s it subsequently assumed through factitious alliances
with political parties bent less on persecuting the Jews than on
profiting by the anti-Jewish agitation. The divisions showed themselves
at the first attempt to form a political party on an anti-Semitic basis.
Imperceptibly the agitators had grouped themselves into two classes,
economic and ethnological anti-Semites. The impracticable racial views
of Marr and Treitschke had not found favour with Stocker and the
Christian Socialists. They were disposed to leave the Jews in peace so
long as they behaved themselves properly, and although they carried on
their agitation against Jewish malpractices in a comprehensive form
which seemed superficially to identify them with the root-and-branch
anti-Semites, they were in reality not inclined to accept the racial
theory with its scheme of revived Jewish disabilities (Huret, _La
Question Sociale_--interview with Stocker). This feeling was
strengthened by a tendency on the part of an extreme wing of the racial
anti-Semites to extend their campaign against Judaism to its offspring,
Christianity. In 1879 Professor Sepp, arguing that Jesus was of no human
race, had proposed that Christianity should reject the Hebrew Scriptures
and seek a fresh historical basis in the cuneiform inscriptions. Later
Dr Eugen Dubring, in several brochures, notably _Die Judenfrage als
Frage des Rassencharakters_ (1881, 5th ed. Berlin, 1901), had attacked
Christianity as a manifestation of the Semitic spirit which was not
compatible with the theological and ethical conceptions of the
Scandinavian peoples. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had also
adopted the same view, without noticing that it was a _reductio ad
absurdum_ of the whole agitation, in his _Menschliches,
Allzumenschliches_ (1878), _Jenseits von Gut und Bose_ (1886),
_Genealogie der Moral_ (1887). With these tendencies the Christian
Socialists could have no sympathy, and the consequence was that when in
March 1881 a political organization of anti-Semitism was attempted, two
rival bodies were created, the "Deutsche Volksverein," under the
Conservative auspices of Herr Liebermann von Sonnenberg (b. 1848) and
Herr Forster, and the "Sociale Reichsverein," led by the racial and
Radical anti-Semites, Ernst Henrici (b. 1854) and Otto Bockel (b. 1859).
In 1886, at an anti-Semitic congress held at Cassel a reunion was
effected under the name of the "Deutsche antisemitische Verein," but
this only las