Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism (alternatively spelled antisemitism) is hostility toward or prejudice against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group, which can range from individual hatred to institutionalized, violent persecution, and can take several different forms. Before the 19th century, most anti-Semitism was primarily religious in nature, based on Christian or Islamic interactions with and responses to Judaism. Jews were often wrongly blamed for Jesus' death and therefore resented by Christians. Since Judaism was generally the largest minority religion in Christian Europe and much of the Islamic world, Jews were often the primary targets of religiously-motivated violence and persecution from Christian and, to a lesser degree, Islamic rulers. Unlike anti-Semitism in general, this form of prejudice was directed at the religion itself, and usually did not affect those of Jewish ancestry who had converted to another religion (Spanish Inquistion notwithstanding).

Racial anti-semitic caricature (France, 1898)

Sometimes this form of anti-semitism is called Anti-Judaism.

The dominant form of anti-Semitism from the late 19th century through today has been racial anti-Semitism. With its origins in the cultural anthropological ideas of race that started during the Enlightenment, racial anti-Semitism focused on Jews as a racially distinct group, regardless of their religious practice, viewing them as inferior and worthy of animosity. With the rise of racial anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories about Jewish plots in which Jews were acting in concert to dominate the world became a popular form of anti-Semitic expression. The highly explicit ideology of Adolf Hitler's Nazism was the most extreme example of this phenomenon, leading to a genocide of the European Jewry.

Many analysts and Jewish groups believe there is a distinctly new form of late 20th century anti-Semitism, called the New anti-Semitism, which is associated with the Left, rather than the Right, borrowing language and concepts from anti-Zionism. This type of anti-Semitism masquerades as legitimate criticism of Israel's policies but goes beyond this to attack the Jews more broadly.

Etymology and usage

The term "anti-semitism" derives from the name of Noah's son Shem and his ancestors who are known as Shemites or Semites. Thereofre, technically, "anti-Semitism" refers not only to Jews but all semitic peoples, including the Arabs. However, historically, the term has predominantly beenused in a more precise way to refer to prejudice towards Jews alone, and this was the only use of this word for more than a century.

German political agitator Wilhelm Marr coined the German word Antisemitismus in his book "The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism" in 1879. Marr used the term as a pseudo-scientific synonym for Jew-hatred or Judenhass. Marr's book became very popular, and in the same year he founded the "League of Anti-Semites" ("Antisemiten-Liga"), the first German organization committed specifically to combating the alleged threat to Germany posed by the Jews and advocating their forced removal from the country.

In recent decades some groups have argued that the term should be extended to include prejudice against Arabs, otherwise known as Anti-Arabism. However, Bernard Lewis, Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University, points out that until now, "Anti-Semitism has never anywhere been concerned with anyone but Jews."

Early anti-Semitism

The earliest occurrence of religious anti-Semitism (Anti-Judaism) has been the subject of debate among scholars. It is thought that the basis for original prejudice against Jews may have been their insistence that their deity alone was the True God, their refusal to eat food considered normal, and their keeping separate from their gentile neighbors, and suspicions of political disloyalty.

The Book of Esther (third or fourth century B.C.E.), deals with anti-Semitism in the Persian Empire under Xerxes, instigated by Haman. Although this account may not have been historical, it provides evidence at the time of Esther that anti-Semitism was a threat. Correspondingly, Egyptian prejudices against Jews are found in the writings of the Egyptian priest Manetho in the third century b.c.e.. In the Greek Empire, where Jews faced hostility in the Diaspora, they gained a reputation as unruly and disloyal, to imperial authority because Jews sometimes violently resisted Greek attempts to force them to do obeisance to Greek emperors such as Antiochus Epiphanes. This reputation carried over into Roman times. The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria in his Flaccus, described an attack on Jews in Alexandria in 38 C.E., in which thousands of Jews died. Philo describes Flaccus, the Roman governor of the city, as allowing Greek mobs to erect statues of their deities in Jewish synagogues and then declaring the Jews outlaws when they resisted. The Jewish revolt against Roman authority in Jerusalem in 70 C.E. further exacerbated suspicion against Jews throughout the Roman Empire.

The New Testament

The animosity between Christians and Jews began as argument between those Jews who accepted Jesus as the Messiah and other Jews who denied his Messiahship. This intra-Jewish debate over the Jewish Jesus intensified as Christians developed their theology of Trinity, declaring Jesus to be, in effect a divinity, and denigrating the Law of Moses as no longer valid. Hard feelings between these two persecuted minority religions in the Roman empire soon combined with Roman negativity toward the Jews to create a tradition of Christian anti-Semitism that has lasted for nearly two millennia.

As a result of the increasingly bitter feelings between traditional Jews and the Jewish-Christian communities that accepted Jesus as the Messiah, a number of passages in the New Testament display harsh attitudes toward "the Jews." For example, Jesus denounced a group of Jews by claiming they are more closely related to the devil than to God:

'"Abraham is our father," they answered... Jesus said to them... "You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desire."' (John 8:39-44)

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Christ before Pilate: "His blood be upon us."

The Gospel of John particularly portrays "the Jews" in general as rejecting Jesus, and even quotes Jesus as speaking of "the Jews" as a group to which he does not seem to belong (John 18, 19). John's strong language against the Jews is evidenced in the following passage:

"You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. ... He who is of God hears the words of God; the reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God." (John 8: 42-47)

The Book of Revelation also contains derogatory remarks against the Jews:

"Behold, I will make those of the synagogue of Satan who say that they are Jews and are not, but lie-behold, I will make them come and bow down before your feet, and learn that I have loved you." (Rev. 3:9, cf. Rev. 2:9)

Matthew's Gospel describes an infamous scene before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate in which "all the [Jewish] people" clamored for Jesus' death, shouting, "Let his blood be on us and on our children!" (Matt 27:24) and adds, "You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?" (Matt 23:27-33)

In the Book of Acts, Stephen, a hellenistic Jew, confronts a Jewish council in Jerusalem just before his execution and indicts the Jews as a consistently rebellious people against God: "You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did not your fathers persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered." (Acts 7:51-53)

Many biblical scholars hold that verses such as these reflect the Jewish-Christian tensions that had emerged in the mid- to late first century. However, Christians soon stopped thinking of themselves in any sense as Jews, and the New Testament passages indicting those Jews who specifically rejected Jesus came to be viewed as pertaining to the Jews collectively.

Early Christianity

A number of early and influential Church works display strongly anti-Jewish attitudes. After the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. and the subsequent expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem, Christianity evolved into an exclusively gentile religion. Christians of Jewish heritage had to stop practicing Jewish traditions such as circumcision and eating only kosher food or else be accused of the heresy of "Judaizing." The apocryphal Letter of Barnabas (c. 100 C.E.) declares that Jesus had abolished the Law of Moses and states that the Jews were "wretched men [who] set their hope on the building (the Temple), and not on their God who made them." Moreover, Christians even took the attitude that the suffering of the Jews in the Roman Empire, unlike their own persecution, was justified because, the Jews were rebels against God who had rejected of Jesus. The Christian apologist Justin Martyr in his Dialog with Trypho the Jew (c. 150 C.E.) stated:

The circumcision according to the flesh, which is from Abraham, was given for a sign; that you may be separated from other nations, and from us; and that you alone may suffer that which you now justly suffer; and that your land may be desolate, and your cities burned with fire; and that strangers may eat your fruit in your presence, and not one of you may go up to Jerusalem... These things have happened to you in fairness and justice.' (Dialog with Trypho, ch. 16)

In the second century, some Christians went so far as to declare that the God of the Jews was a different being altogether from the loving Heavenly Father described by Jesus. The popular preacher Marcion, although eventually rejected as a heretic, developed a strong following for this belief, arguing that the Jewish scriptures be rejected by Christians.

Formal restrictions against Jews began as early as 305 C.E., when, in Elvira (now Granada) the first known laws of any church council against Jews appeared. Christian women were forbidden to marry Jews unless the Jew first converted to Catholicism. Christians were forbidden to eat with Jews or to maintain friendly social relations with them.

During the First Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E., the Roman emperor Constantine said, "... Let us then have nothing in common with the detestable Jewish crowd; for we have received from our Saviour a different way." Easter was formally separated from the Passover celebration. In 329, Constantine issued an edict providing for the death penalty for any non-Jew who embraced the Jewish faith, as well as for Jews who encouraged them. On the other hand, Jews were forbidden any retaliation against Jewish converts to Christianity. Constantine also forbade marriages between Jews and Christians and imposed the death penalty upon any Jew who transgressed this law. [1]

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Bishop John Chrysostom preaches to Empress Eudoxia.

Emperor Theodosius I in 391 C.E. banned pagan worship and in effect made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire, putting the Jews in a vulnerable situation as Christians sought to exercise their newfound privileges against the Jews. Bishop St. Ambrose of Milan challenged this same Theodosius for being too supportive of the the rights of Jews when Theodosius ordered the rebuilding of a Jewish synagogue at a local bishop's expense after a Christian mob had burned it. Ambrose argued that it was inappropriate for a Christian emperor to protect the Christ-rejecting Jews in this way, saying sarcastically:

"You have the guilty man present, you hear his confession. I declare that I set fire to the synagogue, or at least that I ordered those who did it, that there might not be a place where Christ was denied."

In the fifth century, several of the homilies of the famous "golden-tongued" orator Saint John Chrysostom, Bishop of Antioch, were directed against the Jews and against those Christians who associated with them in friendship: "Shall I tell you of their plundering, their covetousness, their abandonment of the poor, their thefts, their cheating in trade? The whole day long will not be enough to give you an account of these things." (Homily I, VII, 1) "I invoke heaven and earth as witnesses against you," Chysostom warned, "if any one of you should go to attend the Feast of the Blowing of the Trumpets, or participate in the fasts, or the observance of the Sabbath, or observe an important or unimportant rite of the Jews, and I will be innocent of your blood." ("Adversus Judæos," I)

Prejudice against Jews in the wider Christian Roman Empire was formalized in 438 C.E., when the Code of Theodosius II established orthodox Christianity as the only legal religion in the empire. The General Council of Chalcedon in 451 banned intermarriage with Jews throughout Christendom. The Justinian Code a century later stripped Jews of many of their rights, and Church councils throughout the sixth and seventh century further enforced anti-Jewish provisions.

In 589 C.E., in Catholic Spain, the Third Council of Toledo ordered that children born of marriage between Jews and Catholic be baptized by force. By the Twelfth Council of Toledo (681 C.E.) a policy of forced conversion of all Jews was initiated (Liber Judicum, II.2 as given in Roth). Thousands fled, and thousands of others converted to Roman Catholicism.

Anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages

In 1239, Pope Gregory IX ordered the Talmud burned. A 15th century painting by Pedro Berruguete.

In the Middle Ages the main justification of prejudice against Jews in Europe was still religious. However, this prejudice was just as violent as much of the racial anti-Semitism of a later era. Jews faced vilification as Christ-killers, suffered serious professional and economic restrictions, were accused of the most heinous crimes against Christians, had their books burned, were forced into ghettos, were required to wear distinctive clothing, and faced expulsions from several nations.

Accusations

Deicide. Though not part of official Catholic dogma, many Christians, including members of the clergy, have held the Jewish people collectively responsible for rejecting and killing Jesus (see Deicide). This was the root cause for various other suspicions and accusations described below. Jews were considered arrogant, greedy, and self-righteous in their status as "chosen people." The Talmud's occasional criticism of both Christianity and Jesus himself provoked book burnings and widespread suspicion. Ironically these prejudices led to a vicious cycle of policies which isolated and embittered many Jews and made them appear all the more alien to Christian majorities.

Passion plays. These dramatic stagings of the trial and death of Jesus, have historically been used in remembrance of Jesus' death during Lent. They often depicted a racially stereotyped Judas cynically betraying Jesus for money and a crowd of Jews clamoring for Jesus' crucifixion while a Jewish leader assumed eternal collective Jewish guilt by declaring "his blood be on our heads!" For centuries, European Jews faced vicious attacks during lenten celebrations as Christian mobs vented their fury on Jews as "Christ-killers."

Well Poisoning. Some Christians believed that Jews had gained special magical and sexual powers from making a deal with the devil against Christians. As the Black Death epidemics devastated Europe in the mid-14th century, rumors spread that Jews caused it by deliberately poisoning wells. Hundreds of Jewish communities were destroyed by resulting violence. "In one such case, a man named Agimet was ... coerced to say that Rabbi Peyret of Chambery (near Geneva) had ordered him to poison the wells in Venice, Toulouse, and elsewhere. In the aftermath of Agimet’s "confession," the Jews of Strasbourg were burned alive on February 14, 1349.

A 15th century German woodcut showing an alleged host desecration. In the first panel the hosts are stolen, in the second the hosts bleed when pierced by a Jew, in the third the Jews are arrested, and in the fourth they are burned alive.

Host Desecration. Jews were also accused of torturing consecrated host wafers in a reenactment of the Crucifixion; this accusation was known as host desecration. Such charges sometimes resulted in serious persecutions (see pictures at right).

Blood Libels. On other occasions, Jews were accused of a blood libel, the supposed drinking of blood of Christian children in mockery of the Christian Eucharist. The alleged procedure involved a child being tortured and executed in a procedure paralleling the supposed actions of the Jews who did likewise to Jesus. Among the known cases of alleged blood libels were:

• The story of young William of Norwich (d. 1144), the first known case of Jewish ritual murder alleged by a Christian monk.
• The case of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln (d. 1255) which alleged that the boy was murdered by Jews who crucified him.
• The story of Simon of Trent (d. 1475), in which the boy was supposedly held over a large bowl so all his blood could be collected. (Simon was canonized by Pope Sixtus V in 1588. His cult was not officially disbanded until 1965 by Pope Paul VI.)
• In the 20th century, the Beilis Trial in Russia and the Kielce pogrom represented incidents of blood libel in Europe.
• More recently blood libel stories have appeared in the state-sponsored media of a number of Arab nations, in Arab television shows, and on websites.

Restrictions

Among socio-economic factors were restrictions by the authorities, local rulers, and frequently church officials. Jews were very often forbidden to own land, preventing them from farming. Because of their exclusion from guilds, most skilled trades were also closed to them, pushing them into marginal occupations considered socially inferior, such as tax- and rent-collecting or money lending. Catholic doctrine of the time held that money lending to one's fellow Christian for interest was a sin, and thus Jews tended to dominate this business. This provided the foundation for stereotypic claims that Jews are greedy and involved in usury. Natural tensions between Jewish creditors and Christian debtors were added to social, political, religious, and economic strains. Peasants, who were often forced to pay their taxes and rents through Jewish agents, could vilify them as the people taking their earnings while remaining loyal to the lords and rulers on whose behalf the Jews worked. The number of Jewish families permitted to reside in various places was limited; they were forcibly concentrated in ghettos; and they were subjected to discriminatory taxes on entering cities or districts other than their own.

The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 C.E. was the first to proclaim the requirement for Jews to wear clothing that distinguished them as Jews. It was sometimes a colored piece of cloth shaped as a star or other emblem, a special hat (Judenhut), or a robe.

The Crusades

French Bible illustration glorifies the slaying of Jews (with pointed hats) by Crusaders

The Crusades were a series of military campaigns sanctioned by the Papacy that took place during the 11th through 13th centuries. They began as Catholic endeavors to capture Jerusalem from the Muslims but developed into territorial wars.

Mobs accompanying the first three Crusades, anxious to spill "infidel" blood, attacked the Jewish communities in Germany, France, and England and put many Jews to death. Entire communities, like those of Treves, Speyer, Worms, Mayence, and Cologne, were massacred during the first Crusade by a mob army. The religious zeal fomented by the Crusades at times burned as fiercely against the Jews as against the Muslims, though attempts were made by bishops and the papacy to stop Jews from being attacked. Both economically and socially the Crusades were disastrous for European Jews.

Expulsions

England. To finance his war to conquer Wales, Edward I of England taxed the Jewish moneylenders. When the Jews could no longer pay, they were accused of disloyalty. Already restricted to a limited number of occupations, the Jews saw Edward abolish their "privilege" to lend money, choke their movements and activities and require them to wear a yellow patch. The heads of many Jewish households were then arrested, over 300 of them taken to the Tower of London and executed, while others were killed in their homes. The complete banishment of all Jews from the country in 1290 C.E. led to thousands killed and drowned while fleeing. Jews were banned from England for three and a half centuries, until 1655 C.E., when Oliver Cromwell reversed the policy.

France. The French crown enriched itself at Jewish expense during the 12th-14th centuries through the practice of expelling the Jews, accompanied by confiscation of their property, followed by temporary readmissions for ransom. The most notable such expulsions were: from Paris by Philip Augustus in 1182, from the entirety of France by Louis IX in 1254, by Charles IV in 1322, by Charles V in 1359, by Charles VI in 1394.

Spain. In 1492, Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile issued General Edict on the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain and thousands of Spain's substantial Sephardic Jewish population fled to the Ottoman Empire, others to the land of Israel/Palestine. Many Jews were later persecuted for secretly practicing their faith after pretending to convert to Christianity to avoid expulsion. (see also Spanish Inquisition)

Germany. In 1744, Frederick II of Prussia limited the city of Breslau (Wrocław in today's Poland) to only ten so-called "protected" Jewish families and encouraged similar practice in other Prussian cities. In 1750 he issued Revidiertes General Privilegium und Reglement vor die Judenschaft: the "protected" Jews had an alternative to "either abstain from marriage or leave Berlin" [2]. In the same year, Archduchess of Austria Maria Theresa ordered Jews out of Bohemia but soon reversed her position, on condition that Jews pay for readmission every ten years. In 1752 she introduced a law limiting each Jewish family to one son. In 1782, Joseph II abolished most of persecution practices in his Toleranzpatent, on the condition that Yiddish and Hebrew be eliminated from public records and Jewish judicial autonomy be annulled.

• Note: the above summary deals mainly with national-level policies and does not include many examples of local expulsions or the forced ghettoization of countless other European Jews.

The Modern Era

The Reformation

Luther's 1543 pamphlet On the Jews and Their Lies

Although the Reformation was a harbinger of future religious liberty and tolerance in some countries, in the short term it did little to help the majority of European Jews. Martin Luther at first hoped that the Jews would ally with him against Rome and that his preaching of the true Gospel would convert them to Christ. When this did not come to pass he turned his pen against the Jews, writing some of Christianity's most anti-semitic lines. In On the Jews and their Lies, Luther proposes the permanent oppression and/or expulsion of the Jews. He calls for the burning of synagogues, saying: "First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them." He calls Jews "nothing but thieves and robbers who daily eat no morsel and wear no thread of clothing which they have not stolen and pilfered from us by means of their accursed usury." According to British historical Paul Johnson, Luther's pamphlet "may be termed the first work of modern anti-Semitism, and a giant step forward on the road to the Holocaust."

In his final sermon shortly before his death, however, Luther reversed himself and said: "We want to treat them with Christian love and to pray for them, so that they might become converted and would receive the Lord." Still, Luther's harsh comments about the Jews are seen by many as a continuation of medieval Christian anti-Semitism.

On the positive side, it should be noted that from the Reformation emerged the European and American traditions of tolerance, pluralism, and religious freedom, without which the struggle for the human rights of Jews would certainly have remained futile.

Modern Catholicism

Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th centuries, the Catholic Church still incorporated strong anti-Semitic elements, despite increasing attempts to separate anti-Judaism — the opposition to the Jewish religion on religious grounds — and racial anti-Semitism. Pope Pius VII (1800-1823) had the walls of the Jewish Ghetto in Rome rebuilt after the Jews were released by Napoleon, and Jews were restricted to the Ghetto through the end of the papacy of Pope Pius IX (1846-1878), the last Pope to rule Rome. Pope Pius XII has been criticized for failing to act in defense of the Jews during the Hitler period. Until 1946 the Jesuits banned candidates "who are descended from the Jewish race unless it is clear that their father, grandfather, and great-grandfather have belonged to the Catholic Church."

Since Vatican II, the Catholic Church has taken a stronger stand against anti-Semitism. Paul VI, in Nostra Aetate, declared that "what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews... then alive, nor against the Jews of today." The Catholic Church, he continued, "decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone." John Paul II went further by confessing that Christianity had done wrong in its previous teachings concerning the Jews, admitting that by "blaming the Jews for the death of Jesus, certain Christian teachings had helped fuel anti-Semitism." He also stated that "no theological justification could ever be found for acts of discrimination or persecution against Jews. In fact, such acts must be held as sinful." [3]

Racial anti-Semitism

The treason conviction of Alfred Dreyfus demonstrated French anti-Semitism.

As the spirit of religious tolerance spread, racial anti-Semitism gradually superseded mere anti-Judaism. In the context of the Industrial Revolution, following the emancipation of the Jews from various repressive European laws, impoverished Jews rapidly urbanized and experienced a period of greater social mobility. Ironically this contributed further to myth of Jewish wealth and greed. The advent of racial anti-Semitism was also linked to the growing sense of nationalism in many countries. The nationalist context viewed Jews as a separate and often "alien" nation within the countries in which Jews resided, a prejudice exploited by the elites of many governments.

Symptomatic of racial Anti-Semitism was the Dreyfus affair, a major political scandal which divided France for many years during the late 19th century. It centered on the 1894 treason conviction of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army. Dreyfus was, in fact, innocent: the conviction rested on false documents, and when high-ranking officers realized this they attempted to cover up the mistakes. The Dreyfus Affair split France between the Dreyfusards (those supporting Alfred Dreyfus) and the Antidreyfusards (those against him).

Pogroms

The victims, mostly Jewish children, of a 1905 pogrom in Dnipropetrovsk.

Pogroms were a form of race riots, most common in Russia and Eastern Europe, aimed specifically at Jews and often government sponsored. Pogroms became endemic during a large-scale wave of anti-Jewish riots that swept southern Russia in 1881, after Jews were wrongly blamed for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. In the 1881 outbreak, thousands of Jewish homes were destroyed, many families reduced to extremes of poverty; women sexually assaulted, and large numbers of men, women, and children killed or injured in 166 Russian towns. The new tzar, Alexander III, blamed the Jews for the riots and issued a series of harsh restrictions on Jews. Large numbers of pogroms continued until 1884, with at least tacit inactivity by the authorities. An even bloodier wave of pogroms broke out in 1903-1906, leaving an estimated 2,000 Jews dead, and many more wounded. A final large wave of 887 pogroms in Russia and Ukraine occurred during the Russian Revolution of 1917, in which 70,000-250,000 civilian Jews were killed by riots led by various sides.

During the early to mid-1900s, pogroms also occurred in Poland, other East European territories, Argentina, and the Arab world. Extremely deadly pogroms also occurred during World War II beside the Nazi Holocaust itself, including the Romanian Iaşi pogrom in which 14,000 Jews were killed, and the Jedwabne massacre in Poland which killed between 380 and 1,600 Jews. The last mass pogrom in Europe was the post-war Kielce pogrom of 1946.

Anti-Jewish legislation

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 used a pseudo-scientific basis for racial discrimination against Jews. People with four German grandparents (white circles) were of "German blood," while people were classified as Jews if they descended from three or more Jewish grandparents (black circles in top row right). One or two Jewish grandparents made someone "mixed blood." Since the racial differences between Jews and Germans are small, the Nazis used the religious observance of a person's grandparents to determine their "race." (1935 Chart from Nazi Germany used to explain the Nuremberg Laws)

Anti-Semitism was officially adopted by the German Conservative Party at the Tivoli Congress in 1892. Official anti-Semitic legislation was enacted in various countries, especially in Imperial Russia in the 19th century and in Nazi Germany and its Central European allies in the 1930s. These laws were passed against Jews as a group, regardless of their religious affiliation - in some cases, such as Nazi Germany, having a Jewish grandparent was enough to qualify someone as Jewish.

In Germany, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 prevented marriage between any Jew and non-Jew, and made it that all Jews, even quarter- and half-Jews, were no longer citizens of their own country (their official title became "subject of the state"). This meant that they had no basic citizens' rights, e.g., to vote. In 1936, German Jews were banned from all professional jobs, effectively preventing them having any influence in education, politics, higher education and industry. On 15 November of 1938, Jewish children were banned from going to normal schools. By April 1939, nearly all Jewish companies had either collapsed under financial pressure and declining profits, or had been persuaded to sell out to the Nazi government. Similar laws existed in Hungary, Romania, and Austria.

The Holocaust

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Der Stürmer: "Satan". The caption reads: "The Jews are our misfortune."

Racial anti-Semitism reached its most horrific manifestation in the Holocaust during World War II, in which about six million European Jews, 1.5 million of them children, were systematically murdered. A virulent anti-Semitism was a central part of Hitler's ideology from the beginning, and hatred of Jews provided both a distraction from other problems and fuel for a totalitarian engine that powered Nazi Germany.

The Nazi anti-Semitic program quickly expanded beyond mere hate speech and the hooliganism of brown-shirt gangs. Starting in 1933, repressive laws were passed against Jews, culminating in the Nuremberg Laws (see above). Sporadic violence against the Jews became widespread with the Kristallnacht riots of November 9, 1938, which targeted Jewish homes, businesses and places of worship, killing hundreds across Germany and Austria.

During the war, Jews were expelled from Germany and sent to concentration camps. Mass murders of Jews occurred in several Eastern European nations as the Nazis took control. The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust were not German Jews, but natives of Eastern Europe. When simply shooting Jews and burying them in mass graves proved inefficient, larger concentration camps were established, complete with gas chambers and crematoria capable of disposing of thousands of human lives per day. Jews and other "inferior" people were rounded up from throughout Nazi-controlled Europe and shipped to the death camps in cattle cars, where a few survived as slave laborers but the majority were put to death.

(For a detailed discussion of the Holocaust and Hitler's "final solution" please see the related articles listed below for details.)

New anti-Semitism

In recent years some scholars of history, psychology, religion, and representatives of Jewish groups, have noted what they describe as the new anti-Semitism, which is associated with the Left, rather than the Right, and which uses the language of anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel to attack the Jews more broadly. Anti-Zionist propaganda in the Middle East frequently adopts the terminology and symbols of the Holocaust to demonize Israel and its leaders. At the same time, Holocaust denial and Holocaust minimization efforts have found increasingly overt acceptance as sanctioned historical discourse in a number of Middle Eastern countries.

According to the 2005 U.S. State Department Report on Global Anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism in Europe has also increased significantly in recent years. Beginning in 2000, verbal attacks directed against Jews increased while incidents of vandalism (e.g. graffiti, fire bombings of Jewish schools, desecration of synagogues and cemeteries) surged. Physical assaults including beatings, stabbings and other violence against Jews in Europe increased markedly, in a number of cases resulting in serious injury and even death.

The European Commission on Racism and Intolerance formally defined some of the ways in which anti-Zionism may cross the line into anti-Semitism. "Examples of the ways in which anti-Semitism manifests itself with regard to the State of Israel taking into account the overall context could include:

• denying the Jewish people right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor;
• applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation;
• using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism (e.g. claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel, to characterize Israel or Israelis); and
• holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the State of Israel." [4]

Britain's chief rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, has warned that what he called a "tsunami of anti-Semitism" is spreading globally. In an interview with BBC's Radio Four, Sacks said that anti-Semitism was on the rise in Europe. He reported that a number of his rabbinical colleagues had been assaulted, synagogues desecrated, and Jewish schools burned to the ground in France. He also said that: "People are attempting to silence and even ban Jewish societies on campuses on the grounds that Jews must support the state of Israel."

While some of these attacks come for neo-Nazi and "skinhead" groups, according to The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, most of the current anti-Semitism comes from militant Islamist and Muslim factions.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Bodansky, Yossef. Islamic Anti-Semitism as a Political Instrument, Freeman Center For Strategic Studies, 1999.
• Carr, Steven Alan. Hollywood and anti-Semitism: A cultural history up to World War II, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Cohn, Norman. Warrant for Genocide, Eyre & Spottiswoode 1967; Serif, 1996.
• Dubnow, Simon. History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Ktav Pub. House, 1975. ISBN: 0870682172

• Evans, Craig A. and Donald A. Hagner (eds.). Anti-Semitism and Early Christianity: Issues of Polemic and Faith, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.
• Freudmann, Lillian C. Antisemitism in the New Testament, University Press of America, 1994.
• Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. Holmes & Meier, 1985. 3 volumes.
• Lipstadt, Deborah. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Penguin, 1994.
• Prager, Dennis, Telushkin, Joseph. Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism. Touchstone (reprint), 1985.
• Selzer, Michael (ed). "Kike!" : A documentary history of anti-Semitism in America, New York 1972.

Further reading

• Why the Jews? A perspective on causes of anti-Semitism
• Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism (with up to date calendar of anti-Semitism today)
• Annotated bibliography of anti-Semitism hosted by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA)
• Anti-Semitism and responses
• The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary anti-Semitism and Racism hosted by the Tel Aviv University - (includes an annual report)
• Jews, the End of the Vertical Alliance, and Contemporary Antisemitism
• An Israeli point of view on antisemitism, by Steve Plaut
• The Anti-Semitic Disease - an analysis of Anti-Semitism by Paul Johnson in Commentary Magazine
• Council of Europe, ECRI Country-by-Country Reports
• Anti-Defamation League's report on International Anti-Semitism
• The Middle East Media Research Institute - documents antisemitism in Middle-Eastern media.
• Judeophobia: A short course on the history of anti-Semitism at [5] Zionism and Israel Information Center.
• Arab and Muslim Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism A mini study with extensive links and resources.
• If Not Together, How?: Research by April Rosenblum to develop a working definition of antisemitism, and related teaching tools about antisemitism, for activists.
• Rise of Anti-Semitism in Modern Armenia and Karabakh
• The Holocaust and Armenian Case: Highlighting the Main Differences

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