an
ethics. In his well-known antisemitic speech as early as 19.9.1879 Stoecker
warns his listeners:

"We can already detect here and there a hatred directed against the Jews
that is contrary to the Gospels". [19]

Even in his most violent speeches against the Jews Stoecker did not draw
the extreme biological consequences of his racial theories and continued
to maintain that conversion was the only authentic solution to the Jewish
question that would complete the universal mission of Christianity and that
only baptism could save the Jews from their ignominious belief in the
validity of the halacha after the coming of Jesus. The salvation promised
to the Jew then is to be saved from his Judaism. The final redemption,
however, will not raise the Jews above the nations of the world, as
promised in the Old Testament, but this position of eminence and election
will pass, or actually has already passed, from the Jews not just to the
Christians but to Christian Germany. The redemption promised to the Jews
is thus to be attained by way of the baptismal font at the entrance to
the Church:
<XII>
"All Israel will be saved when the fullness of the heathen shall have come
to an end. This was Paul's promise to his beloved people - final salvation
and not a future glory that will raise Israel above the other nations as
proclaimed in the Old Testament... and every believing Christian knows well
what a rejoicing there will be in the Kingdom of God when the people of the
Old Testament finally acknowledge their sin against Christ and repent. This
event will be hailed by all Christendom and by the angelic hosts with paeans
of praise, and it will be turned by the Church in the End of Days into glory
and renown when Israel will bring to it its uncommon religious talents and
intellectual gifts..." [20]

The inner tension between the theological view that sees the solution of the
Jewish question in the liquidation of Judaism and the racial view that sees
it in the liquidation of the Jews is clearly expressed in an address delivered
by Stoecker on 8.2.1882 about the danger to the German Reich from Jews in
public life, in which he states:

"We regard the Jewish question not as a religious nor indeed as a racial
question. Although it is at bottom both of these, it appears in its external
form as a social-ethical question, and is treated by us as such. No people
can toler