Hitler and Tacitus: Ancient and Modern Anti-Semitism
Reading an example of Tacitus' anti-Semitisim in his Annals,
it is difficult not to draw connections to the most potent form of anti-Semitism in the modern era—the Nazis. When one considers Hitler’s views on the Jews
in Mein Kampf, one can certainly see
the echoes of Tacitus—which is to say the echoes of ancient anti-Semitism; as Mellor puts it, "it is through Tacitus that the mainstream Alexandrian
Greek anti-Semitic prejudice enters the Western tradition”[1]
. Certainly, some of Tacitus’ ideas are visible in Mein Kampf. For example, the idea of the Jews as a “race,” and a
self-consciously pure one, pervades both authors’ impressions.
The ‘othering,’ of Jews in Tacitus
is, arguably, stronger than other groups in his work, or, is at least expressed
in stronger terms. This is particularly interesting considering Tacitus’
ethnographic writings were often more concerned with criticizing Roman
standards, by emphasizing the more virtuous qualities of the, albeit simpler,
‘other’[2].
It may be, as Schafer argues, that, ultimately, it is the threat and lure of
monotheism that made the Romans so uneasy about the Jews and, indeed, the
Christians[3]—that
is to say that Tacitus saw their beliefs as fundamentally undermining to Roman
civilisation and ‘Romaness’. Certainly, this theme is prevalent in Hitler’s
writings. The threat of ‘the Jew’ is financial, cultural and political; what ‘the
Jew’ represents is fundamentally undermining to all parts of German society,
and what it means to be German. The greatest irony of all is that Hitler’s views
on ‘the German’ were informed, in part, by another politically motivated and
factually questionable ethnographical work of Tacitus, The Germania.
The use of
prejudice and fear, which has little or no basis in fact, it would seem, is common to
both Tacitus and Hitler, though their respective ends may have been very
different. The power of such erroneous ideas to affect human action, down through millennia, is truly
startling.
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