Michael A. Meyer HEINRICH GRAETZ AND HEINRICH VON TREITSCHKE: A COMPARISON OF THEIR HISTORICAL IMAGES OF THE MODERN JEW In 1870 the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz published Volume Eleven of his Geschichte der Juden, which brought his magnum opus down to the most recent period of Jewish history. Well over half of its nearly 600 pages were devoted to the Jews of Germany, though at the time they made up little more than a tenth of the world Jewish population. Nine years later, in the summer of 1879, the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke read Graetz's work in preparing Volume Two of his own multi-volume opus, DeutscheGeschichte im Neunzehnten Jahrhundert (1878-1894). He was appalled and angered by what he found: Graetz's writing represented in the form of historical narrative just those attributes which explained, and almost justified, the virulent antisemitism then appearing in Berlin. Only a few weeks after reading Graetz, Treitschke lent his own voice to the chorus of protest against an allegedly ruinous Jewish influence in Germany and held Graetz up as the best example of Jewish adherence to anti-German and anti-Christian attitudes. The dispute which ensued drew in leading German Jews as well as Theodor Mommsen, Treitschke's colleague at the University of Berlin. In recent years the public debate of 1879-1881has received ample scholarly discussion.1 Much less attention, however, has been given to analyzing Graetz's historiography with the intent of explaining why it should so have provoked Treitschke. And no one, to my knowledge, has attempted to compare Graetz's historical image of modern German Jews with the quite extensive historical treatment Treitschke himself accorded to the same figures in the volumes of his history. Such a comparison is especially intriguing because, however dif- ferently they regarded the modern Jew, Graetz and Treitschke were remarkably alike in the manner of their historiography. For neither man was historical scholarship merely an antiquarian discipline. They both wrote as much or more to educate and inspire as to add to historical knowledge.2 Graetz disdained the work of his predecessor, Isaac Marcus Jost, precisely because it was so disconnected and bloodless. His own 1