345) show that he read it with care and approbation. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)