CHRISTIAN S. Davis. Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany

This monograph raises a number of extremely interesting and relevant questions. Christian S. Davis sets out to elucidate how “the antisemitic and colonialist movements of the Kaiserreich era impinged upon each other in meaningful ways” (p. 3). His principal focus is on the role prominent Germans of Jewish background played in the colonial movement and the ways in which their involvement was perceived and problematized (or not) by antisemitic activists, deputies, and publicists. Davis seeks to contribute to the discussion surrounding the significance of both imperial German antisemitism and colonialism for explaining the Shoah. He argues that historians have tended to overestimate the role of antisemitism while the “effects that colonialism had on what was ‘possible to think’ in terms of race and racial domination ... have been downplayed” (p. 250). Susannah Heschel's and Jonathan M. Hess's utilization of postcolonial theory to examine constructions of Jewishness has indicated that an exploration of this nexus can indeed render rich conceptual fruit, as has Jay Geller's recent discussion of “some of the more familiar associations of Jew and Chinese” in the European, and especially German, colonial imagination (The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity [2011], p. 52). The material Davis presents leaves no doubt that he has much to contribute to this debate. Turning first to the involvement of “hardened antisemites” in the colonial project and similarities in the perception and portrayal of Jews and black Africans in racial discourse, the bulk of the book looks at the involvement of Germans of Jewish background in the colonial movement, focusing in particular on Paul Kayser, the head of the Colonial Division of the Foreign Office from 1890 to 1896, and Bernhard Dernburg, Kayser's successor at the head of the Colonial Division, who subsequently served as Secretary of State for Colonial Affairs until 1910.

Antisemitism · Archaeology · Colonialism · Ethnology · German · Jewish question · Judaism · Modernity · Nazism · Political science · Sociology · The Holocaust · Theology · Anthropology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · Gender Studies · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies