At the time of his death on September 27, 1980, Werner J. Cahnman had completed the manuscript that Judith T. Marcus, Zoltan Tarr, and Transaction Publishers now offer us. In their fine introduction, the editors make clear that Cahnman, a sociologist and promoter of Jewish causes who was born in Munich to a German-Jewish family, defended a "survivalist"-as opposed to an assimilationist-point of view. He believed, that is, that repudiation of Jewish identity was too great a sacrifice for acceptance, were it to be offered, by the Gentile world.
As the somewhat loosely connected chapters of this book demonstrate, however, Cahnman was not optimistic about that acceptance, even if Jews proved willing to assimilate. As a historical sociologist interested primarily in recurring patterns of behavior in different historical epochs, he had concluded that relations between Jews and Gentiles showed a remarkable, and not very encouraging, structural durability. To be sure, those relations were not invariably unfriendly; genuine symbiosis was sometimes achieved. But conflict and hostility were the rule. Although it would be difficult to argue the point, it should be noted that the "shattering experience" of the Holocaust was always before Cahnman's eyes.
To Gentiles, according to Cahnman, the Jew has always been a "stranger," an outsider. He was, to begin with, a stranger to Christianity, having refused to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah. In time, however, Gentile hostility cut itself loose from theology and assumed socioeconomic form. The pivotal moment in that secularizing transformation came when Christians, who were forbidden to take interest on loans, began to identify usury, even when interest was not excessive, as a deadly sin. From then on, Gentiles could always justify the resentment and envy they often felt by citing, or manufacturing, socioeconomic grievances.
Drawing upon Norman Cohn's classic, The Pursuit of the Millennium, Cahnman points out, in a thoughtful chapter entitled "The Revolt of the Masses," that it was primarily the lower classes that were drawn to millenarian sects that demonized Jews as well as Church hierarchs; "repressed pagan emotions surfaced again," Cahnman wrote. Like Cohn, he viewed millenarian hysteria and hatred as ominous portents of Nazi populism and mass murder. At the same time, he made the important observation that dehumanization-the Jew as devil or unclean animal-always paved the way for murder.
Cahnman was ambivalent in his attitude toward the Enlightenment. He appreciated the role it played in Jewish emancipation but believed the asking price-"the dissolution of Jewish peoplehood"-to be too high. And though he himself seemed to think of Judaism primarily in ethical terms, he recognized that the weakening of religion led to a questioning of morality and ultimately to "the nihilism inherent in the Nazi movement."
For Jews-and not Jews alone-Nazism led to the abyss, but Cahnman was not much impressed by what some others have regarded as promising experiments in human relations: the Soviet Union and the United States. There was nothing, he concluded, in the policies of the USSR that could be considered a new beginning in Jewish-Gentile relations. And to the question "Is America different?" he answered with an emphatic "no"; in the new world, "the pattern of the centuries," even if less lethal, remained essentially unchanged. It comes as no surprise, then, to learn that Cahnman sympathized with the state of Israel. But that only led him to fear that anti-Zionism was or would soon be a convenient cover for anti-Semitism. Recent events around the world make that fear seem real-all the more reason for men and women of good will to redouble their efforts.