Wilhelm Marr has gone done in history as the man who probably coined and certainly
propagated the term 'anti-Semitic' throughout the world after publishing a booklet entitled Der
Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums über das Judenthum (The Way to Victory of Germanism
over Judaism) in 1879. it was his avowed aim to focus on what he and many others saw as the
Jewish question in a manner that did not presuppose any particular religious or philosophical
premise but rather adopted a supposedly 'scientific' approach to this matter. He argued that
from Roman times the Jews posed a distinct ethnic group that understood itself to be the
victims of oppression by a surrounding majority and therefore under the necessity to outwit
and undermine the forces that were against it.
Marr concluded that Germans had to defend themselves from overbearing Jewish control if
they were to survive as a people and nation. He founded the Anti-Semitic league as a means of
popularizing his position throughout Germany. In this regard he did not greatly succeed but he
did succeed in promoting the word 'anti-Semitic’ and related words among those who were
well placed to wield great influence, notably the court chaplain Adolf Stoecke, the noted
nationalist historian and politician, Heinrich von Treitschke and those who organized the so-
called anti-Semitic petition that garnered several thousand signatures. Treitschke'si decision to
urge university students to add their signatures to the petition enraged the great historian
Theodor Mommsen, a doughty. defender of minorities in the German Empire.
In short, the advocates of anti-Semitism fell into distinct groups, one headed by Luther
thumping Adolf Stoecke on the basis of Christian beliefs, one furthered by von Treitschke in the
academic world and the group composed of so-called anti-Semitic hooligans that arose from
Marr's anti-Semite league. Indeed, there was an extreme case of anti-Semitic violence when a
synagogue was destroyed by fire in the region of Saxony..
The course of anti-Semitic activism advocated by the emergent anti-Semitic movements varied.
Marr pleaded for the exclusion of Jews from German life altogether, implicitly their expulsion
therefore. Tritschkei insisted on the banishment of Jews from participating in all forms of
officialdom and from positions of influence in education and the higher professions. These
demands headed the anti-Semitic petition. At this time we also see the emergence of political
parties that sought entry into the Reichstag under the banner of anti-Semitism. Such parties
continued to be represented in the Reichstag throughout the remainder of the German
Empire's duration but with little to show for it in statistical terms, gaining at most 3 percent of
the electorate's votes.
Strange as it may seem, Marr had not always been a radical exponent of hostile views directed
against Jews. Back in 1862 Marr published a book entitled Der Judenspiegel. (A Mirror to the
Jews). For the main part it presented the parody of a survey of the Hebrew Bible with the intent
of adducing evidence of Jewish moral failures and devious characteristics. Thus Joseph becomes
a grain hoarding cartel boss and King David a marauding brigand., it concludes, however, that

Jews were perfectly entitled to enjoy most common benefits from living in Prussia and
elsewhere as long as they did not have a hand in government and civic administration. He
couched his arguments in socio-economic terms just as Karl Marx had in 1842 when he
published "Zur Judenfrage' (On the Jewish Question). Marx opposed the position taken by
Bruno Bauer on Judaism which advocated the extinction of Judaism along with religion in
general. Marx was not so dogmatic on that point and pleaded that Jews as human beings
should not be singled out for persecution. He was of Jewish extraction after all.
There is a remarkable contrast between the relatively restrained attitude to Jews as evinced in
Spiegel and the radical call for the total suppression of Judaism that he announced in 1879.
What explains this? A new ingredient is found in Marr's later expressions of anti-Semitism that
was absent in the Judenspiegel., in a word 'race'
The word lay at the centre of the thesis put forward by Joseph Arthur de Gobineau in 1852
when he published his 'Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races.' In this he aimed to rebuff
the central ideals of the French Revolution and replaced them by a new triad of supremacy,
inequality and division. The 14th of July marked not only the fall of the Bastille but also his own
birthday, a quirk that prompted him to observe that even opposites meet at times, In his
scheme of thought the white Aryans posed the highest form of humanity above the Black and
Asian races. He denounced the mixture of races as a source of degeneracy. Only the pure
Nordic Aryans located in Germany were entitled to claim the status of ‘the master race’. The
greater the contamination of Aryan blood by inferior races, the lower the resulting progeny on
his racial scale. Gobineau's ideas seeped into the mainstream of European culture and left trace
seven in poetry. Baudelaire’s poem 'Cain et Abel' introverts the story of the brothers in the
Bible so as to present the race of Abel as a symbol of upper-class domination and the race of
Cain as a symbol of the oppressed lower class.
It is not clear at what time the spirit of Gobineau's racist theory entered the soul of Wilhelm
Marr. I would suggest shortly after the creation of German Empire and the outbreak of the first
economic crisis it suffered, the crash of 1873. This event prompted Marr to write a pamphlet
blaming the Jews for the crisis. On this occasion Marr's polemics did not seriously affect the
political climate. Other matters were then uppermost in people's minds, such as migration and
Church-State relations. Bismarck owed his great successes in war and peace in large part to the
advice and financial expertise of Gerson von Bleichroeder, his Jewish Banker.