Antisemitism

Hatred of Jews as a group or of “the Jew” as a concept. The term antisemitism was first coined in the late 1870s, and since then it has come to be used with reference to all types of Jew-hatred, both historical and modern. The word itself comes from the idea that Hebrew belongs to the Semitic language family, and thus Jews must be “Semites.” Many other languages also belong to the Semitic language family, such as Arabic and Ethiopic, and by the same token other groups of people could also be called “Semites.” However, there is no such thing as “semitism,” and no other groups have been included in the hatred and prejudice denoted by antisemitism. The word itself is a good example of how, during the late nineteenth century, Jew haters pretended that their hatred had its basis in scholarly and scientific ideas.

Jew-hatred is not a modern phenomenon – it goes all the way back to ancient times. Traditional antisemitism is based on religious discrimination against Jews by Christians. Christian doctrine was ingrained with the idea that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus, and thus deserved to be punished (this is known as the Deicide, or killing of god, Myth). Another concept that provoked hatred of Jews among Christians was the Supercession Myth, which claimed that Christianity had replaced Judaism, as the Jews had failed in their role as the chosen people of God - and thus deserved to be punished, specifically by the Christian world. Over the centuries various stereotypes about Jews came into being. Individual Jews were not judged based on their personal achievements or merits, but rather were seen on the whole as greedy, devilish, standoffish, lazy, money-grubbing, and over-sexed. At some points, Jews were even falsely accused of using the blood of Christian children as part of the Passover holiday ritual (known as the Blood Libel).

The nineteenth century gave the world the Enlightenment – a philosophical movement that based its ideas on reason rather than traditional, religious dogma, and was accompanied by social, humanitarian, and political progress. However, antisemitism did not disappear during the Enlightenment, it just changed forms. At that time Jews were awarded equal rights in many European countries, and many people expressed Jew-hatred in their questioning of whether Jews could ever be truly loyal to the newly emerging nation states. In addition, people who did not approve of the modernization and political changes being made accused the Jews of being behind the changes.

During the 1870s the new political antisemitism was joined by “racial” antisemitism. Based on the new ideas on evolution posited by the English naturalist Charles Darwin – who himself never meant to leave the realm of science – Jew haters began saying that Jews were an inferior “race” on the evolutionary scale. Since their problem was physical, or genetic, it could never be changed, despite assimilation. Included in this new form of antisemitism was the idea that Jews were responsible for the world’s troubles because of their race.

In Germany, this type of thinking found expression in a political, nationalist movement called the voelkisch movement. This group’s representatives opposed the industrialization and secularism that accompany modernization, because they believed that industrialization and secularism would destroy traditional German culture. They blamed the Jews for undermining the Germans’ traditional way of life, and stated that German Jews were not really part of the German people. At the end of the nineteenth century many antisemitic political parties sprung up in Germany, which were further revitalized after Germany’s loss in World War I.

In France, antisemitism reared its ugly head in the 1890s during the Dreyfus Affair, in which a Jewish army officer was falsely accused of treason by Jew haters. In Russia, throughout the reign of the Czars, antisemitism was official government policy. Jewish movement was restricted to certain areas, and pogroms were encouraged by the ruling class. Only after the February Revolution in 1917 were Jews granted equal rights. Many Jews took part in the October Revolution, and this gave antisemites throughout Europe another excuse to hate Jews – because Jews were now associated with the hated Communists.

The Nazi Party, which was created in 1919 and came to national power in Germany in 1933, was one of the political movements that was fundamentally based on racist antisemitism. The Nazis discriminated against the Jews from the very beginning of their regime, first by instituting racial laws that separated Jews from the rest of the society, and later by exterminating members of the “inferior” race. In the countries that collaborated with or were occupied by the Nazis, the local manifestations of antisemitism – whether traditional, political, or racial – helped determine the Jews’ fate. Even in the countries that opposed Hitler and the Nazis, antisemitism still existed to some degree, and some experts believe that those antisemitic attitudes inhibited those nations from doing more to rescue Jews from the clutches of the Nazis.

After World War II, when the West realized what had happened in Europe, antisemitsim was greatly weakened. Many churches admitted their huge mistake in cultivating traditional Christian antisemitism (Pope John Paul II termed antisemitism a sin) and some governments no longer allowed the enactment of antisemitic policies. However, antisemitism was revitalized in the Soviet Union just a few years after the war’s end, when Joseph Stalin became paranoid about his country’s Jews and began persecuting them.

In addition, over the years, antisemites (especially Muslims who opposed the existence of the State of Israel) began camouflaging their Jew-hatred in “anti-Zionism.” The United Nations even showed its approval of such anti-Semitic sentiment in 1975 when it passed a resolution which stated that “Zionism is racism.” This resolution was finally canceled in 1994. Holocaust denial and Neo-nazism are other ways of expressing antisemitism in the modern world, in that they seek to absolve Nazism of its crimes or to glorify Nazism and Jew-hatred as it existed in the past.

From the Facts On File Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, prepared by Yad Vashem and the Jerusalem Publishing House, edited by Dr. Robert Rozett and Dr. Shmuel Spector.