The Roots of Antisemitism : THE JEW ACCUSED <i> By Albert S. Lindemann</i> , <i> (Cambridge University Press: $27.95; 301 pp.) </i>

The literature on the subject is extensive, the studies exhaustive, yet the question remains unanswered: What are the roots of violent antisemitism? Does it well up out of some dark place in the communal subconscious where pagan deities and tribal instincts still rule? Or does it spring from real sources--cultural, economic, demographic--that through history but especially in the past 100 years have brought Jews and Gentiles increasingly into conflict?

This is the highly charged territory that Albert S. Lindemann sets out to explore in “The Jew Accused,” an ambitious, wide-ranging and, in important ways, stereotype-debunking study of three oft-analyzed and still spiritedly debated turn-of-the century antisemitic affairs.

Because the author, a professor of history at UC Santa Barbara, is more interested in the origins of antisemitism than in the ordeals of the Jewish martyrs in question, he does no more than sketch his famous case histories. Thus readers seeking vivid accounts of the trials and tribulations of Alfred Dreyfus (convicted in 1894 on charges of selling French military secrets to Germany and later pardoned), Mendel Beilis (tried and acquitted in 1913 on charges of killing and ritually mutilating a Russian peasant boy) and Leo M. Frank (convicted in 1913 on charges of murdering a Georgia factory girl and subsequently lynched) should look elsewhere.

However, anyone in the market for a convincing and contrary rumination on what occurred during the years preceding 1900 to set the stage for these three notorious episodes will find Lindemann’s work bracing. Indeed, some Jews may find it too bracing, for the author’s contention is that the affairs were precipitated to a varying degree by actual grievances against Jews--or at least rational fears of them--and that the antisemites responsible were “part of the human family, not stick-figures or bugbears.”

Lindemann’s thinking on such matters is well-considered. His reason for dismissing the bad-yahoos-versus-good-Jews argument is not only that it’s just as biased as the reverse but that it “plays into the hands of anti-Semites” who “charge Jews with trying to prevent an honest and objective examination of anti-Semitism.”

His brief against the view that these things happened in a vacuum is equally cogent. If Jews were persecuted in the courtroom merely because they were Jews, then each time a Jew was arraigned at the bar, an atrocity would follow. But as the trials of Leopold and Loeb, the Rosenbergs and, more recently, Jonathan Pollard prove, controversial legal proceedings in which Jews are defendants do not necessarily provoke antisemitic incidents. No, according to Lindemann, the ingredient needed to transform a case into an affair is this: ideological fervor ignited by genuine issues involving Jews.

As Lindemann surveys the fin-de-siecle world, he sees both the fuel that fed and the spark that kindled the fires that scorched Dreyfus and Beilis and engulfed Frank. The fuel was a society in which monarchies were collapsing, crops were failing, engines of production were changing and old truths were expiring. These transformations left both embattled elites and impoverished masses equally adrift and volatile. The spark--in the author’s phrase --was “the rise of the Jews.” In short, Lindemann contends that the children of Israel were multiplying so rapidly and making such tremendous strides in all professions during these uncertain times that it would have been difficult for Europeans and to a lesser degree Americans not to have perceived them as threatening.

Among the figures that Lindemann cites to fortify this viewpoint, one fairly leaps out. In 1860, Vienna’s Jewish population was but 6,000, yet by 1910 it had grown to 175,000. And numbers don’t tell the entire story. “Nearly all banks in the capital and indeed in the . . . monarchy were owned by Jews, as were the important newspapers,” the author writes, adding: “For the citizens of Vienna the rise of the Jews was a . . . striking, palpable matter.”

Now Austria--as Lindemann acknowledges--was the most antisemitic country in Europe (oddly enough, neighboring Hungary was the most philosemitic, and stranger still, it was during this period of terrible bigotry that Vienna’s fabled community of Jewish intellectuals flourished), yet across the continent, similar increases in Jewish population and visibility were creating similar stresses. For instance, in France--also a traditionally philosemitic land--Jews sided with forces that in the 1880s tried to bring about secular as opposed to Catholic control of public schools, thus incurring the wrath of right-wingers. And in Germany, several Jewish brokers --the 19th-Century equivalents of Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken--were involved in an 1873 stock-market scandal that set off a stubborn recession during which poor farmers, craftsmen and shop owners suffered horribly.

Then there was Russia. Here, Lindemann subscribes to a more conventional view of the Jew as victim. Long before the bloody pogroms and the May Laws that prohibited Jews from owning property, Russians by and large not only despised Jews but subscribed to the dark lore that held that they “killed Christ or . . . used Christian blood for their ceremonies.” Such prejudices extended to the loftiest levels of government. In fact, Czar Nicholas II spent thousands of his own rubles to publish virulent antisemitic literature.

Yet even in Russia, Lindemann contends, the public was in part reacting to the fact that Russian Jews--mostly Hasidim--were willfully resistant to social and political intercourse with either peasant or prince. “For . . . Russians, their country’s Jewish population appeared intractable, foreign, and hostile. . . . There was, in short, a rather widespread consensus in Russia that Jews were a separate . . . race steadily working to dominate those among whom they lived.”

By the time Lindemann actually addresses the Dreyfus, Beilis and Frank affairs, he’s succeeded in constructing a backdrop that not only makes these three episodes seem predictable but leaves us wondering why there weren’t more like them. Meanwhile, he’s established himself as the writer to rescue the cases from some of the mythologies that over the years have grown up around them.

Among the most cherished misrepresentations that Lindemann exposes are those involving Emile Zola, the novelist-hero of the Dreyfus affair. Zola, whose polemical “J’Accuse” called attention to the miscarriage of justice that sent Dreyfus to Devil’s Island, was not, asserts the author, a friend of the Jews. Quite to the contrary, Lindemann writes that Zola--who in one of his early works, “L’Argent,” retailed the usual antisemitic claptrap--only came to Dreyfus’ rescue for one reason: political expediency. The novelist wasn’t an enemy of antisemitism--merely of the particular anti-semites arrayed against Dreyfus.

With similar zeal, Lindemann also shreds some of the fables that shroud the Beilis and Frank cases. Regarding Beilis, the author delights in calling attention to a supreme and usually overlooked irony. “Our Mendel,” as his Russian friends often called him, was the only one of the three Jews accused to be acquitted--the evidence against him was obviously falsified by czarist prosecutors. In other words, despite the Russians’ antisemitic beliefs, they knew a trumped-up case when they saw it.

As for Frank, initially Lindemann restores, if not the good names, then at least the human dimensions of two of the Jewish factory boss’s antagonists--the solicitor, Hugh Dorsey, and the populist, Tom Watson, each of whom has been subject (in popular books and an NBC miniseries) to what the author correctly dismisses as unwarranted vilification. Dorsey, he maintains, was actually a decent sort who simply thought Frank was guilty, while Watson--though he practiced cruel Jew-bashing--lambasted Frank not for religious reasons but because he was a Yankee capitalist. (This last distinction is a fine one; no matter what Watson’s intent, he created the atmosphere that incited Frank’s lynching.) Such revisions out of the way, Lindemann points up the saddest irony of all: Only in America, the nation where Jews believed they would be free from persecution, was one of the Jews accused, abducted from a state prison by a mob and hanged from a tree.

Despite Leo Frank’s execution, Lindemann contends that by 1915, things were looking up for Jews everywhere. Many of the issues that exacerbated Jewish-Gentile relations in previous decades seemed to have been resolved. Yet this--as he confesses and as the Holocaust tragically proved--was not the case. After Auschwitz, a search for the underpinnings of antisemitism seems futile. In the end, perhaps those who claim that hatred of Jews seeps out of unconscious--and unconscionable--inner caverns are closer to the truth.

That, though, is not Lindemann’s story, for he writes of a more innocent time, and his triumph is not that he restores it for us in all its clarity but in all its ambiguity.