A History of Jewish Boycotts 1933 - 2015
Including summary
Jewish Human Rights Watch
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A History of Jewish Boycotts 1933 - 2015
Executive Summary
The present day BDS movement to boycott the State of Israel – so as to weaken the Jewish
state’s economy through financial disinvestment and sanctions and to isolate Israelis from
global academia and culture – emulates, in disturbing ways, the Nazi boycott of the Jews in the
1930s. The Nazi boycott appeared to be simply a short-term nuisance but turned out to have
been an early indication of far more nefarious and ultimately genocidal designs against the
Jews. Western societies who profess to have learned the lessons of the Holocaust would do
well to heed history’s warnings in dealing with BDS.
Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS): A new idea?
The present day BDS movement to boycott the state of Israel – so as to weaken Israel’s
economy through financial disinvestment and sanctions and to isolate Israelis from global
academia and culture – has rapidly escalated and now has Jewish people everywhere in its
sights.
As a campaign purportedly interested in pressuring the state of Israel into altering its foreign
and security policies, BDS is at the core of hostility toward the Jewish State around the world.
That hostility is exhibited in every forum in which promoters of BDS participate, from private
panels to public demonstrations, where refrains such as “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas” are
commonly heard. Behind this ostensible concern with a foreign political dilemma is thus an
elemental detestation of a domestic ethno-religious community, the Jews, a hatred apparently
only genocide can satisfy.
“Boycotts” have a long history and they have been used in many contexts to exert wider
pressure on a regime, notably against South Africa. Even that boycott, however, never
extended to South Africans living elsewhere.
The boycott of Israel is as old as she is, as Arab states implemented one from her earliest days
(indeed the Jewish community in the area was boycotted even before Israel’s inception) and
sustained it for decades with the support of the broader Islamic world.
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A History of Jewish Boycotts 1933 - 2015
BDS emulates the Nazi program
The BDS movement seeks to revive this strategy of isolating and injuring the Jewish State and
to extend participation to non-Islamic countries. But as the movement becomes ever more
prominent in Europe, the United States, Australia and Latin America, what we are witnessing
is less a call to pressure a foreign country and more like a systematic campaign against an
entire people, regardless of their connections with or views on Israel as a state. In this the BDS
movement shares much common ground with what the Nazis did in Germany in the 1930s.
Back then, what seemed like a short-term tactic was in fact a crucial step toward Germany, a
modern state in the heart of civilized Europe, eventually murdering six million Jews, with the
acquiescence or support of neighbouring states. The series of events culminating in the
Holocaust began simply as a boycott. A merely “economic” act reflected much deeper and
pernicious hatreds that would ultimately prove genocidal. What happened?
Daubed in Yellow – the medieval colour for the Plague Infection
At 10 am on Saturday 1st April 1933 Germany’s Jews became the target of a nationwide
boycott which was pre-planned a few days earlier by a committee headed by the notoriously
anti-Semitic Franconian Gauleiter Julius Streicher. Local Nazi party cells were to form special
‘action committees’ that were to implement the boycott at exactly the same time across
Germany. The Nazi paramilitary groups SA and SS were to be stationed outside Jewish owned
businesses to deter “Aryan” customers, while the police were ordered not to intervene in the
event of trouble.
Trucks filled with Brown shirted SA storm troopers raced around town centers. Armed thugs
mobbed Jewish–owned department stores, shops, law firms and medical practices, which they
plastered with signs reading “Germans! Defend Yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews!”, “Go to
Palestine” or “Jews Are Our Misfortune!” Doors and windows were daubed with crude
yellow-painted Stars of David, yellow being the medieval color for plague infection within a
house. In Berlin, Goebbels himself whipped up a frenzy of Jew-hatred in the Lustgarten, while
in Munich, Streicher, editor of the Nazi Party’s hate-filled “Der Sturmer”, gave vent to vicious
anti-Semitic hatred.
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A History of Jewish Boycotts 1933 - 2015
“What a Jew chose to believe was irrelevant”
The Nazi boycott was a radical extension of earlier attempts by extreme right circles to
marginalize Jews socially, for example excluding Jewish people from membership of elite
student societies. This applied to Jews who had converted to Christianity too. Hence it was a
matter of “race” rather than religion; what a Jew chose to believe was irrelevant.
The immediate pretext for the events of April 1933 was the critical reporting by international
newspapers of the wave of violence that ensued from the Nazis’ “seizure of power”, which is
how they described Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. Some
had recommended a boycott of German manufactured goods.
From February onwards, political opponents and critics of the Nazis, as well as many
obviously Jewish people, had been arrested by paramilitary policemen and taken to ad hoc
detention centres. There they were abused, mocked, tortured and sometimes killed in an orgy
of violence.
These “wild” sites (often in basements, garages or bars) were the forerunners of more
organized concentration camps, the first of which opened at Dachau outside Munich in 1934.
Their inmates would be beaten and murdered according to rules known only to the SS guards
themselves.
Goebbels claimed that all Jews were connected in one worldwide conspiracy against Germany,
hence he blamed Germany’s Jews for the foreign criticism and therefore sought to make them
suffer. In reality, no Jewish dress shop owner or physician could possibly have had any
influence over what appeared in Le Monde or the New York Times. But then, as Goebbels
always said, “propaganda has absolutely nothing to do with truth”.
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A History of Jewish Boycotts 1933 - 2015
“We traitors bought from Jews”
In itself, the 1st April boycott was not a success. Since it was a Saturday, many Orthodox Jews
were not at work but observing the Sabbath.
Others had read what was coming and simply stayed at home. It was also not self-evident
which businesses were owned by Jews or merely managed by Jews for “Aryan” German
owners. What, moreover, was to be done to a law firm or medical practice that had “Aryan”
and “Jewish” partners?
Furthermore, many ordinary Germans were appalled by being pushed around by uniformed
hooligans and defiantly and ostentatiously patronized the boycotted businesses. In Annaberg in
Saxony, SA men attacked those gentile shoppers and used a rubber stamp to mark their cheeks
or foreheads with “We traitors bought from Jews”. In Hanover scuffles erupted between people
who wanted to go to their favourite shops and those who sought to prevent them.
The former were taking a risk, since Nazi cameramen were on hand to photograph them, and
these pictures were then mounted in street display cases along with menacing captions. Being
a prominent “Friend of the Jews” was almost as risky as being Jewish.
Apart from the damage the boycott did to the German economy, the Nazis were acutely
sensitive to German public opinion (and monitored it closely) and tacked their sails
accordingly. In this case they drew the lesson that respectable people disliked public disorder,
but would accept whatever measures had a cloak of legality. Moreover, respectable people
might even be won over, if economic exclusion and marginalization of Jews might eradicate
competition or open up jobs and professional posts for themselves. This may partly explain
why the keenest supporters of the boycott were not only fervent Nazis but young students and
junior academics who sensed opportunity in the removal of Jews.
This accounts for why there were few protests a few days after the public boycott when a new
law ordered the compulsory retirement of Jewish civil servants, teachers and academics from
the public service, schools and universities.
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A History of Jewish Boycotts 1933 - 2015
The legalities
A legal clause could be generalized, rather in the way that health and safety or human rights
clauses are mechanically included in directives and legislation. In this case it was a clause
deliberately marginalizing Jewish people. Hence hospitals and medical insurance panels began
excluding Jewish doctors, followed soon by Jewish dentists. Indeed many private professions
and trades took it upon themselves also to exclude Jews, on the basis of what had been decreed
for the public sector, by adopting similar sounding “Aryan clauses” that restricted their
activities to non-Jews.
In this fashion, Jews were excluded from whole swathes of economic activity, while public
contracts were only granted to “Aryan” enterprises. By May 1933 these measures had been
extended to the gentile partners of Jews, so that a nurse married to a Jewish physician would
find herself unemployed. It followed that informal social associations and clubs soon excluded
Jews too, so that they were ostracized from everything from posh gentlemen’s clubs to card or
chess societies to sports groups. In some places carpenters and undertakers would no longer
afford deceased Jews coffins or funerals, and gentiles thought it best not to attend those
funerals either.
By July, the government took the opportunity to denaturalize all Eastern European Jewish
immigrants who had gained citizenship between 1918 and 1933, rendering thousands of
Ostjuden (Jews from Eastern Europe) stateless, and this at a time when other states were
unlikely to welcome them as refugees.
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A History of Jewish Boycotts 1933 - 2015
From Boycott to Nuremberg
While these voluntary forms of discrimination spread throughout German society, the Nazi
government felt emboldened to regulate the status of Jews in general along racist lines. The
infamous 1935 Nuremberg Laws purported to determine who was a Jew, denying them
German citizenship, while drawing a line between Jews and Aryans even in the most intimate
human affairs. The Nuremberg Laws forbade future marriage between Jews and Gentiles, and
criminalized extramarital sexual relations too. This resu lted in many divorces, and single
women forced to wear placards defaming them for “miscegenation”. In a nasty act of
purposive insinuation, Jews were no longer allowed to employ Gentiles as domestic servants,
the implication being that their employers would sexually misuse them. For similar reasons,
Jews were banned from public swimming baths lest they seduce girls or pollute the water.
A parallel law excluded all Jews from service in the German Armed Forces, in which many had
fought with great distinction during the Great War. In fact the only Jews who were initially
excluded from Nazi discriminatory measures were Jewish war veterans, largely because Hitler
had had to respect the sensibilities of President Hindenburg and an army leadership that was
wary of populist upstarts.
“What seemed like a short-term tactic”
Taken together these measures, which began as a one-off boycott, destroyed Jewish economic
existence in Germany. In 1932 there were approximately 100,000 individual Jewish owned
businesses, some large merchant banks, department store chains or such publishing houses as
Mosse or Ullmann. By mid-1935 a quarter, and by mid-1938 two-thirds of these businesses
had been eliminated, their owners bankrupted or taken over by “Aryan” rivals who scented a
bargain. Minor Nazis on the make often benefited, since each takeover had to be approved by
Party agencies, which knew how to benefit its own.
In a parallel drive, the Jewish presence was systematically eradicated from cultural life too, so
that even books by Jewish authors were purged from libraries, or burned by Nazi students in
orgies of cultural vandalism.
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A History of Jewish Boycotts 1933 - 2015
Much discussion went into whether authors who used pen names (such as the biographer Emil
Ludwig) should be forced to use their real name, in his case Emil Ludwig Cohn. A cultural and
scientific brain drain ensued, ranging from the physicist Albert Einstein to film-maker Billy
Wilder, and about a third of university professors, including 24 Nobel Prize laureates.
There is no need here to pursue where this lead : to the orchestrated violence of 11 November
1938 (the Reichskristallnacht Pogrom) and then, once war erupted, to roving death squads and
industrial extermination facilities. The total resources of a modern state and those of the
Germans’ allies and collaborators were turned to the project of murdering Europe’s Jews.
Following the War and the Holocaust, international sympathy for the Jews’ desire to found a
state in their ancient homeland was driven in part by the recognition that only Jewish
sovereignty could prevent another genocide of the Jews.
BDS Boycotts | Nazi Boycotts
It is not difficult to see the parallels between Nazi boycotts and today’s BDS, and therefore the
dangers the latter poses. The boycotts for which the BDS movement strives are not a
short-term measure but merely a step to eradicate the Jewish State, an aspiration its leaders
have expressly declared. And the elimination of the Jewish State is part of a subtler campaign
against Jews everywhere, evidenced both by the anti-Semitic atmosphere the BDS movement
seeks to create and by its objective of removing the Jewish State which is tasked in part
precisely to prevent such genocidal harm being dealt to the Jewish people yet again.
The idea of the BDS movement is not a new one. It has a long and contemptible history, and
anyone who does not mean the Jewish people harm should stand firmly against it.
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