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Life & Wisdom Quote by Stefan Zweig

"The idea of Jewish unity, of a plan, an organization, unfortunately exists only in the brains of Hitler and Streicher"

About this Quote

Zweig’s line lands like a scalpel: it punctures the paranoid fantasy of a monolithic “Jewish plan” by attributing that coherence not to Jews, but to the architects of antisemitic propaganda. The sting is in the inversion. What the Nazis brand as an ominous network is, for Zweig, a projection -- an organizational genius granted to Jews only inside the minds that need Jews to function as an explanation for everything.

The intent is defensive, but not in a pleading way. It’s a writer’s counterspell against a story that’s already spreading faster than fact. By naming Hitler and Streicher (the grotesque impresario of Der Sturmer), Zweig points to authorship: conspiracy isn’t discovered, it’s written. Antisemitism here isn’t merely hatred; it’s a narrative technology, manufacturing “unity” so that a scattered, diverse minority can be treated as a single enemy. That’s what makes the sentence work: it refuses to debate the details of the lie and instead exposes the lie’s engine.

The subtext is bleak. Zweig knows that truth has a weak grip in a culture primed for myth. Even as he denies the existence of a Jewish “organization,” he’s acknowledging that the fiction is politically potent precisely because it simplifies a messy reality into a clean target. In interwar Europe, where economic anxiety and national humiliation begged for scapegoats, the fantasy of Jewish coordination offered emotional relief and bureaucratic convenience. Zweig’s irony doubles as warning: the most dangerous “unity” is the one your enemies invent for you, then punish you for.

Quote Details

TopicHuman Rights
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APA Style (7th ed.)
Zweig, Stefan. (2026, January 16). The idea of Jewish unity, of a plan, an organization, unfortunately exists only in the brains of Hitler and Streicher. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-idea-of-jewish-unity-of-a-plan-an-128401/

Chicago Style
Zweig, Stefan. "The idea of Jewish unity, of a plan, an organization, unfortunately exists only in the brains of Hitler and Streicher." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-idea-of-jewish-unity-of-a-plan-an-128401/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The idea of Jewish unity, of a plan, an organization, unfortunately exists only in the brains of Hitler and Streicher." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-idea-of-jewish-unity-of-a-plan-an-128401/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2026.

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Stefan Zweig on the Nazi Myth of Jewish Unity
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About the Author

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Stefan Zweig (November 28, 1881 - February 22, 1942) was a Writer from Austria.

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