Jewish Crimes and Misdemeanours: In Search of Jewish Criminality (Germany and Austria,1890-1914)

Abstract

This article seeks to answer the question of how Jewish crimes and criminals were conceptualized in Germany and Austria at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, both by the budding science of criminology and by the popular discourse surrounding crime. The article argues that despite surface affinities between contemporary biological models of criminality and racial and anthropological identifications of Jewish essence, no straightforward conflation of the two narratives took place. Rather, antisemitic conceptualisations of Jewish criminality focused primarily on charges of dissimulation and on allegations that Jews were wilfully sabotaging the fragile access to truth available to the justice system. Far from focusing on the deviance of the individual criminal actor, this narrative routinely implicated Jewish lawyers and newspaper editors, Jewish psychologists and other scientists in the conspiratorial creation of criminal spaces.