If pre WWI, Jews, Germans and Austrians could magically read "Esau's Tears", they would probably recognize it as a fair statement of their lives and times. Lindemann sets out to examine all aspects of anti-semitism from the 1870's onwards and give the political and economic context, plus enlightening contemporary commentary.

The main theme is the flight of poor religious Jews from the Russian Pale of Settlement and Galicia to Vienna, Budapest, Germany and to a lesser extent the United States, France and Great Britain. They were searching for economic opportunity and served as an irritant to the already successful Jewish communities, particularly those in Germany and Austria who were keen on integration and were "more German than the Germans".

German stability from 1870 onwards was built around the Prussian Junker aristocracy with the root of the anti-semitic problem located elswhere in the terminally unstable pre WWI Austro-Hungarian empire, particularly the capital city Vienna. It's Germans, Czechs, Hungarians etc. were at loggerheads in a dysfunctional parliament and into this situation came a massive influx of poor religious urban Jews adding to an already dominant educated Jewish presence.

As Lindemann says, "The rise of the Jews in Austria-Hungary may well have been the most sudden , impressive rise of Jews in modern history."
He quotes a German-Jewish writer who had moved to Vienna from the German Reich, "....all public life was dominated by Jews. The banks, the press, the theater, literature, social organizations, all lay in the hands of the Jews.... The aristocracy would have nothing to do with such things.... The small number of untitled patrician families imitated the aristocracy; the original upper-middle class had disappeared..... The court, the lower middle class and the Jews gave the city its stamp. And that the Jews, as the most mobile group, kept all the others in continual motion is, on the whole, not surprising."

The Jewish press ferociously attacked any criticism of Jews but the dam finally broke with the election of Karl Lueger as mayor of Vienna who opportunistically picked up the anti-Jewish lower middle class and working class vote.

Lindemann shows how the proportion of Jews in dominant positions in society, business and the professions became a critical factor in anti-semitism (e.g. among the Germans of Vienna who had until recently filled these roles) and the degree to which Jews avoided anti-semitism by integrating and abandoning traditional religious and marriage rules. In the highly anti-semitic 1930's the smaller number of integrated Jews of Italy experienced almost no anti-semitism. They lived in Italian society as Italians from a Jewish background rather than as Jews living in Italy.
It's difficult to do justice to the quality of this book in illuminating such a dark area of history. ( )

This is a scholarly work on the origin and nature of anti-semitism and its history from the 1870's to the eve of the holocaust. It very efficiently refutes the failed interpretations of the Jewish apologists, whose claim that it is a causeless, inexplicable pathology of the non-Jews--independent of anything the Jews do, or even of their very presence, and is rooted in the Christian theology of deicide. It is, according to these morons, the province of a primitive impulse of the ignorant, something like the primitive's unreasoned abhorrence for ghosts and goblins.
Lindemann painstakingly shows the real complexity of the phenomenon, varying in time and place. He effectively proves that it is just another manifestation of the interaction of distinct peoples, with its quite understandable jealousies and hatreds brought on by competition for the goods of capitalism and modernity. There is nothing transcendental or ineffable about it, and can be understood by anyone able to think dispassionately and are susceptible to the arguments of the historical science. Most of what is written about it today, colored as it is by the propaganda of the holocaust, he persuasively claims, is the hooey of hysterics and the balderdash of the self-deceived. Moving decisively away from the by now traditional, emotional recitation of the injustice found in their over-worked narrative, toward a reasoned view enlightened by facts and data, he rises above such unreasoned nonsense and so will surely be accused of anti-semitism himself.

I especially appreciated his analysis of the phenomenon in Russia, and the background for the pogrom in Kishenev, is described in some detail. I was amazed to read how the Jews greatly exaggerated their claims, hoping for greater compensation from the West, which Lindemann is unafraid to relate.

His tools and method of analysis unfortunately ignores the important insights afforded by evolutionary psychology, a la Kevin MacDonald in his three volume series. Read together, they usefully complement one another.

His writing style, while rather that of an academic, is quite lucid and the material is well organized. This is a big book, perhaps a bit longer than it needs to be, but it is a serious antidote to all the baloney written on this topic, and the interested reader will be well rewarded by the exposure to an honest treatment of it. ( )