Antysemityzm jako światopogląd „naukowy”. Theodor Fritsch i jego „Katechizm

The article sets out to analyse the phenomenon of German anti--Semitism within the process by which its leading adherents endowed it with the semblances of science. Alongside Wilhelm Marr, coiner of the term ‘anti-Semitism’ and “patriarch” of the position it describes, one of the champions of that ‘modern nti-Semitism’ was a student of his, Theoder Fritsch, to whom the paper is devoted. Fritsch’s idée fi xe was to present the traditional anti-Semitism of the confessional, in other words, anti-Judaism, as well as the then fl edgling racial anti-Semitism, with a ‘scientifi c’ world view (wissenschaftliche Weltanschauung). This guise of unquestionable knowledge, empirically verifi ed, was intended to place an ideological weapon in the hands both of the disciples of the ‘old school’ of anti-Semitism and of the new votaries who were drawn to the ‘movement’ (Bewegung). In the eyes of the latter, the central conception of the ‘instinctive’, ‘pre-scientifi c’, which is to say, religious, anti-Semitism was offensive, if not to say discrediting per se. Fritsch’s opus magnum was his Anti-Semitic Catechism, the systematics and substance of which are the subject of penetrating analysis in the article, as are his ideological path and the reception of his works in Hitler’s Third Reich.