Volume II – The Seeds of Hate
Chapter 1 – The Age of Reason and Its Shadows
"He who would live must fight... those who do not wish to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live."
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
Paris, 1789. The streets trembled with chants of Liberté, égalité, fraternité! The Bastille had fallen, and the monarchy teetered. To Europe's Jews, the thunder of the French Revolution sounded like a long-awaited crack in the heavens. For centuries, they had lived as pariahs on the margins of Christendom, locked into ghettos, barred from universities, excluded from guilds, branded as usurers, tolerated only when kings needed loans. But now, in France, new voices proclaimed that all men were born free and equal.
For the Jewish merchant Isaac Rothschild of Frankfurt, the news reached him like a letter from the Messiah. He read the proclamations of the French Assembly by candlelight, his fingers trembling over parchment. His wife Rivka looked over his shoulder, whispering in Yiddish:
"Do they mean us, Isaac? Do they mean Jews?"
He could not answer. In his heart, he wanted to believe that the walls of centuries were about to fall. But the Enlightenment was a double-edged sword. It preached liberty, yes, but also demanded conformity. If Jews were to be accepted as citizens, should they give up the customs that set them apart? Should they become Frenchmen and Germans first, Jews second?
The Enlightenment's Promise
Across Europe, salons buzzed with ideas of reason and progress. Voltaire and Rousseau dismantled old hierarchies of crown and church. Philosophers argued that prejudice was irrational, that all humans shared the same natural rights. In cities like Berlin and Paris, Jewish intellectuals like Moses Mendelssohn chief among them, became interlocutors between Jewish tradition and European modernity. Mendelssohn translated the Hebrew Bible into German, declaring that Jews could live as citizens without abandoning their faith.
In his study in Berlin, Mendelssohn once told a gathering of young students:
"We are not strangers to reason, nor aliens to humanity. We are Jews, yes, but also Germans, lovers of philosophy, lovers of truth."
Yet even as his words inspired, others muttered that Jews were clever mimics, incapable of genuine enlightenment. A Polish noble sneered in a letter: "The Jew will quote Plato to your face, then cheat you in the market stall."
Napoleon's Decree
When Napoleon Bonaparte marched across Europe, he dismantled ghettos and declared Jews citizens in lands he conquered. In Mainz, Cologne, Milan, Jews walked freely through city gates for the first time in centuries. Some wept openly as they burned the yellow badges they had been forced to wear.
But emancipation came with suspicion. In 1806, when petitions against Jewish citizenship multiplied in France, Napoleon convened the Sanhedrin; a gathering of Jewish notables, to answer whether Jews could truly be loyal to the French nation. Were they Frenchmen of the Mosaic faith, or a nation apart?
The fictional Abramovich ancestor, Yitzhak Abramovich, a watchmaker from Alsace, sat in the audience during one such assembly. He whispered to his son:
"If they ask whether we are French, answer yes. If they ask if we are Jews, answer yes. They will not understand how both can be true."
This tension, the demand that Jews dissolve their distinctiveness in order to be accepted, would haunt them century to come.
The Ghetto Walls Fall, but New Ones Rise
By the mid-19th century, ghettos across Western Europe were abolished. In Paris, Jews entered salons and universities. In Berlin, Jewish bankers and lawyers rose in prominence. The Rothschild family, through careful lending and shrewd alliances, became financial advisers to kings and emperors. Their wealth provoked admiration and envy alike.
Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe, life remained bleak. The Pale of Settlement confined millions of Jews to overcrowded towns in Russia and Poland. They lived in wooden shtetls; small, insular market towns where poverty was common, yet culture thrived. Hebrew schools, Yiddish theater, Hasidic mysticism, all blossomed in the cracks of oppression.
The fictional Asimov family, from a shtetl near Smolensk, lived in a house of leaning timbers, its windows patched with cloth. By day, Reb Mendel Asimov taught Torah to barefoot children. By night, he wrote sermons of consolation: "We are exiles, but we are not forgotten. Each exile is a step closer to redemption."
Yet beyond the shtetl walls, peasants spat curses. Rumors of Jews poisoning wells or hoarding wealth lingered. When famine struck, mobs descended on Jewish homes with pitchforks. Even in an age of reason, the old superstitions endured.
The Christian Counterattack
The Catholic Church, watching Enlightenment reforms unfold, warned that Jewish emancipation was a threat to Christendom. In papal bulls and sermons, priests declared: "The Jews crucified Christ; they cannot be equals among us." Protestant preachers echoed similar sentiments.
In small towns across Bavaria, Luther's ancient invectives were republished. Farmers who had never met a Jew read pamphlets that claimed Jews plotted to destroy Christian society.
Friedrich Keller's grandfather, a fictional teacher in Würzburg, copied one such pamphlet by hand for his students: "The Jew may speak German, but he is not of us. He is the eternal wanderer, condemned to roam until he repents of Christ's blood."
Children grew up reciting these lessons as if they were gospel. Seeds planted in classroom soil would later bear poisonous fruit.
The Tension of Assimilation
By the late 1800s, many Jews in Western Europe embraced assimilation wholeheartedly. They dressed like their neighbors, attended secular schools, even converted to Christianity to advance careers. Some intermarried, believing prejudice would fade if distinctions blurred.
Yet society never let them forget. The more Jews entered professional life, the more they were accused of infiltrating. If they remained distinct, they were called backward; if they assimilated, they were called deceptive.
Young Albert Einstein, born in Ulm in 1879, grew up in a secular Jewish household. His parents did not keep kosher, and his education was scientific, not religious. Yet in school, classmates still whispered "Jude" behind his back.
The Shadow in the Light
The Enlightenment promised equality, but it also created a new category: the nation. As France, Germany, and Italy defined themselves as nations of shared language and heritage, Jews remained marked as the outsiders. The ghetto walls had fallen, but invisible barriers of blood and belonging rose in their place.
For Isaac Rothschild's grandson, now a wealthy banker in Frankfurt, the contradiction was clear. He could lend money to princes, fund railroads, and host soirées where poets drank his wine, yet when anti-Jewish riots erupted in the countryside, his estate was marked with graffiti: "Death to the Jew Banker."
One night, he confided to his daughter Miriam:
"They say we are citizens when they want our gold. They say we are aliens when they need a scapegoat. Tell me, my child, what are we truly? French? German? Or only Jews, eternal in our wandering?"
Miriam's answer was silence.
Thus the 18th century's Age of Reason opened wide the door of hope and behind it, planted seeds of resentment. Jews emerged from ghettos, but their emancipation triggered fears in Christian and nationalist hearts. To some, the Jewish presence was proof of progress. To others, it was a danger to nation, faith, and race.
In the smoky taverns of Vienna, in the pulpits of Bavarian churches, in the pamphlets of Paris, whispers spread: "The Jews will never be like us."