(This takes 6⅔ minutes to read.)

Quoting Gideon Reuveni’s Consumer Culture and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity, pgs. 124–129:

Calls to boycott Jews, or the “cold pogrom,” have a long history that predates [German Fascism] by more than four decades.⁴ In the late nineteenth century, German courts were called to deal with the attempts to boycott Jewish-owned businesses. In 1897, the Zionist Viennese weekly Die Welt reported about six Jewish businessmen from the city of Munich who sued the nationalistic newspaper Deutsches Volksblatt for distributing leaflets urging consumers not to buy from Jews.⁵

At the end of 1898 Die Welt revealed that two hundred thousand copies of a similar pamphlet calling upon Christians not to do their shopping in Jewish outlets were circulated in the city of Berlin alone.⁶ By 1900 the newspaper referred to boycotts of Jewish business as a popular sport (Lieblingssport), especially before Christmas.⁷

Jews were boycotted in three different ways: Jewish-owned businesses were targeted for avoidance; Jewish consumers were refused service; and Jewish employees were excluded from working. The scope and effectiveness of each type of these boycotts in Germany in the period before the rise of [German Fascism] remains a subject of debate among scholars.⁸

Some argue that the calls to boycott Jews seriously threatened Jewish life, while others claim that at least until the beginning of the 1930s this form of anti-Jewish agitation remained a marginal phenomenon with neither wide support nor even a positive image, especially in larger urban centers. However, what I would like to argue here is that the marketplace boycotts designate a conceptual change toward consumers, turning them into political agents, and to shopping, making it into a highly charged political act.

The two initial types of boycott mentioned above — those targeting Jewish businesses and Jewish consumers — were primarily consumer boycotts in which the relations between rights and desires, the status of consumers, and the cultural and political meaning of consumption played a central rôle.⁹ The language of court cases from the time reveals how these episodes unfolded in a consumerist context. During the years of the Weimar Republic, German courts frequently arbitrated attempts to boycott Jews, with hundreds of trials taking place in the 1920s.¹⁰

These proceedings reveal a tension between different types of individual rights: the right to free expression of opinion as opposed to the right of privacy, and the idea of citizenship as an expression of the right to belong to the nation. As a rule, statements such as “don’t buy from Jews,” or for that matter “don’t buy from antisemites” and “avoid doing business with Protestants,” were protected under article 118 of the Weimar Constitution that guaranteed freedom of speech to every German citizen.¹¹ Only in cases in which the court could establish tangible distress or damage to other rights of individual consumers or businesses were such appeals considered illegal.

For example, in 1931 the [Fascist] newspaper Coburger Nationalzeitung in Bavaria announced an essay competition asking its readers to report on their experiences of the perils of buying from and selling to Jews.¹² Based on this evidence the newspaper proclaimed that shopping in Jewish stores “contaminates German goods” and should be considered “treachery to the German struggle for freedom.”¹³ Discussing the lawsuits filed by some Jewish businessmen against the newspaper, the provincial high court condemned this boycott attempt “because it refuses German citizens the right to exist in the economic sector for no other reason than their affiliation to the Jewish race.”¹⁴

In another case, the court of the city of Jena found it reprehensible when threats were made to publicly name customers of a Jewish-owned department store, because “under the law every individual is free to buy wherever he likes. Whether he buys from department stores or from other shops is entirely his own business.”¹⁵

But not all court cases were settled with a verdict against the boycott. Some courts considered the calls to boycott Jewish businesses a form of legitimate political opinion with no confirmable influence on consumer behavior.¹⁶ Whether the boycotts were defended or declared illegal by the courts, the concept of rights and the issue of consumer choice played a central rôle in these discussions.

Even the Nazi party, who comprised the powerhouse of the boycott movement during the Weimar years, appropriated the vocabulary of the free market and consumer agency when advocating its politics of Jewish exclusion. For the [German Fascists], boycotting Jews constituted a legitimate measure of self-defense, aimed at protecting consumer interests.

At least formally, the calls to boycott Jews sought to redress the alleged imbalance of Jewish economic supremacy by facilitating “fair” competition in the marketplace. An example of this can be found in the following rhyme that contemporary observers report was sung enthusiastically by groups of German nationalists: “It is not right if you buy from a Yid/ for the Jews it is never too bad/ but your country’s businessmen/ they are pushed to the verge of ruin.”¹⁷

Promoting economic boycott accentuated the idea of consumer responsibility by transforming consumer choice into a form of political action. This action was framed in personal terms. The calls to boycott Jews often employed the direct second person Du (you) form, rather than the polite and somewhat impartial third person Sie, underlining the personal agency and autonomy of consumers.¹⁸

This approach, firmly embedded in the promotional culture of the period, gave rise to a commercial-style politics that embraced the language of modern consumerism. The [German Fascists] even offered incentives such as cash bonuses, gift hampers, and sweepstakes to encourage consumers to avoid doing business with Jews.¹⁹

The [Fascist] appeal to the shoppers was explicitly gendered. In many of their publications, the [German Fascists] exclusively addressed women, urging them to support German businessmen by shopping only in non-Jewish stores. Transforming household shopping responsibilities into an ideology of consumer rights and obligations, the [Fascists] sought to politicize women’s consumer consciousness.

At the same time, this simplistic distinction between a feminine consumer and a masculine producer prompted further antisemitic fantasies about relations between putatively dominant Jewish businessmen and submissive female customers. It is little wonder, then, that [Fascist] propagandists sought to empower women by emphasizing the economic and political significance of their consumption.

A salient expression of this propensity can be found in the publications of the Kampfgemeinschaft gegen Warenhaus und Konsumverein (Association for the Struggle against the Department Store and the Consumer Cooperative), a [Fascist] organization founded in Munich in 1930 to represent what the [Fascists] considered to be German middle-class interests.²⁰

The association considered women “the soul of the middle class” (die Seele des Mittelstandes) and launched a campaign to instill an awareness of the politics of consumption among German housewives.²¹ Using the Du second-person form of address, the association urged German women not to buy from Jews: “Gerade an Dich wenden wir uns! Für Dich ist dieses Blatt geschrieben! Du sollst es beherzigen, denn durch Deine Hände geht der größte Teil des deutschen Volks-Einkommens” (We turn to you with good reason! This gazette is written for you! You should take into account that it is you who manages the largest portion of the German people’s income).

In addition to urging shoppers not to purchase from Jewish businesses, the [Fascists] threatened to publish the names of those who shopped from Jewish outlets, hence making public what was otherwise considered to be a private matter and a nonpolitical choice.²²

Slogans such as “you impair your reputation if you buy in Jewish businesses!” (Sie schaden ihrem Gute Ruf, wenn Sie in jüdischen Geschäften kaufen!) or “anyone who buys from Jews is a traitor to the people” (Wer beim Juden kauft, ist ein Volksverräter) reveal how politicized the matter of consumer choice and belonging had become, although there is no indication, however, that such lists were ever published during the Weimar years.²³

During the Third Reich, the Centralverein received many reports of threats, especially in small places, to expose the identity of shoppers who patronized Jewish business. One such report reveals that in the town of Goldap in July 1935, local [Fascist] officials took photos of people entering a Jewish-owned business and threatened female customers with the loss of their husbands’ jobs if they continued shopping there.²⁴

The [Fascists] even organized public gatherings under headings such as “tell me from whom you buy, and I’ll tell you who you are” (Sag mir, bei wem du kaufst, und ich sage dir, wer Du bist) to denounce those alleged Spießer (petite bourgeoisie), Mucker (moaner), and Nörgler (nagger) consumers, who, despite [German Fascism], still bought from Jews.²⁵

These are just two examples of the many ways in which Jews were economically persecuted under [German Fascism].²⁶ At the same time, they provide evidence that during this time consumers continued to patronize Jewish-owned businesses, even in the provincial locations considered strongholds of [Fascist] power. Indeed, the [Fascists] initiated a set of special surveys to determine why “Germans,” women in particular, persisted in shopping in Jewish-owned stores.²⁷

The fact that in the 1920s consumers could be “outed” as antisocial, subversive to the [bourgeois] state, or simply as Jewish, suggests that the act of buying by then had ceased to be understood as a private matter and was already regarded as a political act with strong racial ramifications.

One last thing: I want to confirm that this topic has very little to do with the latest boycotts on Herzlian-owned businesses; this is largely coincidental. That being said, it may be useful to compare these two boycotts so as to realize how dissimilar they are. The Germanic Fascists avoided Jewish-owned businesses for reasons of ultranationalism and economic competition. We avoid Herzlian-owned businesses so as to reduce any income for an apartheid régime engaged in easily verifiable atrocities. Only a liar or a dullard would equate these two boycotts.