Foe of Anti-Semitism

Abstract

A classic example of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk’s courage and non-conformity was his defence of Leopold Hilsner, a poor Jew, who was condemned to death for murder in 1899.¹ In performing this deed Masaryk stood almost alone in the face of overwhelming public hostility and became the target of hatred and vicious abuse throughout the Austrian half of the Monarchy. In what he and others called ⁴a Czech and Austrian Dreyfusiad’, Masaryk assumed the unrewarding role of an Émile Zola, who, but a few years before, in France, had protested the injustice committed against the Jew, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, sentenced, without cause, in 1896, to a life in exile, amnestied in 1900 and rehabilitated in 1906. Although, like Zola, he suffered public calumny and abuse, Masaryk scored only a partial success in the case itself but, with his French counterpart, exerted a continuing positive influence in the struggle against the plague of anti-Semitism. As a recent biographer has written, Masaryk, in conduct ‘certainly unusual for Czech scholar and k.k. (Imperial and Royal) Professor’, displayed a rare combination of qualities as ‘a theoretician, a scholar and publicist’ and an ‘energetic and active practical man’.² In the words of an admirer, his action in the Hilsner case was ‘the brave and undaunted intervention of a great thinker and defender of the truth against human stupidity and dark, medieval and false ideas’.³