When the Israeli historian Shulamit Volkov formulated the concept of «antisemitism as a cultural code» in 1978, it caught the attention of historians in an era dominated by debates on whether National Socialism was the endpoint of the German Sonderweg. Volkov derived the concept from her dissertation research on the anti-modern dispositions of master craftsmen in the German Empire. While industrialization posed a material threat to skilled workers, she argued, they did not reject liberal economics out of hand. Rather, they protested against what they viewed as an extreme form of liberalization that had resulted in crises like the Panic of 1873 and the ensuing Long Depression, and they believed that Jews were responsible for it. «Their enemy was not capitalism», wrote Volkov, «but the Jews who had led it to inhuman excesses; not liberalism as such, but the Jews who misinterpreted and misrepresented it; it was not the modern state that was responsible for neglecting their interests, but the Jews who thought of theirs only, and so forth.»¹

Volkov interpreted the cultural code of antisemitism as an «ideal syndrome» of anti-modern social and political formations. Antisemitism could become the hallmark political symbol of an anti-modern subculture precisely because antisemitic worldviews had relatively few adherents in late nineteenth-century German society. Volkov’s analysis provided empirical evidence for the seventh thesis of the «Elements of Antisemitism» that Adorno and Horkheimer appended to their Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1947, three years after the publication of the book’s first edition. They posited that antisemitism had become just one part of the «fascist ticket» and no longer stood for itself: «When the masses accept the reactionary ticket containing the clause against the Jews, they are obeying social mechanisms in which individual people’s experiences of Jews play no part.»² The «social mechanisms» and economic structures of industrial mass societies, Adorno and Horkheimer thought, reify their individual members’ conceptions of themselves and others and foster stereotyped thinking. Hatred of difference in its antisemitic iteration is directed at Jews, but it could target any minority. In the end, the critical theorists argued that antisemitism is just one element of a pre-formulated «ticket» that authoritarianism mobilizes for its ends.

It is consensus in German historiography that antisemitism was no arbitrary part of the «fascist ticket». Anti-Jewish prejudices shaped the Christian West for centuries and ultimately resulted in the exterminatory antisemitism of the Nazis. Adorno and Horkheimer’s thesis does not contest this. But their insight that antisemitism is bundled with other positions in a «fascist ticket» led them to believe that ending antisemitism required fighting authoritarianism through concrete action in social and political conflicts. Adorno himself wrote nearly 300 texts for radio and spoke in public forums over 300 times. At the Institute for Social Research, he ground the gears of the administered world until he finally succeeded in establishing the course of study in sociology at the University of Frankfurt in 1966. It was his conviction that sociological education made a practical contribution to the democratization of society, and that sociological studies—particularly those assessing the dispositions of students themselves—represented an elementary component of the fight against authoritarianism and, by extension, the fight against antisemitism.

The Search for Latent Antisemitism

Decades of derivative readings of Adorno have led to the general perception of Critical Theory as a lofty, abstract philosophy. But this entirely misses the central focus of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, which is right in the name: empirical social research. In his 1936 essay «Authority and the Family», Horkheimer articulated how the dawn of modern societies had flipped the struggle against dependence on authority into a glorification of authority as such. Antisemitism was an important index of this shift. Even in the postwar Federal Republic of Germany, antisemitism retained its function in the formation of community. A survey conducted in 1946 by the US military government’s Information Control Division classified 18 percent of Germans as radical antisemites, 21 percent as antisemites, 22 percent as racists, 19 percent as nationalists, and only 20 percent as mostly free of prejudice.

But things gradually changed. While in 1950, four out of ten respondents agreed with the statement that it would be better if there were no Jews in Germany, the number had decreased to just nine percent three decades later. Sociologists Werner Bergmann and Rainer Erb explained this transition as the result of a shift in how antisemitism was treated in social conflicts. While the «zero hour» never actually ushered in a radical new beginning, public censure of expressions of antisemitism started having an educational effect around 1957, if not earlier. Only when pertinent segments of the political and media elite turned against antisemitism did antisemitic statements begin to be treated as a scandal. This ultimately gave rise to a kind of «communicative latency»: Because the anti-antisemitic norm of public discourse no longer permitted the articulation of antisemitic sentiments, they were forced into the private sphere.¹

Empirical research on social attitudes has been on the lookout for latent antisemitism ever since. After all, even though only nine percent of those surveyed in 1983 agreed with the statement that it would be better if there were no Jews in Germany, this did not necessarily mean that they supported the opposite. Fifty percent of respondents to the same survey ducked the question by answering «undecided», which can be interpreted as confirmation of the theory of communicative latency. Writing on Horkheimer’s diagnosis of the authoritarian shift in modern societies, the editors of the 2022 edition of the annual Leipzig studies on authoritarianism—which are squarely situated in the tradition of the Frankfurt School—write: «We have seen the same old reaction [the glorification of authority] again and again, despite all of the ‹innovations› that society is constantly inventing. But as research on authoritarianism has made this reaction into an object of critical social theory since the rise of fascism in the 1920s, it is necessary to keep an eye on both that which remains identical in the face of change as well as new developments and forms.»¹