Why the Germans? Why the Jews? : envy, race hatred, and the prehistory of the Holocaust

Tracing the prehistory of the Holocaust--from the 1800s to the Nazis' assumption of power in 1933--Aly shows that German anti-Semitism did not originate with racist ideology or religious animosity, as is often supposed. Instead, through striking statistics and economic analysis, he demonstrates that it was rooted in a more basic emotion: material envy. As Germany made its way through the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, the largely agrarian, mostly illiterate German majority found itself floundering in the rapidly modernizing world. On the other hand, the urban, well-educated Jewish minority enjoyed great success. Less than thirty years after they were freed from the ghettos, more than half the Jews were firmly middle class, and a sizable proportion of them were in the upper-middle classes. Envying this success, Germans embraced compensatory theories of Jewish racial inferiority