Volume II – The Seeds of Hate
Chapter 11 – The Industrial Revolution and Resentment
The 19th century had remade Europe. Steam engines thundered across landscapes once quiet with fields and villages. Railways connected cities like veins carrying the lifeblood of industry. Coal dust blackened skies. Factories rose where cottages once stood.
It was an age of invention, progress, and upheaval. And into this new age, Jews stepped with vigor and ambition.
Jewish Success in the Modern Age
For centuries, Jews had been pushed to the margins, restricted to ghettos and barred from trades. But with emancipation and industrialization, barriers began to fall. Suddenly, talents long confined found outlets in commerce, science, and culture.
Banking dynasties like the Rothschilds expanded from Frankfurt into London, Paris, Vienna, and beyond, financing railways and governments. Their name became synonymous with wealth, influence, and, in the minds of many Europeans, secretive power.
In Germany, Jews became doctors, lawyers, professors. In Vienna, Jewish intellectuals filled salons and universities, debating philosophy, music, and politics. In Paris, Jewish writers and artists contributed to the flowering of French culture.
One family that reflected this new age was the Einstein family of Ulm, Germany. They were not aristocrats or bankers, but modest, hardworking people. Hermann Einstein ran an electrical engineering business, selling dynamos and lighting equipment. His son, Albert, born in 1879, showed little promise at first. He was quiet, slow to speak, often at odds with rigid schools. But in his restless mind, seeds were germinating that would one day transform physics and make his name synonymous with genius.
Across Europe, Jewish families like the Einsteins were proof that emancipation worked. They were citizens, contributors, builders of modern society.
The Zionist Idea vs. the Comfort of Europe
But even as Zionism spread, most Jews hesitated to leave.
In Warsaw, the Abramovich family embodied this dilemma. By the turn of the century, their textile shop had grown into a thriving business. Isaac Abramovich, the fiery young Zionist, still spoke passionately of Palestine, of the pioneers breaking soil and founding settlements. But his father, Moishe, resisted.
"Why should we leave?" Moishe asked, gesturing to the bustling street outside, filled with customers and wagons. "Here we have a shop. Here we have money, friends, connections. In Palestine there is nothing but swamps and stones. Would you trade this comfort for backbreaking labor in a desert?"
His daughter Rivka added her own voice: "Why not America? At least there, they say, Jews live free without fear of pogroms. And there is opportunity, not mud huts."
The debates of the Abramovich household echoed across Europe. Zionism had lit a fire in the Jewish imagination. But when faced with the reality of abandoning a comfortable home in Vienna or Paris for malaria-ridden fields in Palestine, most chose to stay.
Herzl had given them a vision. But visions alone could not uproot centuries of habit, wealth, and belonging.
The Zuckerbergs: Another Path
In Odessa, the Zuckerberg family faced no such comforts. Their home was modest, their work hard, and their lives precarious. When pogroms struck in the 1880s, leaving Jewish shops smashed and synagogues burned, they decided they could no longer remain.
They did not go to Palestine, where hardship awaited. They boarded a ship to America. Like hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews, they landed in New York, settling in crowded tenements, working in sweatshops, peddling goods on the streets.
For them, America was no promised land of milk and honey. It was toil, struggle, and gradual progress. But it was freedom from pogroms, and that was enough.
Thus, Jewish migration splintered: a few idealists to Palestine, a flood to America, the majority clinging to Europe despite the dangers.
The Resentment of the Majority
As Jews prospered in business, science, and culture, resentment grew.
To conservatives, Jews represented modernity itself; finance, industry, liberalism, socialism, everything that was dismantling the old order. To nationalists, Jews were eternal outsiders, corrupting the "blood" of the nation. To workers, Jews were scapegoats for economic hardship, imagined as greedy bankers or exploitative factory owners.
The irony was cruel. When Jews were poor, they were despised as filthy, lazy, parasitic. When they succeeded, they were hated as powerful, cunning, conspiratorial.
The Rothschilds, for example, became symbols in antisemitic caricature, hooked noses counting money, pulling strings behind governments. In truth, the Rothschild family had helped finance infrastructure, railways, and even public charities. But facts mattered little against prejudice.
In coffeehouses of Vienna, pamphlets circulated claiming Jews controlled the press, the banks, even the future. In Berlin, leagues of antisemites formed, calling for limits on Jewish influence.
For many, the new modern world, fast, unsettling, industrial, was terrifying. And who better to blame than the Jews, who seemed to thrive in it?
The Keller Family and German Nationalism
Amid this shifting landscape, in a small Bavarian town, the Keller family raised their son, Friedrich, on tales of German greatness. His grandfather had studied the works of racial theorists, absorbing ideas that "Germanness" was rooted in blood, not faith or culture.
At school, Friedrich's teachers spoke of national pride, of unity, of the need to defend against foreign influences. When economic troubles struck, when factories closed or crops failed, whispers in the town blamed Jewish merchants and bankers.
Friedrich was only a boy, but the lessons sank deep. To him, Jews were not neighbors but interlopers, never truly German, no matter how well they spoke the language or wore the clothes.
This way of thinking was spreading across the continent: nationalism that excluded Jews not as a faith, but as a race; a category from which no conversion, no assimilation, no loyalty could ever free them.
Einstein and the Irony of Success
Back in Ulm, young Albert Einstein struggled in school. His teachers called him lazy, uninterested, even a failure. But while they criticized him, he wandered through the streets, fascinated by compasses, light, and the mysteries of the universe.
Albert's mind would one day revolutionize science, earning him global fame. Yet even in his triumph, he would face antisemitism. In the 1920s and 1930s, German nationalists would denounce his theories as "Jewish physics," a supposed corruption of pure science.
The irony could not have been sharper: the very genius who embodied Germany's intellectual brilliance would be cast out as alien because of his ancestry.
The Einsteins, like the Abramovichs, the Rothschilds, the Zuckerbergs, lived at the intersection of progress and prejudice, success and suspicion.
The Fragile Balance
By the dawn of the 20th century, Jewish life in Europe balanced on a fragile edge.
Zionism had planted the idea of a homeland, but most Jews remained where they were, unwilling to abandon comfort or prosperity.
Emancipation had given Jews rights, but antisemitism had merely changed its form, modernizing into racial theory and economic scapegoating.
Some Jews looked westward to America, others eastward to Palestine, but the majority stood still, hoping the storm would pass.
What none could foresee was how quickly the storm clouds were gathering. Industrialization had transformed nations, but it had also sharpened tensions, created inequalities, and stoked nationalist fervor.
And at the heart of it all, Jews remained the convenient target; too modern for traditionalists, too foreign for nationalists, too visible for those seeking scapegoats.
Chapter Summary
The Industrial Revolution had brought light, electricity, steam, and progress. For Jews, it had opened doors never before imagined. Yet every step forward seemed to breed new forms of hatred.
In Vienna, Herzl's vision flickered in the minds of the young. In Palestine, pioneers sweated over fields. In America, immigrants toiled in sweatshops. And in Germany, children like Friedrich Keller absorbed the whispers of suspicion that would one day harden into something far more sinister.
The balance between belonging and exclusion could not last forever. The fault lines were deepening, and soon they would break open.