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. 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.

Anti-Semitism takes several different forms:

• Religious anti-Semitism, or anti-Judaism. Before the 19th century, most anti-Semitism was primarily religious in nature, based on Christian or Islamic interactions with and interpretations of Judaism. 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 is directed at the religion itself, and so generally does not affect those of Jewish ancestry who have converted to another religion, although the case of Conversos in Spain was a notable exception.
  

  Racial anti-semitic caricature (France, 1898)

• Racial anti-Semitism. With its origins in the anthropological ideas of race that started during the Enlightenment, racial anti-Semitism became the dominant form of anti-Semitism from the late 19th century through today. Racial anti-Semitism replaced the hatred of Judaism as a religion with the idea that the Jews themselves were a racially distinct group, regardless of their religious practice, and that they were inferior or 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.

• New anti-Semitism. 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.

Etymology and usage

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Marr's The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism

Technically, "anti-semitism" refers not only to Jews but all semitic peoples, including the Arabs. However, historically, it refers 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 combatting 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 anti-Semitism has been the subject of debate among scholars. Egyptian prejudices against Jews are evidenced in the writings of the Egyptian priest Manetho. These views seem to have spread in the Greek Empire, where Jews faced hostility in the Diaspora. Jews sometimes violently resisted Greek attempts to force them to do obeisence to Greek emperors such as Antiochus Epiphanes, gaining them a reputation as arrogant and disloyal to imperial authority. 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.

Anti-Judaism in the New Testament

The animosity between Christians and Jews began as argument between Jews who accepted Jesus as the messiah and other Jews who denied his messiahship. The early Jewish followers of Jesus continued to practice circumcision and observe dietary laws(Acts 11:3; 15:1ff; 16:3). But this intra-Jewish debate over the Jewish Jesus soon dove-tailed with Roman anti-Judaism and created a tradition of Christian anti-semitism that lasted for two mellennia.

Most of the New Testament was written by Jews who became followers of Jesus. However, because of the increasingly bitter feelings between those traditional Jews and the communities that accepted Jesus as the messiah, a number of passages in the New Testament display harsh attitudes toward "the Jews." Such passages have frequently been used for anti-Semitic purposes, for example:

Jesus speaking to a group of Pharisees: "I know that you are descendants of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me, because my word finds no place in you. I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have heard from your father. They answered him, "Abraham is our father." Jesus said to them, "If you were Abraham's children, you would do what Abraham did. ... You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires... If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? He who is of God hears the words of God; the reason why you do not hear them is you are not of God." (John 8:37-39, 44-47, RSV)

Stephen speaking before a synagogue council just before his execution: "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, you who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it." (Acts 7:51-53, RSV)

Some biblical scholars hold that verses like these reflect the Jewish-Christian tensions that were emerging in the late first or early second century, and do not originate with Jesus. Others point out that Jesus and Stephen are presented as Jews speaking to other Jews, and that their use of broad accusation against Israel is borrowed from Moses and the later Jewish prophets (e.g. Deut 9:13-14; 31:27-29; 32:5, 20-21; 2 Kings 17:13-14; Is 1:4; Hos 1:9; 10:9). Today, nearly all Christian denominations de-emphasize verses such as these, and reject their use and misuse by anti-Semites. The fact remains, however, that once Christianity gained power in the Roman Empire, such verses became the basis for persecution of Jews.

The New Testament holds that Jesus' disciple Judas Iscariot (Mark 14:43-46), the Roman governor Pontius Pilate along with Roman forces (John 19:11; Acts 4:27) and Jewish leaders and people of Jerusalem were (to varying degrees) responsible for the death of Jesus (Acts 13:27); Diaspora Jews are not blamed for events which were clearly outside their control.

After Jesus' death, the New Testament portrays the Jewish religious authorities in Jerusalem as hostile to Jesus' followers, and as occasionally using force against them. Stephen is executed by stoning (Acts 7:58). Before his conversion, Saul puts followers of Jesus in prison (Acts 8:3; Galatians 1:13-14; 1 Timothy 1:13). After his conversion, Saul is whipped at various times by Jewish authorities (2 Corinthians 11:24), and is accused by Jewish authorities before Roman courts (e.g., Acts 25:6-7). However, opposition from Gentiles is also cited repeatedly (2 Corinthians 11:26; Acts 16:19ff; 19:23ff).

Christian Anti-Semitism in the Roman Empire

A number of early and influential Church works display strongly anti-Jewish attitdues. The apocryphal Letter of Barnabas portrays the Jews as worldly and material, while the Church is portrayed as heavenly and spiritual. After the Jewish revolt of 70 C.E. and the expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem, Christians often portrayed the suffering of the Jews and justified by their rejection of Jesus. Scholars believe that some of these attitudes are visible in New Testament writings, including the Gospels, where Jesus is portrayed as predicting the destruction of Temple of Jerusalem. Later Christian writers developed this theme even further. In his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, Justin Martyrtypifies the attitude of Christian anti-Judaism in saying:

• 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, for you have slain the Just One, and His prophets before Him.' (Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 16)

In the second century, some Christians went so far as to declare that the God of the Jews was a differing being from the Heavenly Father described by Jesus. The popular preacher Marcion developed a strong following for this belief, even arguing that the Jewish spcriptures be rejected by Christians. His views, however, were eventually rejected.

During the First Council of Nicaea in AD 325, 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.

Bishop Ambrose of Milan went so far as to contron this same Theodosius for being too supported of the Jews when he ordered the rebuilding of a Jewish synogogue at church expense after a Christian mob had burned it. Ambrose argued that it was inappropriate for a Christian emperor to use his power in this way, saying sarastically: "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 popular orator Saint John Chrysostom, Bishop of Antioch, were directed agains the Jews and against Christians associating with them:

• "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)

Prejudice against Jews in the Roman Empire was formalized in 438, when the Code of Theodosius II established Roman Catholic Christianity as the only legal religion in the Roman Empire. AMBROSe--- The Justinian Code a century later stripped Jews of many of their rights, and Church councils throughout the sixth and seventh century, including the Council of Orleans, further enforced anti-Jewish provisions. These restrictions began as early as 305, when, in Elvira, (now Granada), a Spanish town in Andalusia, 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. Jews were forbidden to extend hospitality to Catholics. In 589, 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) 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

1239. In the course of a disputation, Pope Gregory IX ordered the Talmud burned (note a non-heretical book floating above the fire). A 15th century painting by Pedro Berruguete.

In the Middle Ages a main justification of prejudice against Jews in Europe was religious.

Deicide. Though not part of offcial 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 a root cause for various other biases, suspicions, and accustations described below. Jews were considered arrogant, greedy, and self-righteous in their status as "chosen people." Ironically these prejudices led to a vicious cycle of policies with isolated the Jews and made them appear all the more alien to Christian majorities.

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 exlusion 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 moneylending. Catholic doctrine of the time held that moneylending to one's fellow Christian for interest was a sin, and thus Jews tended to dominate this business. This provided support for stereotypic claims that Jews are insolent, greedy, 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 villify 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.

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 picture at left).

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 puberty being, tortured, and executed in a proceedure paralleling the supposed actions of the Jews who did likewise to Jesus. In the end, the child would be crowned with thorns and tied or nailed to a wooden cross. The cross would be raised, and the blood dripping from the child's wounds would be caught in bowls or glasses. Finally, the child would be killed with a thrust through the heart from a spear, sword, or dagger. Its dead body would be removed from the cross and concealed or disposed of, but in some instances rituals of black magic would be performed on it. This method, with some variations, can be found in virtually all the alleged Christian descriptions of ritual murder by Jews. Among the documented cases of 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 after the boy was dead, his body was removed from the cross and laid on a table.
• The story of Simon of Trent (d. 1475), which emphasized how the boy was 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.

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Jews wear yellow badges in this sketch from a medieval English manuscript.

Badges and Clothing. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 was the first to proclaim the requirement for Jews to wear clothing that distinguished them as Jews. It could be a colored piece of cloth shpaed as a star or other emblem, a special hat (Judenhut), or a robe. Jews sought to evade the badges by paying what amounted to bribes in the form of temporary "exemptions" to kings, which were revoked and re-paid whenever the king needed to raise funds.

The Crusades

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

The Crusades were a series of several 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 from England, France, Spain, and Germany

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 were forced to wear a yellow patch. The heads of Jewish households were then arrested, over 300 of them taken to the Tower of London and executed, while others killed in their homes. The complete banishment of all Jews from the country in 1290 led to thousands killed and drowned while fleeing. Jews were banned from England for three and a half centuries, until 1655, when Oliver Cromwell reversed the policy.

France. The practice of expelling the Jews accompanied by confiscation of their property, followed by temporary readmissions for ransom, was utilized to enrich the French crown during 12th-14th centuries. 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 Chrisianity to avoid expulsion. (see also Spanish Inquisition)

Germany. In 1744, Frederick II of Prussia limited Breslau 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" (quoting Simon Dubnow). 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 the 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 is annulled.

• Note: the above summary deals only with national-level expulsions and only include local expulsions, pogroms, and forced ghettoization of countless other European Jews.

The Modern Era

Anti-Judaism and 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 the short term it did little to help the 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 goes so far as to provide a detailed recommendation for a pogrom against the Jews and calls for their permanent oppression and/or expulsion. He says synagogues should be burned and declares that Jews should have their tongues cut out for preaching against the Trinity. He calls them "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 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. See also Martin Luther and Antisemitism

Modern Catholic Anti-Semitism

Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, 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. 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."

Racial anti-Semitism

Racial anti-Semitism replaced the hatred of Judaism with the hatred of Jews as a group. In the context of the Industrial Revolution, following the emancipation of the Jews, Jews rapidly urbanized and experienced a period of greater social mobility. With the decreasing role of religion in public life tempering religious anti-Semitism, a combination of growing nationalism, the rise of eugenics, and resentment at the socio-economic success of the Jews led to the newer, and more virulent, racist anti-Semitism.

Nationalism and anti-Semitism

Racial anti-Semitism was preceded, especially in Germany, by anti-Semitism arising from Romantic nationalism. As racial theories developed, especially from the mid nineteenth-century onwards, these nationalist ideas were subsumed within them. But their origins were quite distinct from racialism. On the one hand they derived from an exclusivist interpretation of the 'Volk' ideas of Herder. This led to anti-Semitic writing and journalism in the second quarter of the 19th century of which Richard Wagner's Das Judentum in der Musik (Jewry in Music) is perhaps the most notorious example. On the other hand, radical socialists such as Karl Marx identified Jews as being both victims and enforced perpetrators of the Capitalist system - e.g. in his article 'On the Jewish Question'. From sources such as these, and encouraged by the broad acceptance of racial theories as the century continued, anti-Semitism entered the vocabularies and policies of both the right and the left in political thought.

The rise of racial anti-Semitism

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Image of Jesus as an icon of Nordic "racial purity" from the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer; he is glaring at unacceptably "racially alien" Jewish converts to Christianity.

Modern European anti-Semitism has its origin in 19th century pseudo-scientific theories that the Jewish people are a sub-group of Semitic peoples; Semitic people were thought by many Europeans to be entirely different from the Aryan, or Indo-European, populations, and that they can never be amalgamated with them. In this view, Jews are not opposed on account of their religion, but on account of their supposed hereditary or genetic racial characteristics: greed, a special aptitude for money-making, aversion to hard work, clannishness and obtrusiveness, lack of social tact, low cunning, and especially lack of patriotism.

While enlightened European intellectual society of that period viewed prejudice against people on account of their religion to be declassé and a sign of ignorance, because of this supposed 'scientific' connection to genetics they felt fully justified in prejudice based on nationality or 'race'. In order to differentiate between the two practices, the term anti-Semitism was developed to refer to this 'acceptable' bias against Jews as a nationality, as distinct from the 'undesirable' prejudice against Judaism as a religion. Concurrently with this usage, some authors in Germany began to use the term 'Palestinians' when referring to Jews as a people, rather than as a religious group.

As further proof of its pseudo-scientific nature, it is questionable whether Jews in general looked significantly different from the populations conducting "racial" anti-Semitism. This was especially true in places like Germany, France and Austria where the Jewish population tended to be more secular (or at least less Orthodox) than that of Eastern Europe, and did not wear clothing (such as a yarmulke) that would particularly distinguish their appearance from the non-Jewish population. Many anthropologists of the time such as Franz Boas tried to use complex physical measurements like the cephalic index and visual surveys of hair/eye color and skin tone of Jewish vs. non-Jewish European populations to prove that the notion of a separate "Jewish race" was a myth. The 19th and early 20th century view of race should be distinguished from the efforts of modern population genetics to trace the ancestry of various Jewish groups, see Y-chromosomal Aaron.

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.

Elites and the use of anti-Semitism

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1889 Paris, France elections poster for self-described "candidat antisémite" Adolphe Willette: "The Jews are a different race, hostile to our own... Judaism, there is the enemy!"

Many analysts of modern anti-Semitism have pointed out that its essence is scapegoating: features of modernity felt by some group to be undesirable (e.g. materialism, the power of money, economic fluctuations, war, secularism, socialism, Communism, movements for racial equality, social welfare policies, etc.) are believed to be caused by the machinations of a conspiratorial people whose full loyalties are not to the national group. Traditionalists anguished at the supposedly decadent or defective nature of the modern world have sometimes been inclined to embrace such views. Indeed, it is a matter of historical record that many of the conservative members of the WASP establishment of the United States as well as other comparable Western elites (e.g. the British Foreign Office) have harbored such attitudes, and in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, some xenophobic anti-Semites have imagined world Communism to be a Jewish conspiracy.

The modern form of anti-Semitism is identified in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica as a conspiracy theory serving the self-understanding of the European aristocracy, whose social power waned with the rise of bourgeois society. The Jews of Europe, then recently emancipated, were relatively literate, entrepreneurial and unentangled in aristocratic patronage systems, and were therefore disproportionately represented in the ascendant bourgeois class. As the aristocracy (and its hangers-on) lost out to this new center of power in society, they found their scapegoat - exemplified in the work of Arthur de Gobineau. That the Jews were singled out to embody the 'problem' was, by this theory, no more than a symptom of the nobility's own prejudices concerning the importance of breeding (on which its own legitimacy was founded).

Dreyfus affair

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

The Dreyfus affair was a 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 writer Émile Zola exposed the affair to the general public in the literary newspaper L'Aurore (The Dawn) in a famous open letter to the Président de la République Félix Faure, titled J'accuse ! (I Accuse!) on January 13, 1898.

The Dreyfus Affair split France between the Dreyfusards (those supporting Alfred Dreyfus) and the Antidreyfusards (those against him). The quarrel was especially violent since it involved many issues then highly controversial in a heated political climate.

Dreyfus was pardoned in 1899, readmitted into the army, and made a knight in the Legion of Honour. An Austrian Jewish journalist named Theodor Herzl was assigned to report on the trial and its aftermath. The injustice of the trial and the anti-Semitic passions it aroused in France and elsewhere turned him into a determined and leading Zionist; ultimately turning the movement into an international one. Also see Alfred Dreyfus and Dreyfus affair.

Pogroms

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

Pogroms were a form of race riots, most commonly 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 between 70,000 to 250,000 civilian Jews were killed by riots led by various sides.

During the early to mid-1900s, pogroms also occurred in Poland, Argentina, and throughout the Arab world. Extremely deadly pogroms also occurred during World War II, 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, on the instigation of Dr. Klasing but in the teeth of opposition led by the moderate Werner von Blumenthal.

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, for example, 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, 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. This further reduced their rights as human beings; they were in many ways officially separated from the German populace. Similar laws existed in Hungary, Romania, and Austria.

Even when anti-Semitism was not an official state policy, governments in the early to middle parts of the 20th century often adopted more subtle measures aimed at Jews. For example, the Evian Conference of 1938 delegates from thirty-two countries neither condemned Hitler's treatment of the Jews nor allowed more Jewish refugees to flee to the West.

The Holocaust and Holocaust denial

Racial anti-Semitism reached its most horrific manifestation in the Holocaust during World War II, in which about 6 million European Jews, 1.5 million of them children, were systematically murdered.

Holocaust deniers often claim that "the Jews" or "Zionist conspiracy" are responsible for the exaggeration or wholesale fabrication of the events of the Holocaust. Critics of such revisionism point to an overwhelming amount of physical and historical evidence that supports the mainstream historical view of the Holocaust. Almost all academics agree that there is no evidence for any such conspiracy.

Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories

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2005 Syrian edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion includes a "historical and contemporary investigative study" that repeats the blood libel and other anti-Semitic accusations, and argues that the Torah and Talmud encourage Jews "to commit treason and to conspire, dominate, be arrogant and exploit other countries".

The rise of views of the Jews as a malevolent "race" generated anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that the Jews, as a group, were plotting to control or otherwise influence the world. From the early infamous Russian literary hoax, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published by the Tsar's secret police, a key element of anti-Semitic thought has been that Jews influence or control the world.

In a recent incarnation, extremist groups, such as Neo-Nazi parties and Islamist groups, claim that the aim of Zionism is global domination; they call this the Zionist conspiracy and use it to support anti-Semitism. This position is associated with fascism and Nazism, though it is becoming a tendency within parts of the left as well.

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-Semitism and anti-Zionism

Anti-Zionism is a term that has been used to describe several very different political and religious points of view (both historically and in current debates) all expressing some form of opposition to Zionism. A large variety of commentators - politicians, journalists, academics and others - believe that criticisms of Israel and Zionism are often disproportionate in degree and unique in kind, and attribute this to anti-Semitism. In turn, critics of this view believe that associating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is intended to stifle debate, deflect attention from valid criticism, and taint anyone opposed to Israeli actions and policies. (See Anti-Zionism.)

European Commission definition

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."

Anti-Semitism and the Muslim world

Anti-Semitism within Islam is discussed in the article on Islam and anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism in the Arab World is discussed in the article on Arabs and anti-Semitism

The Qur'an, Islam's holy book, accuses the Jews of corrupting the Hebrew Bible. Muslims refer to Jews and Christians as a "People of the book"; Islamic law demands that when under Muslim rule they should be treated as dhimmis - from the Arab term ahl adh-dhimma. The writer Bat Ye'or introduced the modern word Dhimmitude as a generic indication of this Islamic attitude. Dhimmis were granted protection of life (including against other Muslim states), the right to residence, worship, and work or trade, and were exempted from military service, and Muslim religious duties, personal law and tax. They were obligated to pay other taxes (jizyah and land tax), and subject to various other restrictions regarding the contradiction of Islam, the Qur'an or Muhammad, proselytizing, and at times a number of other restrictions on dress, riding horses or camels, carrying arms, holding public office, building or repairing places of worship, mourning loudly, wearing shoes outside a Jewish ghetto, etc.

Anti-Semitism in the Muslim world increased in the twentieth century, as anti-Semitic motives and blood libels were imported from Europe and as resentment against Zionist efforts in British Mandate of Palestine spread. While anti-Semitism has certainly been heightened by the Arab-Israeli conflict, there were an increasing number of pogroms against Jews prior to the foundation of Israel, including Nazi-inspired pogroms in Algeria in the 1930s, and massive attacks on the Jews in Iraq and Libya in the 1940s (see Farhud). George Gruen attributes the increased animosity towards Jews in the Arab world to several factors including: The breakdown of the Ottoman Empire and traditional Islamic society; domination by Western colonial powers under which Jews gained a disproportionatly large role in the commercial, professional, and administrative life of the region; the rise of Arab nationalism, whose proponents sought the wealth and positions of local Jews through government channels; resentment over Jewish nationalism and the Zionist movement; and the readiness of unpopular regimes to scapegoat local Jews for political purposes.

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.

Anti-Semitism and specific countries

United States

File:KKK holocaust a zionist hoax.jpg

The KKK: Nazi salute and Holocaust denial

Jews were often condemned by populist politicians alternately for their left-wing politics, or their perceived wealth, at the turn of the century. Anti-semitism grew in the years leading up to America's entry into World War II, Father Charles Coughlin, an anti-Semitic radio preacher, as well as many other prominent public figures, condemned "the Jews," and Henry Ford reprinted The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his newspaper.

In 1939 a Roper poll found that only thirty-nine percent of Americans felt that Jews should be treated like other people. Fifty-three percent believed that "Jews are different and should be restricted" and ten percent believed that Jews should be deported. It has been estimated that 190 000 - 200 000 Jews could have been saved during the Second World War had it not been for bureaucratic obstacles to immigration deliberately created by Breckinridge Long and others.

In a speech at an America First rally on September 11, 1941 in Des Moines, Iowa entitled "Who Are the War Agitators?", Charles Lindbergh claimed that three groups had been "pressing this country toward war" - the Roosevelt Administration, the British, and the Jews - and complained about what he insisted was the Jews' "large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government."

Unofficial anti-Semitism was also widespread in the first half of the century. For example, to limit the growing number of Jewish students between 1919-1950s a number of private liberal arts universities and medical and dental schools employed Numerus clausus. These included Harvard University, Columbia University, Cornell University, and Boston University. In 1925 Yale University, which already had such admissions preferences as "character", "solidity", and "physical characteristics" added a program of legacy preference admission spots for children of Yale alumni, in an explicit attempt to put the brakes on the rising percentage of Jews in the student body. This was soon copied by other Ivy League and other schools, and admissions of Jews were kept down to 10% through the 1950s. Such policies were for the most part discarded during the early 1960s.

American anti-Semitism underwent a modest revival in the late 20th century. The Nation of Islam under Louis Farrakhan claimed that Jews were responsible for slavery, economic exploitation of black labor, selling alcohol and drugs in their communities, and unfair domination of the economy. Jesse Jackson issued his infamous "Hymietown" remarks during the 1984 Presidential primary campaign. According to ADL surveys begun in 1964, African-Americans are "significantly more likely" than white Americans to hold anti-Semitic beliefs, although there is a strong correlation between education level and the rejection of anti-Semitic stereotypes.

Europe

The summary of a 2004 poll by the Pew Global Attitudes Project noted that "Despite concerns about rising anti-Semitism in Europe, there are no indications that anti-Jewish sentiment has increased over the past decade. Favorable ratings of Jews are actually higher now in France, Germany and Russia than they were in 1991. Nonetheless, Jews are better liked in the U.S. than in Germany and Russia."

However, according to 2005 survey results by the ADL, anti-Semitic attitudes remain common in Europe. Over 30% of those surveyed indicated that Jews have too much power in business, with responses ranging from lows of 11% in Denmark and 14% in England to highs of 66% in Hungary, and over 40% in Poland and Spain. The results of religious anti-Semitism also linger and over 20% of European respondents agreed that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus, with France having the lowest percentage at 13% and Poland having the highest number of those agreeing, at 39%.

The Vienna-based European Union Monitoring Center (EUMC), for 2002 and 2003, identified France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and The Netherlands as EU member countries with notable increases in incidents. As these nations keep reliable and comprehensive statistics on anti-Semitic acts, and are engaged in combating anti-Semitism, their data was readily available to the EUMC. Governments and leading public figures condemned the violence, passed new legislation, and mounted positive law enforcement and educational efforts.

In Western Europe, traditional far-right groups still account for a significant proportion of the attacks against Jews and Jewish properties; disadvantaged and disaffected Muslim youths increasingly were responsible for most of the other incidents. In Eastern Europe, with a much smaller Muslim population, skinheads and others members of the radical political fringe were responsible for most anti-Semitic incidents. Anti-Semitism remained a serious problem in Russia and Belarus, and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, with most incidents carried out by ultra-nationalist and other far-right elements. The stereotype of Jews as manipulators of the global economy continues to provide fertile ground for anti-Semitic aggression.

France

File:FrenchCemetery103004-01.jpg

Defacement of a Jewish cemetery in France, 2004.

Anti-semitism was particularly virulent in Vichy France during WWII (1939 - 1945). The Vichy government openly collaborated with the Nazi occupiers to identify Jews for deportation and transportation to the death camps.

Today, despite a steady trend of decreasing antisemitism among the population, acts of antisemitism are a serious cause for concern, as is tension between the Jewish and Muslim populations of France, both the largest in Europe. According to the National Advisory Committee on human rights, antisemitic acts account for a majority (72% of all in 2003) of racist acts in France. (See also the official statement of the French ministry of interior about antisemitic acts.

In 2005 the Israeli newspaper the Maariv found that 82% of French people questioned had favourable attitudes towards Jews, the second highest percentage of the countries questioned. The Netherlands was highest at 85%.

Poland

see History of the Jews in Poland

In 1264, King Boleslaus V of Poland legislated a charter for Jewish residence and protection, hoping that Jewish settlement would contribute to the development of the Polish economy. This charter, which encouraged money-lending, was a slight variation of the 1244 charter granted by the King of Austria to the Jews. By the sixteenth century, Poland had become the center of European Jewry and the most tolerant of all European countries regarding the matters of faith, although there were still occasionally violent anti-Semitic incidents.

At the onset of the seventeenth century, however, the tolerance began to give way to increased anti-Semitism. Elected to the Polish throne King Sigismund III of the Swedish House of Vasa, a strong supporter of the counter-reformation, began to undermine the principles of the Warsaw Confederation and the religious tolerance in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, revoking and limiting privileges of all non-Catholic faiths. In 1628 he banned publication of Hebrew books, including the Talmud. Acclaimed twentieth century historian Simon Dubnow, in his magnum opus History of the Jews in Poland and Russia, detailed:

"At the end of the 16th century and thereafter, not one year passed without a blood libel trial against Jews in Poland, trials which always ended with the execution of Jewish victims in a heinous manner..." (ibid., volume 6, chapter 4).

In the 1650s the Swedish invasion of the Commonwealth (The Deluge) and the Chmielnicki Uprising of the Cossacks resulted in vast depopulation of the Commonwealth, as over 30% of the ~10 million population has perished or emigrated. In the related 1648-55 pogroms led by the Ukrainian Haidamaks uprising against Polish nobility (szlachta), during which approximately 100,000 Jews were slaughtered, Polish and Ruthenian peasants often participated in killing Jews (The Jews in Poland, Ken Spiro, 2001). The besieged szlachta, who were also decimated in the territories where the uprising happened, typically abandoned the loyal peasantry, townsfolk, and the Jews renting their land, in violation of "rental" contracts.

In the aftermath of the Deluge and Chmielnicki Uprising, many Jews fled to the less turbulent Netherlands, which had granted the Jews a protective charter in 1619. From then until the Nazi deportations in 1942, the Netherlands remained a remarkably tolerant haven for Jews in Europe, excedeeing the tolerance extant in all other European countries at the time, and becoming one of the few Jewish havens until nineteenth century social and political reforms throughout much of Europe. Many Jews also fled to England, open to Jews since the mid-seventeenth century, in which Jews were fundamentally ignored and not typically persecuted. Historian Berel Wein notes:

"In a reversal of roles that is common in Jewish history, the victorious Poles now vented their wrath upon the hapless Jews of the area, accusing them of collaborating with the Cossack invader!... The Jews, reeling from almost five years of constant hell, abandoned their Polish communities and institutions..." (Triumph of Survival, 1990).

Throughout the sixteenth to eighteenth century, many of the szlachta mistreated peasantry, townsfolk and Jews. Threat of mob violence was a specter over the Jewish communities in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the time. On one occasion in 1696, a mob threatened to massacre the Jewish community of Posin, Vitebsk. The mob accused the Jews of murdering a Pole. At the last moment, a peasant woman emerged with the victim's clothes and confessed to the murder. One notable example of actualized riots against Polish Jews is the rioting of 1716, during which many Jews lost their lives. Later, in 1723, the Bishop of Gdańsk instigated the massacre of hundreds of Jews.

The legendary Walentyn Potocki, a Polish nobleman who converted to Judaism, is said to have been burned by auto da fe on May 24, 1749. In 1757, at the instigation of Jacob Frank and his followers, the Bishop of Kamianets-Podilskyi forced the Jewish rabbis to participate in a religious dispute with the quasi-Christian Frankists. Among the other charges, the Frankists claimed that the Talmud was full of heresy against Catholicism. The Catholic judges determined that the Frankists had won the debate, whereupon the Bishop levied heavy fines against the Jewish community and confiscated and burned all Jewish Talmuds. Polish anti-Semitism during the seventeenth and eighteenth century was summed up by Issac de Pinto as follows: "Polish Jews... who are deprived of all the privileges of society... who are despised and reviled on all sides, who are often persecuted, always insulted.... That contempt which is heaped on them chokes up all the seeds of virtue and honour...." (Issac de Pinto, philosopher and economist, in a 1762 letter to Voltaire).

On the other hand, it should be noted that despite the mentioned incidents, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a relative haven for Jews when compared to the period of the partitions of Poland and the PLC's destruction in 1795 (see Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, below).

Anti-Jewish sentiments continued to be present in Poland, even after the country regained its independence. One notable manifestation of these attitudes includes numerus clausus rules imposed, by almost all Polish universities in the 1930's. William W. Hagen in his Before the "Final Solution": Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Anti-Semitism in Interwar Germany and Poland article in Journal of Modern History (July, 1996): 1-31, details:

"In Poland, the semidictatorial government of Pilsudski and his successors, pressured by an increasingly vocal opposition on the radical and fascist right, implemented many anti-Semitic policies tending in a similar direction, while still others were on the official and semiofficial agenda when war descended in 1939.... In the 1930s the realm of official and semiofficial discrimination expanded to encompass limits on Jewish export firms... and, increasingly, on university admission itself. In 1921-22 some 25 percent of Polish university students were Jewish, but in 1938-39 their proportion had fallen to 8 percent."

While there are many examples of Polish support and help for the Jews during World War II and the Holocaust, there are also numerous examples of anti-Semitic incidents, and the Jewish population was certain of the indifference towards their fate from the Christian Poles. The Polish Institute for National Memory identified twenty-four pogroms against Jews during World War II, the largest occurring at the village of Jedwabne in 1941 (see massacre in Jedwabne).

After the end of World War II the remaining anti-Jewish sentiments were skillfully used at certain moments by communist party or individual politicians in order to achieve their assumed political goals, which pinnacled in the March 1968 events. These sentiments started to diminish only with the collapse of the communist rule in Poland in 1989, which has resulted in a re-examination of events between Jewish and Christian Poles, with a number of incidents, like the masscre at Jedwabne, being discussed openly for the first time. Violent anti-semitism in Poland in 21st century is marginal compared to elsewhere, but there are very few Jews remaining in Poland. Still, according to recent (June 7, 2005) results of research by B'nai Briths Anti-Defamation League, Poland remains among the European countries (with others being Italy, Spain and Germany) with the largest percentages of people holding anti-Semitic views.

Poland is actively trying to address concerns about anti-semitism. In 2004, the Polish government approved a National Action Program against racism, including anti-semitism. Additionally the Polish Catholic Church has widely distributed materials promoting the need for respect and cooperation with Judaism.

Germany

File:Dstsatan.jpeg

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

See main articles: History of the Jews in Germany, Holocaust

From the early Middle Ages to the 18th century, the Jews in Germany were subject to many persecutions as well as brief times of tolerance. Though the 19th century began with a series of riots and pogroms against the Jews, emancipation followed in 1848, so that, by the early 20th century, the Jews of Germany were the most integrated in Europe. The situation changed in the early 1930's with the rise of the Nazis and their explicity anti-Semitic program. Hate speech which referred to Jewish citizens as "dirty Jews" became common in anti-Semitic pamphlets and newspapers such as the Völkischer Beobachter and Der Stürmer. Additionally, blame was laid on German Jews for having caused Germany's defeat in World War I (see Dolchstosslegende).

File:Der Giftpilz - Gott des Juden - Nazi propaganda.jpg

Nazi propaganda for German children from Julius Streicher's publication Der Giftpilz (Toadstool), 1938. The caption reads: "The God of the Jew is Money. And to gain money, he will commit the greatest crimes…."

Anti-Jewish propaganda expanded rapidly. Nazi cartoons depicting "dirty Jews" frequently portrayed a dirty, physically unattractive and badly dressed "talmudic" Jew in traditional religious garments similar to those worn by Hasidic Jews. Articles attacking Jewish Germans, while concentrating on commercial and political activities of prominent Jewish individuals, also frequently attacked them based on religious dogmas, such as blood libel.

The Nazi anti-Semitic program quickly expanded beyond mere speech. Starting in 1933, repressive laws were passed against Jews, culminating in the Nuremberg Laws which removed most of the rights of citizenship from Jews, using a racial definition based on descent, rather than any religious definition of who was a Jew. Sporadic violence against the Jews became widespread with the Kristallnacht riots, which targeted Jewish homes, businesses and places of worship, killing hundreds across Germany and Austria.

The anti-Semitic agenda culminated in the genocide of the Jews of Europe, known as the Holocaust.

Russia and the Soviet Union

File:Iudaism bez prikras 63-7.gif

"Judaism Without Embellishments" by Trofim Kichko, published by the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR in 1963: "It is in the teachings of Judaism, in the Old Testament, and in the Talmud, that the Israeli militarists find inspiration for their inhuman deeds, racist theories, and expansionist designs..."

Main articles: History of the Jews in Russia and Soviet Union, Pogrom

The Pale of Settlement was the Western region of Imperial Russia to which Jews were restricted by the Tsarist Ukase of 1792. It consisted of the territories of former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, annexed with the existing numerous Jewish population, and the Crimea (which was later cut out from the Pale).

During 1881-1884, 1903-1906 and 1914-1921, waves of anti-Semitic pogroms swept Russian Jewish communities. At least some pogroms are believed to have been organized or supported by the Russian okhranka; although there is no hard evidence for this, the Russian police and army generally displayed indifference to the pogroms (e.g. during the three-day First Kishinev pogrom of 1903), as well as to anti-Jewish articles in newspapers which often instigated the pogroms.

During this period the May Laws policy was also put into effect, banning Jews from rural areas and towns, and placing strict quotas on the number of Jews allowed into higher education and many professions. The combination of the repressive legislation and pogroms propelled mass Jewish emigration, and by 1920 more than two million Russian Jews had emigrated, most to the United States while some made aliya to the Land of Israel.

One of the most infamous anti-Semitic tractates was the Russian okhranka literary hoax, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, created in order to blame the Jews for Russia's problems during the period of revolutionary activity.

Even though many Old Bolsheviks were ethnically Jewish, they sought to uproot Judaism and Zionism and established the Yevsektsiya to achieve this goal. By the end of the 1940s the Communist leadership of the former USSR had liquidated almost all Jewish organizations, including Yevsektsiya.

The anti-Semitic campaign of 1948-1953 against so-called "rootless cosmopolitans," destruction of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the fabrication of the "Doctors' plot," the rise of "Zionology" and subsequent activities of official organizations such as the Anti-Zionist committee of the Soviet public were officially carried out under the banner of "anti-Zionism," but the use of this term could not obscure the anti-Semitic content of these campaigns, and by the mid-1950s the state persecution of Soviet Jews emerged as a major human rights issue in the West and domestically. See also: Jackson-Vanik amendment, Refusenik, Pamyat.

Today, anti-Semitic pronouncements, speeches and articles are common in Russia, and there are a large number of anti-Semitic neo-Nazi groups in the republics of the former Soviet Union, leading Pravda to declare in 2002 that "Anti-semitism is booming in Russia." Over the past few years there have also been bombs attached to anti-Semitic signs, apparently aimed at Jews, and other violent incidents, including stabbings, have been recorded.

Though the government of Vladimir Putin takes an official stand against anti-semitism, some political parties and groups are explicitly anti-Semitic, in spite of a Russian law (Art. 282) against fomenting racial, ethnic or religious hatred. In 2005, a group of 15 Duma members demanded that Judaism and Jewish organizations be banned from Russia. In June, 500 prominent Russians, including some 20 members of the nationalist Rodina party, demanded that the state prosecutor investigate ancient Jewish texts as "anti-Russian" and ban Judaism — the investigation was actually launched, but halted amid international outcry.

Asia

Japan

Originally Japan, with no Jewish population, had no anti-Semitism but Nazi ideology and propaganda left an influence on Japan during World War II, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were translated into Japanese. Today, anti-Semitism and belief in Jewish manipulation of Japan and the world remains despite the lack of any Jewish community in Japan. Books about Jewish conspiracies are best sellers. According to a 1988 survey, 8% of Japanese had read one of these books.

Anti-Semitism in the 21st century

According to the 2005 U.S. State Department Report on Global Anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism in Europe has 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.

On January 1, 2006, Britain's chief rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, warned that what he called a "tsunami of anti-Semitism" was spreading globally. In an interview with BBC's Radio Four, Sacks said that anti-Semitism was on the rise in Europe, and 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, therefore they should be banned, which is quite extraordinary because ... British Jews see themselves as British citizens. So it's that kind of feeling that you don't know what's going to happen next that's making ... some European Jewish communities uncomfortable."

Much of the new European anti-Semitic violence can actually be seen as a spill over from the long running Israeli-Arab conflict since the majority of the perpetrators are from the large immigrant Arab communities in European cities. 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 groups, and most Jews tend to be assaulted in countries where groups of young Muslim immigrants reside.

Similarly, in the Middle East, anti-Zionist propaganda frequently adopts the terminology and symbols of the Holocaust to demonize Israel and its leaders. This rhetoric often crosses the line separating the legitimate criticism of Israel and its policies to become anti-Semitic vilification posing as legitimate political commentary. At the same time, Holocaust denial and Holocaust minimization efforts find increasingly overt acceptance as sanctioned historical discourse in a number of Middle Eastern countries.

The problem of anti-Semitism is not only significant in Europe and in the Middle East, but there are also worrying expressions of it elsewhere. For example, in Pakistan, a country without a Jewish community, anti-Semitic sentiment fanned by anti-Semitic articles in the press is widespread. This reflects the more recent phenomenon of anti-Semitism appearing in countries where historically or currently there are few or even no Jews.

See also

• • [Judaism]]
  • Judeophobia
  • Anti-Judaism

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.
• 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
• State University of New York at Buffalo, The Jedwabne Tragedy
• Jews in Poland today
• 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 [1] Zionism and Israel Information Center.
• Arab and Muslim Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitiem 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.
• 'Anti-Semitism in Armenia is a Result of Hate against Israeli-Turkish Cooperation: Journal of Turkish weekly (JTW)
• Armenia’s Jewish Scepticism and Its Impact on Armenia-Israel Relations
• Rise of Anti-Semitism in Modern Armenia and Karabakh
• The Holocaust and Armenian Case: Highligting the Main Differences
• Armenian Anti-Semitism in the Ottoman Period

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