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(Read the piece at Tablet here<\/a>.)<\/strong><\/p>\n A few weeks ago, between watching thugs drive through north London shouting \u201cF*** the Jews, rape their daughters,\u201d and reading a tweet from an American TV personality with a pink bikini and 275,000 Twitter followers that read \u201cThese Jewish people are really killing children,\u201d I picked up a vintage hardcover that was gathering dust at a lending library on a street near mine. This book was published in 1975 and set mainly in the 1890s, so I was surprised, upon opening it, to find \u2026 the present.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We\u2019re in Vienna. The main character, Theodor Herzl, is a writer, a master of the German language, and a former member of a Teutonic college fraternity. He is a Jew by birth, but he\u2019s over it. His son isn\u2019t circumcised, and when a rabbi pays a visit to his home one December, the writer is just lighting the Christmas tree. He\u2019s a proud citizen of a great polyglot power, the empire of the Habsburgs, where Jews are emancipated, fitting in tentatively, moving up conclusively.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Something is happening outside, a kind of unsettling buzz on the street. \u201cIt was easy at first to laugh it all off as a short-lived fad,\u201d writes the book\u2019s author, historian Amos Elon. \u201cMany people succumbed to the temptation.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yet, the country is in decline, disintegrating into its constituent parts. The Austro-Hungarians are no longer in agreement over what \u201cAustro-Hungarian\u201d means, or who is included. There are Germans and Czechs and Hungarians and Poles, conservatives, socialists, anarchists\u2014and then there are Jews, or rather, the \u201cJewish problem,\u201d which suddenly becomes a burning preoccupation in Vienna and across Europe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The correct attitude among Jewish intellectuals, Herzl\u2019s social circles, was to cringe at both rich and poor, affecting a very Viennese attitude of wry fatigue with the foibles of humanity. The writer works for the\u00a0Neue Freie Presse<\/em>, the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0of the empire, a newspaper of careful Jews who are celebrated for their brilliance, hampered by their social aspirations, and wrong, in retrospect, about everything. We don\u2019t know that yet. Herzl\u2019s plays are produced in Berlin and at the best theater in the city. Progress might not be smooth, but it is inevitable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And yet society becomes increasingly preoccupied with the \u201cbad manners\u201d of the Jews. There are many people with bad manners, but the Jews stand out, \u201cbecause of the obsessive interest in their lives and the general belief in the existence of a \u2018problem,\u2019 which even Jews paranoically began to share themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Books appear seeking to analyze the Jews\u2019 warped character and physiognomy. This isn\u2019t primitive hatred of Jews like in the days of the Church and the ghetto. This is science. As a young man Herzl reads one such book\u2014Eugene Duhring\u2019s\u00a0The Jewish Question as a Racial, Ethical, and Cultural Question\u2014<\/em>and allows it briefly to penetrate his consciousness, mentioning his troubled emotions in his diary before relegating it to the back of his mind. One of the most toxic tracts would eventually be written by a Jew by the name of Otto Weininger. Like all Jews willing to attack other Jews, Weininger was borne upward on a strange, grateful tide of popularity, before taking his critique to its logical conclusion and killing himself. \u201cWhen a number of frightened Jewish scholars publicly endorsed the new \u2018scientific\u2019 antisemitism and admitted the \u2018biological\u2019 inferiority of their race,\u201d Elon writes, \u201cother Jewish wits replied that \u2018antisemitism did not really succeed until the Jews began to sponsor it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Viennese politicians begin understanding how effective this hatred can be as a mobilizing tool. The dark word \u201cthey\u201d comes into use\u2014everyone knows who \u201cthey<\/a>\u201d are.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The most adept of this breed is Karl Lueger, who rides Jew-hatred into power but has Jewish friends. \u201cI decide,\u201d he famously declares, \u201cwho is a Jew.\u201d It\u2019s a type becoming familiar in our own time. Jews like Herzl believe that the genteel people in the palaces and grand townhouses of Vienna are in control of events, and that culture will thus prevail. But power is shifting to the gutter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Herzl\u2019s newspaper sends him to be the correspondent in Paris, the capital of European culture and the first country to emancipate its Jews. But here, too, there is that same buzz\u2014dark stories of Jewish finance, of Jewish treachery and fakery. And here the journalist doesn\u2019t do what one would expect, what his colleagues and friends and wife were all doing. He doesn\u2019t invent a story about why none of this is about him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\nThe prosperous Jews of Vienna, who assumed that this problem was on its way to being solved, are surprised to find themselves the focus for the anxieties of the age. They\u2019re caught off guard in their colleges, law firms, and factories, midstep on their journeys toward assimilation. \u201cJews were baffled and shocked by this obsession,\u201d Elon writes. \u201cShould they react to the attacks or ignore them? Was it something they had done? Many sensitive young Jews were tormented by these questions. Rich Jews tended to blame poor Jews, and vice versa.\u201d<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n