The Enlightenment, or Haskalah movement, broadly speaking, comprises
the Jewish absorption of secular learning, particularly in literature
and science, the abandonment of the study of the Talmud for modern
subjects, and the adoption of farm and craft life.[10] Moses
Mendelssohn in Germany and Lilienthal in Russia were the first great
protagonists of these radical departures; and the movement, which in
part led to the demand for Emancipation and in part resulted from it,
further removed the differences between Jew and non-Jew, at least from
the standpoint of the former, and further removed him from his
religious and historical past, perceptibly weakening and in many
cases practically destroying the medieval sense of solidarity. Each
Jew adopted the culture of his native country, and so one Jew became
virtually a foreigner to another. Haskalah, in a word, is a looking
outward on the part of the Jew; for all its virtues this movement had
the consequence of blunting racial consciousness and blurring racial
identity.

_Nationalism and Anti-Semitism_

All might have been well but for the presence of a third and
conflicting element. While the Jew became infected with the
universalism of the Revolutionary spirit, the majority of Europeans
were absorbing and developing the particularistic implications of '89.
Nationalism is the self-consciousness of a people, and it found its
European expression in the creation of the modern States of Germany,
Italy, Hungary, Greece, and the small Balkans. It is a race's
recognition of itself, a looking inward, and it leads to the pursuit
of racial ideals and development of racial qualities--an inward
expansion which, indifferent to the charge of chauvinism, can only be
secured by an outward discrimination. The Jew and the Christian had
changed places since medieval times: the Jew now stood for a universal
society and a universal church, and the Christian for exclusion and
separation upon racial bases. Emancipation thus brought the conflict
directly to the attention of the strong majority, namely, the
Christians, and anti-Semitism was their answer.

In its restricted sense, anti-Semitism is a scientific stick used to
beat the Jewish dog with. After impartial, impersonal scientific
investigation, French and German scholars[11] demonstrated the racial
inferiority of the Semite to the Aryan, enumerated the inherent
Semitic qualities as greed, special aptitude for money-making,
aversion to ha