Something New under the Sun: Witchcraft and the Cruelty of Anti-Semitism

(L) Chancellor von Bismarck (C) Witch burning, Photo: Encyclopedia Britannica (R) Chancellor Hitler at Berlin in 1938, Photo: AP

by Mary W Maxwell, LLB

I recently found a 1956 book entitled "The Magic Background of Modern Anti-Semitism: An Analysis of the German-Jewish Relationship." It was written by Adolf Leschnitzer from lectures he gave at Free University of Berlin from 1952 to 1954. He served in WWI as a German soldier and then was a history teacher in high schools until he emigrated, to escape persecution, in 1939 -- first to Netherlands then to England.

The theme of the book -- "Magic Background" -- goes like this. For two centuries -- the 1200s and 1300s -- there was violent persecution of Jews in Germany (this book never talks about Jews elsewhere). Oddly, the cruelty lightened up during the 1500s and 1600s, the reason being that a focus on witchcraft replaced it. Then it came back again in 1800s and 1900s.

In the preface, Adolf Leschnitzer says "In another study I propose to put to the test the assumption that modern anti-Semitism is the witchcraft 'mania' of 'late' modern times."

Notice the sarcastic quote marks around 'late.' The author is not so sure we have got passed the stage of developing hatred for a group when we are in economic distress -- as Germany was, following two depressions, 1919-1924 and 1929-1933. His book seems to me to be spot on, and I was elated to see a new approach to "mass hypnosis."

Interesting Historical Facts

Here are three background factors discussed in this very readable and very ideology-neutral book:

First, Germans did not participate in the intellectual liberation, such as the Paris salon, or cogitate on the American republic. There wasn't a "Germany," as such, until the 19th century. There was Prussia, and other areas of German speaking people. It was partly feudal.

Second, Jews in Germany did not receive Emancipation until the 1800s. They got partial emancipation in 1812, via the Prussian edict "On the Civil Equality of the Jews," then full equality in 1872. At that time, by an edict of Otto von Bismarck, (1815-1898), first chancellor of the German Empire, the serfs were also freed.

Third, because the lower classes got mobility at the same time as the Jews, anyone could now go to university, become professionals, and own land. The two groups came through it together and were friends -- in symbiosis. Many Jews assimilated fully and after 1872 most were indifferent to their religion. Some followed the recommendation to get baptized. Page 78:

"They were irreligious. They thought they had found in science ... an adequate substitute for religion. They did not attend religious services at all, or at most ... on the High Holidays. They paid their Jewish community taxes. One could sever all ties with Judaism without being baptized, in Prussia they could do so by a simple declaration to a lower court."

Jews made up only one percent of the German population but after they could get formal education they became writers, doctors, lawyers, musicians, judges, and contributed heavily to the cultural blossoming of Germany.

Now let's go back earlier. Note: where the author wrote 'the seventeenth century,' I changed that to 'the 1600s,' as it is easier to picture. Pages 27-28:

"The first stage began in the last two decades of the 1600s when a handful of well-to-do Jewish families were again granted permission to live in the capitals of a few German states, such as Vienna or Berlin. ... The state assisted in the creation of a Jewish upper bourgeoisie.... The first personal relationships between Christians and Jews evolved. Thus Lessing and Mendelsohn struck up their friendship in 1756.

"(a) The groups involved on both sides were small. Neither the largest portion of the Jews nor the mass of the German population were touched by this process of coming together.

"(b) The process was set in motion by the mercantilist economic policy of absolutism.... The Jews pioneered in some fields in which other businessmen were late or hesitant to enter.

"(c) Assimilation or absorption followed each other within two or three generations."

Witches, Anyone?

I am jumping around the book, but will now report Leschnitzer's insight into anti-Semitism, which I think has merit. The Jews were used to being persecuted. They were downtrodden and looked down upon. (I say it's natural for the dominant group to give little recognition or even hate to the lower class.) But this took the form of "magic." Jews could be blamed for anything.

I think the author got this idea from the chronology, pointed out above, that during the 1500s and 1600s in Europe people went crazy blaming "witches." I had no idea until I read this book that perhaps a hundred thousand were burned at the stake or hanged for being witches. This was from 1575 to 1699. Page 97:

"In a time of transition [the advent of science], when many people did not know which way to turn, the witchcraft mania was directed primarily against the female sex. The general feeling that womankind is strange grew to absurd suspicion, which was in turn activated by the grotesque superstitiousness of the age and a systematic policy connected with economic calculations."

Holocaust "Denial"

Before continuing with Adolf Lesnitchzer's theme, let me revert to our interest in Holocaust revisionism. I jumped on the bandwagon with my Adelaide friend Fredrick Toben, circa 2012, as he pointed out to me the outrageousness of the prison terms being handed out in Germany for "Holocaust denial." A phrase in the law made it a crime to insult the dead, or something like that. (Talk about making history inaccessible!)

France and Poland made similar laws. Australia's Human Rights Act did not make it a crime, but Toben was jailed for contempt of court when he refused to delete "anti-Semitic" material from his website. (I am on record supporting Toben in court and I am also on the record evaluating his AdelaideInstitute.org website as anti-Semitic; one of the cartoons was disgusting, but dear Fredrick was determined to fight censorship.)

At GumshoeNews.com, we were also moved by a very intelligent German lady, age 90, Ursula Haverbeck who stated in videos that no Jewish organization would answer her simple question about the location of the Nazi's mass killings. The museum at Auschwitz had quietly changed its proclaimed number of Jewish deaths from 4 million to 1.5 million without that causing a rewrite of the famous number six million.

Furthermore, sleuths found many quotes in the New York Times, as far back as the 1920s, that "six million" Jews died in the FIRST World War -- a figure no one today would try to support.

We know today, even from prisons in the US and the UK, that torture abounds when no one is looking. Jews were rounded up from their homes and interned -- there's no shortage of evidence for that. But no written evidence of an extermination policy has thus far been located. It is OK therefore to question it, indeed it is very healthy, always, to put the arguments on the table. A whispering campaign is by definition dangerous.

(Note, however, that it's not German Jews but German Gentiles who have made and enforced the laws against Holocaust denial or Holocaust minimization. What's that all about? Hmm. I don't rule out that the whole deal has to do with keeping eyes off of the truly guilty. Indeed it would be a very clever strategy, wouldn't it?)

When reading this book "The Magic Background of Modern Anti-Semitism," it struck me as very likely that Jews have had to put up with very unfair criticism -- many people hold a negative view that can't be reasoned with. And maybe it is akin to hysteria about witches. Psychologists know how important it is for individual to find a scapegoat to blame for their trouble. And masses can do this, too. Pages 140-143:

"Emotions, ideas, desires... were available to be manipulated for political purposes.... A new psychological vacuum had arisen which needed to be filled.... For a long time, anti-Jewish feeling found expression in words, in social discrimination, but only rarely in outbreaks.... Highly inflammable materials were being assembled. Evil gossip... fear... baseless and bottomless hatred were swarming in the air....

"Declining classes generally believe they are suffering an injustice. They are inclined to blame the classes which are rising at the time. The lower middle classes between 1850 and 1880 linked their own difficulties with the prosperity of the Jews in a cause-and-effect relationship.... [By 1933] the number of [Germans] threatened with ruin swelled exorbitantly. The wild senseless anti-Semitic charges pulled out of air became a kind of magic word in Nazi mouths... creating the precondition for dictatorship. [There was] a systematic fostering of mass hypnosis.

"The racist doctrine of the inequality of man -- the German was able by birth, destined to the highest achievement, the Jew worthless -- was the dynamite that blew up the democratic egalitarian conception of the republic. In Mein Kampf, Hitler makes it clear that the masses must always be presented with but ONE enemy. There was the passionate desire to find the villain and make him answer for his crimes."

We are all doing this today. It's remarkable that Leschnitzer was writing in the Fifties: he had no way of seeing our situation. The tragedy we are facing is the takeover by the globalists. I, like others, am keen to identify who is responsible. Surely it takes massive coordination for the geo-engineers to do their hurricanes, and the financiers to plan a depression, and the "Tavistockians" to control our minds, and the Mafias to supply the hitmen of errant leakers. Etcetera! Surely it can't be "the Jews."

I know of scholars who believe it is the Jews. They do intensive research and find plausible clues. But they fail to look for clues that would take them elsewhere. Here is an example, which I often mention. Many Americans think AIPAC is running Congress. Without doubt, there are unofficial congressional whips who do get our legislators to pass particular laws (by bribe, by blackmail, whatever).

The "I" in their acronym stands for Israel. This does NOT mean that Jews are running Congress. It does not even mean that Israel is running Congress. The 535 members of Congress are running Congress. When they do wrong, they are the ones to blame. If they feel helpless, let them say so. Maybe we could help them.

Three of the top Cabinet posts in the US government today are filled by Jewish individuals -- State, Treasury, and Justice. Those three persons are doing evil things. Are they doing it because they are, ethnically or religiously, Jews? I don't think so. Are they doing it to help their tribe? Surely you jest. So what's going on? Let's open everything up and find out.

Apologies Are Due, for Anti-Semitism

In 2001, the Massachusetts House of Representatives declared innocent the many women who were executed as witches in Salem in the 1600s. Recently, the government in Scotland has apologized for its witch hunting. I suppose the motivation for this is that, since everyone now knows that the executed persons were really not witches, it is time to correct the record.

I think apologies are due to Jews for persecutions and pogroms that occurred throughout millennia. In 1998, Pope John Paul II issued a paper "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah," acknowledging that the Church should have taken a position against Naziism. And Germany has paid reparations to survivors of the Holocaust and to the state of Israel. But we Gentiles should go further and repent our (natural) habit of blaming people for things they are not actually guilty of.

Jews have been particularly vulnerable to attack as individuals but also as a group -- as when, say, Queen Isabella kicked the Jews out of Spain in 1492 despite their great contribution to culture. According to History.com, "Many died trying to reach safety, and in some cases it is believed that refugees paid for passage to other countries only to be thrown overboard by Spanish captains."

I don't think it would be wise to talk about apologies at this moment, as there is already a major effort underway to stir ethnic groups up against each other -- the media gives it non-stop coverage.

To repeat: Adolf Leschnitzer's 1956 book "The Magic Background of Modern Antisemitism: An Analysis of the German-Jewish Relationship" is a wonderful contribution to the study of an era -- mainly 1872 to 1933. The author show sympathy to the Germans for their economic plight and does not blame them, as a people, for Nazi policy.

That book is now 63 years old. I hope there's a contemporary Leschnitzer out there who can help us, such as with our imminent war over Ukraine. Let me quote again his insight, that there was "a systematic fostering of mass hypnosis." Such a thing is hardly limited to Germany. Page142:

"Wild senseless anti-Semitic charges pulled out of the air became a kind of magic word in Nazi mouths... turning individuals into masses and thereby creating the precondition for dictatorship.... "

-- Mary Maxwell lives in New Hampshire. She is the author of many books, one of which, about Pizza-gate and mind control, is linked below. Leschnitzer's book is at archive.org.