Anti-Semitism

HISTORY

EXPLANATIONS

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Is anti-Semitism a new name for an ancient, uninterrupted phenomenon? It is a recent name, no doubt—its 1878 coinage being attributed to Swiss radical Wilhelm Marr. Yet, new names have become one of the curious features of problems that either refer to a long and obstinate history (e.g., the hatred of the Jews through the centuries) or indicate sites of resistance, the refusal to confront diverse and changing phenomena. Understandably, different interests seeking to isolate and refute or, alternatively, contextualize “anti-Semitism” necessarily run the risk of sacralizing or banalizing it. Thus, inseparable from the study and elusive comprehension of such an object (or objects), the politics of anti-Semitism have involved most manifestly the definition of the word Semite (along with its companion, Aryan, a term that was invented in German Protestant theological circles circa 1771 and quickly spread to England, France, and their respective empires) and most covertly the very representation of the West vis-à-vis its others.

HISTORY

Scholars and ideologues differ in invoking, for different periods and regions of the world, terms such as Jew-hatred, anti-Judaism, Judeophobia, more recently including even anti-Zionism. Is there, then, one history of anti-Semitism through the ages (Almog 1988)? Should one not attend instead to the distinct histories of relations between Jews and the populations among whom they have lived? A further claim has been made that some forms of anti-Semitism have thrived, in fact, in the complete absence of Jews. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, famously asserted that anti-Semitism is essentially independent of the Jews, that it rather “makes the Jew” (“c’est l’antisémite qui fait le Juif”) (1948, p. 84). Indeed, it now seems as if anti-Semitism has become a unified and universal, indeed global, phenomenon, one that has spread and radiated from its historical center in early Christian theology (borrowing from earlier Greek and Latin writers) and in western Europe to all corners of the planet. When considering the genocidal paroxysm that hostility to Jews reached in Europe (and, incidentally, only there), the temptation has increased to read all prior hostility toward Jews as prefiguring the horrors of the Holocaust (Bernstein 1994).

EXPLANATIONS

Clearly, anti-Semitism demands explanation—and refutation—and many compelling cases have been made in this direction. Some have sought to testify to anti-Semitism’s quasi-eternal nature (Netanyahu 2001; Bein 1990) or account for its specific persistence (the recurrence of Christian theological prejudice). Others have explored vectors of change (the well-known, modern shift from religion to race described by Léon Poliakov; the teleological understanding of Daniel Goldhagen) and tried to account for historical distinctiveness (Amos Funkenstein on the changing and proximate nature of the Jewish-Christian dispute; Gavin Langmuir’s criterion of “socially significant chimerical hostility” [1990, p. 341]; Jeremy Cohen’s description of the medieval transformation of the Jews from “theological witness” to “demonic” figures) and geographical or cultural difference (Poliakov, again, as well as Mark Cohen). At times, Jewish thinkers themselves have gone so far as to consider Jewish “antisocial behavior” as a major source of anti-Jewish hostility (Bernard Lazare; Israel Yuval on Jewish collective suicide in the eleventh century).

Other reasons, equally contentious, have been proposed: materialist reasons, for example, and chief among them, socioeconomic ones (“Jews and money,” as the old topos goes, but see also Abram Léon’s notion of the Jews as a “people-class”), and political reasons (Karl Marx, but also Hannah Arendt’s theory of the modern state and the role of “political anti-Semitism” in it) and psychological reasons as well (Sigmund Freud on sibling rivalry and castration, and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno on mimesis). Historians of science have shown the importance of new categories of thought and classification, including those operative in Jewish self-perception (Gilman 1986; Hart 2000). There are those who have sought to locate anti-Jewish hostility within the larger frame of attitudes toward “outsiders” (Mayer 1982) or as one among numerous features of a “persecuting society” (Moore 1987). A recurring dispute continues to separate those who wish to distinguish exclusionary practices on the basis of their (real or fantasmatic) targets and those who uphold the strategic usefulness of conducting a unified fied analysis of (and struggle against) all agents of exclusionary practices. Should all racisms be studied and fought as the different guises of one essence or should differences be acknowledged and exposed?

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

Hannah Arendt (1958) insisted on the numerous elements and structures that relate attitudes toward the Jews with issues of state formation, modern racism, imperialism, and colonialism. After Arendt, however, the most significant breakthrough in the study of anti-Semitism was made by Edward W. Said (1978). Arguing that the history of Orientalism (and prominent among them “western views of Islam”) is the history of anti-Semitism, Said has enabled a novel understanding of the emergence of the category of “Semites” as the most obvious manifestation of an enduring theologico-political problem. This problem, which antedates modernity, is at the heart of the West’s own constitution as a historical subject. Relating theological premises to political endeavors, and religion to race, Said demonstrates the necessity of understanding the distributive and dynamic distinctions between Jews and Arabs, between Judaism and Islam, strategically associating and dissociating the two from within the standpoint of Western Christendom and, later, of European colonialism (Anidjar 2003). This dynamic approach also means taking the measure of the late eighteenth-century invention of “Semites” as the unity of race and religion, of Jew and Arab (Olender 1992; Hess 2002). From this novel perspective, it becomes possible to better understand the spread of European anti-Semitism to the Arab world (described, for example, by Bernard Lewis and Geneviève Dermenjian), as well as phenomena like Zionism in its different figures, at once emancipatory and potential manifestations of covert self-hatred (Gilman 1986).

The intricate connections that tie modern anti-Semitism to Zionism may further explain the continued contaminations we witness today between the two (Wistrich 1990; Finkelstein 2005). The Zionist “negation of exile” also participated in the project to reinscribe and undo the unity of the Semites and recast it from within as either a separation of Jews from Arabs (anti-Semitism from Orientalism) or as a binational perspective—advocated by Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Arendt, and other members of Brit Shalom, a Jewish group founded in 1925 dedicated to promoting coexistence—seeking to invent and promote collective rights for both Jews and Arabs (Raz-Krakotzkin 2001). The debate over the persistence of anti-Semitism as anti-Zionism can therefore be better understood as the enduring effort to maintain Jews and Arabs as separate and opposed, indeed as objects of different, unrelated, exclusionary practices. Reframed as the unity of a theologico-political complex that manages both hostility to Jews and hostility to Arabs, anti-Judaism and the war on Islam, anti-Semitism and Orientalism, are revealed as indissociable: one and the same in their very difference.

SEE ALSO Jewish Diaspora; Jews

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Almog, Shmuel, ed. 1988. Antisemitism Through the Ages. Trans. Nathan H. Reisner. Oxford and New York: Pergamon.

Anidjar, Gil. 2003. The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Origins of Totalitarianism. 2nd ed. New York: Meridian.

Bein, Alex. 1990. The Jewish Question: Biography of a World Problem. Translated by Harry Zohn. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Bernstein, Michael-André. 1994. Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cohen, Jeremy. 1982. The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Cohen, Jeremy. 1999. Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cohen, Mark R. 1994. Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Dermenjian, Geneviève. 1983. Juifs et Européens d’Algérie: L’antisémitisme oranais, 1892-1905. Jerusalem: Institut Ben-Zvi.

Finkelstein, Norman G. 2005. Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Freud, Sigmund. 1967. Moses and Monotheism. Trans. Katherine Jones. New York: Vintage.

Funkenstein, Amos. 1993. Perceptions of Jewish History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gilman, Sander L. 1986. Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Goldhagen, Daniel. 1996. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Knopf.

Hart, Mitchell B. 2000. Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Hess, Jonathan M. 2002. Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Katz, Jacob. 1980. From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Langmuir, Gavin I. 1990. Toward a Definition of Antisemitism. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lazare, Bernard. 1995. Antisemitism: Its History and Causes. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Léon, Abram. 1970. The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation. New York: Pathfinder.

Lewis, Bernard. 1986. Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice. New York: Norton.

Mayer, Hans. 1982. Outsiders: A Study in Life and Letters. Trans. Dennis M. Sweet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Moore, R. I. 1987. The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250. Oxford: Blackwell.

Netanyahu, Benzion. 2001. The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain. 2nd ed. New York: New York Review of Books.

Olender, Maurice. 1992. Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Poliakov, Léon. 1965. The History of Anti-Semitism. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vanguard.

Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon. 2001. Binationalism and Jewish Identity: Hannah Arendt and the Question of Palestine. In Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven E. Aschheim, 165-180. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1948. Anti-Semite and Jew. Trans. George J. Becker. New York: Schocken.

Wistrich, Robert S., ed. 1990. Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism in the Contemporary World. New York: New York University Press.

Gil Anidjar

ANTI-SEMITISM

ANTI-SEMITISM and the fight against it have played a small but significant role in American history. During the colonial period, the most serious incident of anti-Semitism occurred not in a British colony, but in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (later New York), where in 1654 Governor Peter Stuyvesant attempted to bar Jews from the city. In the British colonies, Jews generally faced no worse treatment than did Catholics or other Christian minorities. The main obstacles they faced were religious requirements for holding political office.

In the colonial and early confederation period, every one of the thirteen colonies except for New York required all office holders to take a Christian oath. Some went even further—in South Carolina, belief in Protestant Christianity was a voting requirement. But by 1877, the last Christian voting requirement had been eliminated, and the United States offered many attractive incentives to Jewish immigration.

The Early Twentieth Century

By the early twentieth century, the United States had become the immigration destination of choice for Jews from all over the world. Yet vestiges of anti-Semitism remained. In order to combat these, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) was formed in 1906. Their goal was to protect Jewish civil rights, not only in the United States, but also internationally. A few years later, in 1913, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith was formed. This organization focused on combating negative media stereo-types of Jews and economic discrimination.

The strength of these Jewish defense groups demonstrated that although the United States had problems with anti-Semitism, these problems could be redressed by organization within the political system. These opportunities helped the United States remain the main destination for Jewish immigrants until the second decade of the twentieth century. Palestine was then only a distant second.

Between the 1910s and 1930s, the Jewish population of Palestine tripled to nearly 30 percent. This population explosion was directly connected to anti-Semitism and nativism in America. In 1921, the U.S. Congress clamped down on immigration from Eastern Europe, where a majority of European Jews lived. After the United States was closed off, more Jewish immigrants moved to Palestine than any other country. This would eventually have a profound impact on anti-Semitism in America. In the meantime, however, domestic American anti-Semitism was growing more visible.

During the 1920s, automaker Henry Ford, an early financial supporter of Hitler, was quite effective in promulgating anti-Semitic material, both at home and abroad. His anti-Semitic articles in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, were mainly for domestic consumption. But his anti-Semitic book, The International Jew (1922), found a wide readership not only in the United States, but in Germany as well. (Hitler kept Ford's book at his office, with a portrait of Ford above his desk.) Ford also disseminated an older anti-Semitic work, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This notorious and fraudulent work claimed to expose a secret Jewish conspiracy to rule the world.

In the 1930s, one of the places where people were most concerned with this mythical Jewish conspiracy was in Germany. The Nazi campaign against the Jews was an international development with links to American anti-Semitism. After Kristallnacht, many German Jews tried desperately to emigrate to the United States. They were kept away because of U.S. immigration quotas that the government refused to relax. The ostensible reason was fear of Nazi infiltrators hidden in a sudden flood of Jewish refugees. A more covert reason was the anti-Semitism of upper-level state department officials such as Breckenridge Long.

During this period, as fascism became a strong minority movement in America, anti-Semitism became more common. One of the most visible far-right anti-Semites was Charles Coughlin, the popular "radio priest" who referred to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal as "The Jew Deal."

Although his administration was characterized by some of its enemies as "philo-Semitic," one aspect of Roosevelt's military policy during World War II (1939–1945) has since been labeled anti-Semitic: U.S. complicity in the joint allied decision not to bomb the railways leading into major concentration camps such as Auschwitz, even when the Allies had clear proof of the Holocaust.

After the Holocaust

It was postwar knowledge of the Holocaust, more than anything else, that made anti-Semitism socially and morally unacceptable in almost all parts of postwar America. This new sentiment was given concrete expression by a major Hollywood film of 1947, Gentleman's Agreement. A scathing indictment of anti-Semitism, it not only did well at the box office, but was given the Oscar that year for best picture.

Then, one year later, in 1948, the Jews in Palestine declared that they were an independent nation. Within fifteen minutes of their declaration, President Harry S. Truman made the United States the first nation to recognize the existence of Israel. From that moment on, the United States became the key supporter of Israel in the Middle East.

The international importance of Israel to America's interests in the Middle East, combined with the moral opprobrium attached to the Holocaust, made American Jewish defense groups such as the AJC even more ambitious in their aims. Essentially, they went from defensive strategies to offensive operations. More specifically, leaders of Jewish defense groups in the 1940s developed an ideology centered upon what they called a new "unitary theory of prejudice." This was the then-radical idea that prejudice itself, no matter what group it was directed at, was a major social problem. This allowed Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League to move beyond strictly Jewish issues to work with other minority groups, especially African Americans in the civil rights movement.

Their efforts came to a triumphal climax of sorts with the 1950 publication of the book The Authoritarian Personality, by Theodor Adorno and others. This widely read and tremendously influential work successfully attempted to present prejudice—prejudice against any minority—as a personality disorder.

Ironically enough, at the start of the new millennium one of the few American groups that still noticeably exhibited anti-Semitism was one that had previously been helped tremendously by the Jewish campaign against prejudice: African Americans. Certain African American leaders, notably the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan, revitalized old myths about a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. In the process, these leaders not only reopened old wounds, but created new and bitter antagonisms between American minority groups that had once worked together as allies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dinnerstein, Leonard. Anti-Semitism in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Gurock, Jeffrey S., ed. Anti-Semitism in America. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Jaher, Frederic Cople. A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Kaufman, Jonathan. Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times between Blacks and Jews in America. New York: Touchstone, 1995.

Svonkin, Stuart. Jews against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

RichardBradley

See alsoCivil Rights Movement ; Fascism, American ; Jews ; Jewish Defense League ; Zionism .

anti-Semitism is not a concept on which there can be any general consensus. Its dictionary meaning, ‘hatred of Jews’, gives only limited guidance, since the term is used to refer to a very wide range of attitudes, from petty prejudice to genocide. Many Jewish authors maintain that anti-Semitism is a unique phenomenon, that the Final Solution during the Second World War was the culmination of 2,000 years of Christian anti-Semitism. Religious, political, economic, social, and racial categories of anti-Semitism are often distinguished. Other commentators, in contrast, would argue that anti-Semitism is just one variant of the racism and xenophobia that can be found among members of any community, including Jews. The racist anti-Semitism which was propagated in Nazi Germany is often set apart from the kind of recriminations against Jews which flourished alongside other similar intercommunal antagonisms, especially in the multi-ethnic societies of eastern Europe. More recently, anti-Semitism has been used to describe widespread prejudice in the western world against Arabs (who, like the Jews, are Semites).

Anti-Semitism of the most virulent racist type formed a central theme of Nazi ideology. In Mein Kampf, Hitler made numerous ugly references to the Jews as ‘parasites’ and ‘degenerates’ whose presence was supposedly poisoning the purity of German blood. He also identified Communism as a Jewish movement, giving the struggle against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ the highest priority in his programme. Once in power the Nazis gave legal expression to their views. According to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, it was a criminal offence for Jews and non-Jews to marry or to have sexual intercourse. Jewishness was defined by kinship criteria within three generations, and was used to withdraw civil rights from all people coming within its purview. Jews were not the only group to be classed as Untermenschen or ‘sub-humans’, nor were they the only people to be murdered en masse, simply for what they were. But the so-called Final Solution of 1941–5 was certainly the largest single campaign of genocide which the Nazis put into execution.

It is relevant to note that Nazi anti-Semitism flourished in a country where the Jews represented less than 1% of the population and where they were highly assimilated into German culture. It would seem that the more extreme anti-Semitic fantasies thrived on the fact that the scapegoats were scarce. It is difficult to say how many Germans shared the Nazis' views and how many rejected them in private, but there were few public protests.

In Poland, where the Jewish community was ten times larger than in Germany and much less assimilated, racist anti-Semitism of the Nazi type was rare. Tensions between Jews and non-Jews had certainly been rising in the last years before the war, and they were to rise still further in 1939 when the Jews of eastern Poland were widely suspected of welcoming the Soviet invasion. The nationalist wing of public opinion had always been notoriously xenophobic, and the various religious and ethnic minorities had to suffer a tide of threats, jibes, and petty discrimination. Religious anti-Semitism involving the ancient ‘blood-libel’ was not uncommon. At the same time, pre-war Poland had granted far-reaching political and cultural autonomy to the Jewish kahals, or communes. Since the Middle Ages legal ghettos had disappeared, until their formation by the Nazis in 1939–40, and organized violence was at most sporadic. The SS located their death camps (see OPERATION REINHARD) in occupied Poland for the simple reason that the majority of the intended victims lived there: they could not count on any significant measure of support from a Polish population which was itself terrorized. In the period of segregation, a class of szmalcowniks or ‘greasers’ was used by the Gestapo to betray fugitive Jews for money. (The Gestapo had a similar practice of keeping Jewish informers alive on licence in order to report on the Polish underground.) Despite widespread apathy and complacency in Poland about the fate of the Jews, many individuals risked their lives in order to render assistance (see Zegota). The most eloquent commentary on Polish anti-Semitism is to be found at the Yad-Vashem Holocaust Memorial Centre in Jerusalem, where Polish names form the largest single group in the avenue of ‘the Righteous among Nations’.

Elsewhere in Europe the patterns of anti-Semitism were extremely varied. There was a strong dislike of Jews in many English upper-class and academic circles, and British attitudes were also coloured by the activities of Zionist terrorists in Palestine (see Irgun and Stern gang). France received a large influx of Jewish refugees in the period preceding the German occupation, and popular reactions were not always generous. French police in the occupied zone, like the Vichy authorities in the south, followed Nazi demands to round up Jews for deportation. Hitler's fascist allies in Italy were less enthusiastic, and Italy's Jewish community was largely left intact, though similar laws to the Nuremberg ones were passed in November 1938 (in the provisions for the Defence of the Italian Race). The Dutch also gained a good reputation, although only 20% of the Jews in the Netherlands survived. Hungary's Jews stayed in place as long as the Horthy regime was in power. In the brief German occupation of 1944–5, the Hungarian Arrow Cross (see Hungary, 3) collaborated willingly. But others, such as Wallenberg, made elaborate attempts to limit the deportations. Romania witnessed a wave of native pogroms in 1939–41, long before the Nazis arrived to finish the job more systematically. In the Baltic States, the Nazis recruited auxiliary units to assist in their work. In Ukraine, it was reported that civilians spontaneously joined in the murderous work of the Einsatzgruppen. In the Soviet Union, anti-Semitism was officially regarded as a vice exclusive to the fascist enemy, but in practice it was alive and growing. The Stalinist purges against the old Bolsheviks, many of whom were Jewish, had heightened the climate of suspicion; and no arrangements were made to evacuate Jews from areas threatened in 1941–2 by the Nazi advance. It is often said that a full-scale anti-Semitic purge was only prevented by Stalin's death in 1953.

In any fair analysis, however, collective guilt and stereotypes are to be avoided. Anti-Semitism could be found in most countries, while no nation could be collectively characterized as anti-Semitic. The climate of public opinion was usually set by political regimes, but individual reactions to that climate were often unpredictable.

Norman Davies

Anti‐Semitism. A term coined in Germany in 1879, “Anti‐Semitism” means hostility toward Jews. Rooted in Christian teachings, this antagonism dates back almost two thousand years. Assumptions about “Jewish” responsibility for the death of Jesus pervaded Christian theology well into the twentieth century. The worst manifestations of European anti‐Semitism occurred during crisis times when people blamed Jews for social ills. These malevolent ideas were based not only on theological beliefs but also on erroneous assumptions about Jewish religious, economic, and political predilections. Jews were believed to kill gentile children and use their blood for religious ceremonies; in different centuries they were censured as usurers, “blood‐sucking” economic predators, and plotters against Christian governments.

European immigrants brought anti‐Semitism to America as early as the seventeenth century. In 1654, Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, sought to prevent Jews from settling in what is now New York City. Throughout the Colonial Era, authorities limited the economic and political activities of Catholics and non‐Christians. In some colonies, Jews could not become lawyers or physicians. In most they could not vote. Jews gradually gained legal rights after the Revolutionary War, but not until 1877 did New Hampshire become the last state to lift its ban on non‐Christian voting.

Although anti‐Semitism to a degree remained part of the cultural baggage of successive waves of Christian immigrants from Europe, these prejudices were both molded and softened as the newcomers encountered a culturally diverse society and American commitments to the idea of tolerance. But while the restrictions on Jews in the United States were never as stringent as they had been in Europe, individual Jews often found themselves the targets of prejudice and ancient cultural stereotypes portraying them as cold‐hearted, cunning, and loathsome.

While anti‐Semitic attitudes have waxed and waned throughout American history, they were especially strong during the Civil War and the periods of heavy immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Passing of the Great Race (1916) by the prominent New York lawyer and civic leader Madison Grant purveyed a virulent anti‐Semitism. The national‐quota provisions of the immigration acts of 1921, 1924, and 1952 aimed to limit the number of Jewish (and Asian) immigrants.

Anti‐Semitism in America peaked between 1918 and 1945. The 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia led to a “Red scare” targeting aliens, especially Jews, who were thought to harbor subversive attitudes. Auto magnate Henry Ford ran a series in his Dearborn Independent newspaper, throughout the 1920s on “The International Jew.” The articles blamed every evil and moral failing in the United States on Jews and charged that Jews were plotting to overthrow existing governments. In the same decade housing and employment discrimination increased, colleges and universities established Jewish quotas, and leaders of society harbored a chilling animosity that contributed to the ostracism of Jews in many spheres.

During the Depression‐wracked 1930s, the presence of Jews among President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's advisers resulted in opponents of the New Deal labeling it the “Jew Deal.” In 1938, as Hitler's power increased in Germany, a Roman Catholic radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin, denounced Jews and encouraged his followers to join him in a “Christian Front.” Coughlin's attacks intensified over the next four years. In 1942, after the United States had entered World War II, Roosevelt threatened to jail Coughlin for sedition and Coughlin's superiors silenced him. But Coughlin was not alone. Anti‐Semitism in the State Department, the corporate world, and the public at large played a role in Washington's hesitant response to the desperate plight of European Jews persecuted by the Nazis.

American anti‐Semitism declined precipitously after World War II. The horror of the Holocaust, Hitler's genocidal program to exterminate European Jews, served to discredit the pronouncements of anti‐Semites. The 1947 film Gentleman's Agreement, starring Gregory Peck, exposed anti‐Jewish discrimination in American society. Civil rights organizations challenged various forms of discrimination. The American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the Anti‐Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith monitored incidents of anti‐Semitism and sought legislation minimizing its impact. The AJ Committee also engaged in extensive study on the causes of anti‐Semitism, worked behind the scenes with elected political officials, and sponsored uplifiting radio programs designed to present Jews in a favorable light. The AJ Congress actively challenged existing institutional prejudices through the legal system, while the ADL both engaged in serious research on the causes of anti‐Semitism and sought media publicity to expose bigotry. By the end of the twentieth century, expressions of anti‐Semitism were quickly disavowed by leaders in religion, government, and business. But though much diminished, anti‐Semitism persisted, peddled by alienated, marginal organizations obsessed with conspiratorial theories, and exploited by some leaders of disadvantaged minorities as a focus for their anger and resentment.
See also Cultural Pluralism; Immigration Law; Judaism; New Deal Era, The; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Bertram Korn , American Jewry and the Civil War, 1951.
Robert G. Weisbord and and Robert Stein , Bittersweet Encounter: The African American and the American Jew, 1970.
Michael Barkun , Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement, 1994.
Leonard Dinnerstein , Antisemitism in America, 1994.
Fred Jaher , A Scapegoat in the Wilderness, 1994.

Leonard Dinnerstein

anti-Semitism , form of prejudice against Jews , ranging from antipathy to violent hatred. Before the 19th cent., anti-Semitism was largely religious and was expressed in the later Middle Ages by sporadic persecutions and expulsions—notably the expulsion from Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella—and in severe economic and personal restrictions (see ghetto ). However, since Jews were generally restricted to the pursuit of occupations that were taboo, such as moneylending, the sentiment was also economic in nature.

The Enlightenment to the Holocaust

After the emancipation of the Jews, brought about by the Enlightenment of the 18th cent. and by the French Revolution, religious and economic resentments were gradually replaced by feelings of prejudice stemming from the notion of the Jews as a distinct race. This development was due not only to the rising nationalism of the 19th cent., but also to the conscious preservation, especially among Orthodox Jews, of cultural and religious barriers that isolated the Jewish minorities from other citizens. It has also been charged that in the years between the fall of Napoleon and the rise of Hitler the Roman Catholic Church, which sometimes subscribed to the idea of Jewish racial identity and sometimes denied it, not only failed to condemn European anti-Semitism, but actually contributed to it. Jewish reaction to the phenomenon of anti-Semitism in its many forms found political expression in Zionism .

The unpopularity of the Jews was exploited by demagogues, such as Édouard Drumont in France, to stir the masses against an existing government, and by reactionary governments, as in Russia, to find an outlet for popular discontent. The millions of Russian and Polish Jews who, after the assassination (1881) of Alexander II, fled the pogroms and found refuge in other countries contributed to the popular feeling that Jews were aliens and intruders. In addition, a spurious document, the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," purporting to outline a Jewish plan for world domination, emerged in Russia early in the 20th cent. and was subsequently circulated throughout the world. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Jews were accused of plotting to dominate the world by their international financial power or by a Bolshevik revolution.

Pseudoscientific racial theories of so-called Aryan superiority emerged in the 19th cent. with the writings of Joseph Arthur Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain and found their climax in those of Alfred Rosenberg. These theories were incorporated in the official doctrine of German National Socialism by Adolf Hitler. Hitler's persecution of the Jews during World War II was unparalleled in history. It is estimated that between 5 and 6 million European Jews were exterminated between 1939 and 1945 in the Holocaust (see also concentration camp ).

Since the Holocaust

The end of persecution did not mean the end of anti-Semitism, as the sporadic attacks on synagogues in many countries since the end of World War II indicate. In the USSR and Eastern European countries, where anti-Semitism was officially outlawed, it continued to reappear in new forms. From the late 1940s until Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, anti-Semitic persecution took the form of deportations, jailings, and the suppression of Jewish publications and cultural institutions. Although anti-Semitism in these countries receded during the 1950s, it reappeared in the 1960s and 70s, when synagogues were periodically closed, particularly in the upsurge of anti-Semitism that followed the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. With Gorbachev's glasnost and the breakup of the Soviet Union, however, increasing numbers of Jews have emigrated. International anti-Semitism has been so accepted that the United Nations did not condemn it as racism until 1999.

The existence of anti-Semitism has complicated internal Israeli politics as well as political opposition in other countries to Israeli policies. Arab and Islamic anti-Semitism has increased because of resentment over Israel's existence and its treatment of Arab Palestinians. Right-wing nationalistic movements, which are generally anti-Semitic, became vocal in the republics of the former Soviet Union, in Germany, and other European countries in the 1990s. In the United States, anti-Semitism has never been an instrument of national policy, but in certain communities and regions it resulted in the exclusion of Jews from membership in certain private clubs, schools, and housing.

Bibliography

See J.-P. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (tr. 1948, repr. 1960); J. Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction (1980); H. A. Oberman, The Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Age of Renaissance and Reformation (1984); D. A. Gerber, ed., Anti-Semitism in America (1986); M. Zimmerman, Wilhelm Marr: The Patriarch of Anti-Semitism (1986); P. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (1988); L. Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (1994); F. C. Jaher, A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America (1994); J. Carroll, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History (2000); D. I. Kertzer, The Popes against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (2001).

anti-Semitism Whilst Christian hostility towards Jews dates back to the first century, modern anti-Semitism denotes hostility towards the Jewish race or, more popularly, towards Jewish culture and traditions. Its origins go back to the 1870s, when earlier, sporadic outbreaks of anti-Jewish feelings became a permanent phenomenon in European society. In the writings of early anti-Semites, such as the German Wilhelm Marr or the Frenchman Ernest Renan, Jews were identified as a separate race, so that even if they converted to Christianity or assimilated to current cultural values they continued to be considered Jewish. Throughout history, Jews had been made the scapegoats for economic and other misfortunes, but in addition they became identified by conservative populists as the harbingers of progress, industrialization, and international capital, who destroyed the values and livelihoods of an idealized rural peasant society.

Hence, one of the most striking characteristics of modern anti-Semitism especially before World War II was its strength in countries such as Poland and France, where conservatives linked to the Roman Catholic Church were united principally by anti-Semitism in their opposition to economic and social change, even in cases (e.g. France) where there were virtually no Jews resident. In France, this broad coalition of forces resistant to change came together as a result of the Dreyfus Affair, which at the same time revealed the extent of popular (as well as official) anti-Semitism. In Russia, where Jews had settled relatively recently, they began to be prosecuted in pogroms, with the support of officials eager to please the anti-Semitic Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II. Partly in response to the pressures of modernization, anti-Semitism developed in Germany and Austria, too. It was fuelled by widespread Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe into a number of urban centres which already had considerable Jewish populations. In the Vienna of Hitler's years as an apprentice (1909–13), anti-Semitism had been made acceptable in public discourse during Karl Lueger's mayorality (1897–1910), since he was an anti-Semite supported by the growing Austrian Christian Social Union.

In Germany, by contrast, anti-Semites remained on the political fringe before 1918, though it was during the German Empire that the foundations for the extraordinary rise of anti-Semitism in politics and society were laid. The conclusion of the Versailles Treaty, the ensuing widespread economic misery of the Weimar Republic, and its political weakness made many Germans very receptive to the anti-Semitism of the right wing (and of the emerging Nazi Party in particular). Many of the Republic's most ardent supporters, most affluent business leaders, and many influential politicians (such as Stresemann and Rathenau) were Jewish, and became easy scapegoats. What was most striking about the German Third Reich under Hitler was the brutality with which anti-Semitism was brought to its most horrendous and extreme conclusion through the murder of over five million Jews in concentration camps during World War II.

These horrors ensured that for the first decades after the war anti-Semitism became publicly unacceptable not only in Germany (where the denial of the Holocaust became a criminal offence), but throughout most of Europe and elsewhere in the world. At the same time, anti-Semitism was thinly disguised in the USSR, where it was partially encouraged by the state during the 1950s and early 1960s because of fears the Jews might look towards Israel rather than the Soviet Union as their ultimate authority. From the 1980s, in some Western European countries anti-Semitic parties such as the Front Nationale in France and the Austrian Liberal Party generated considerable electoral appeal, even though this was the result more of inherent xenophobic popular moods against immigrants. Furthermore, the appeal of such parties was based on general popular prejudices against Jews rather than on the racial anti-Semitism (with its implications of assumed Jewish racial inferiority) which was current before and during World War II. Since 1945, such anti-Semitism remained the preserve of violent neo-Fascist groups.

Jedwabne Massacre

25. Anti-Semitism (See also Bigotry, Genocide.)

1. Agobard (799–840) Lyonnais archbishop, father of medieval anti-Jewish racism. [Fr. Hist.: Wigoder, 15]
2. Anti-Defamation League B’nai B’rith organization which fights anti-Semitism. [Am. Hist.: Wigoder, 33]
3. Armleder medieval bands; ravaged Alsatian Jewish communities. [Ger. Hist.: Wigoder, 41]
4. Ashkenazi, Simcha and Jacob discover the tenuousness of their position when anti-Semitism spreads in Poland. [Yiddish Lit.: Brothers Ashkenazi ]
5. Babi Yar Russian site of WWII German massacre of the Jews. [Russ. Hist.: Wigoder, 56]
6. Bernheim Petition 1933 petition exposed Nazi treatment of Jews. [Jew. Hist.: Wigoder, 83]
7. Black Death pogroms plague blamed on Jews who were later murdered. [Jew. Hist.: Bishop, 382]
8. Black Hundreds early 20th-century armed squads ravaged Jews. [Russ. Hist.: Wigoder, 92]
9. blood libel trials of Jews who allegedly murdered non-Jews for Passover blood. [Jew. Hist.: Wigoder, 95]
10. Bok, Yakov victim of Russian anti-Semitism; falsely accused of murder. [Am. Lit.: The Fixer ]
11. Final Solution Nazi plan to exterminate Jewish race. [Ger. Hist.: Hitler, 1037–1061]
12. Frank, Anne (1929–1945) young Dutch girl found and killed by Nazis after years in hiding. [Dutch Lit.: Diary of Anne Frank ]
13. Gentleman’s Agreement indictment of anti-Semiticism. [Am. Lit.: Gentleman’s Agreement ]
14. Haman convinces king to issue decree for Jewish extermination. [O.T.: Esther 3:1–11]
15. Hep Hep riots Jewish pogroms Germany (1819). [Ger. Hist.: Wigoder, 251]
16. Hitler, Adolf (1889–1945) Nazi dictator of Germany; eclipsed all predecessors’ hatred for Jews. [World Hist.: Hitler ]
17. Jacobowsky and the Colonel anti-Semitic Polish colonel refuses to recognize his rescuer because he is Jewish. [Ger. Lit.: Jacobowsky and the Colonel ]
18. Kishinev Moldavian city; scene of pogroms and WWII genocide. [Jew. Hist.: Wigoder, 344]
19. Kristallnacht destruction of Jews’ property anticipated later atrocities (November 9–10, 1938). [Ger. Hist.: Hitler, 689–694]
20. Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler’s autobiography, including his theories on treatment of the Jews. [Ger. Hist.: Mein Kampf ]
21. Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of citizenship and civil rights (1935). [Ger. Hist.: Wigoder, 458]
22. Protocols of the Elders of Zion forged tract revealing Jewish conspiracy to control world. [Jew. Hist.: Wigoder, 170]
23. swastika symbol of German anti-Semitism since 1918; became emblem of Nazi party. [Ger. Hist.: Collier’s, XVIII, 78]
24. Torquemada, Tomás de (1420–1498) head of Spanish Inquisition; instrumental in expelling Jews from Spain (1492). [Span. Hist.: Wigoder, 600]
25. Untermenschen subhumans; Nazi conception of Jews and Slays. [Ger. Hist.: Shirer, 1223]
26. Volkischer Beobachter Nazi party organ featuring Jew-baiting articles. [Ger. Hist.: Shirer, 75–78]

antisemitism Both John the Baptist the Baptist and Jesus had condemned their Jewish contemporaries for failing to heed their messages, following the tradition of OT prophets; but the gospels were compiled when relations between Christians and Jews, Church and Synagogue, had become strained, and the rebukes Jesus levelled at his fellow Jews (Matt. 12: 34) were in due course thrown by Gentile Christians at the non-believing Jews. This mutual suspicion is reflected in the gospels. No doubt Jesus encountered opposition from scribes and Pharisees from the earliest days of his ministry (Mark 3: 6), and in the Little Apocalypse in Mark 13: 9 the disciples are warned to expect to be beaten in synagogues. This indeed became a threat in history. After the Fall of Jerusalem (70 CE) there was excommunication from the synagogue (John 9: 22; 16: 2) and in about 85–90 CE the rabbis at Javneh (or Jamnia) included in the Eighteen Benedictions as number Twelve a curse against the Nazareans and the Minim (heretics) which may have sealed the rupture, though it is uncertain whether this addition was accepted everywhere and by all Jews. It is possible to trace in the Passion Narratives a tendency to lay more of the blame for the Roman penalty of crucifixion on the insistence of the Jewish leaders and to diminish the responsibility of the Roman Pontius Pilate, who condemns Jesus with increasing reluctance. In Matt. 27: 25 the crowd exclaim, ‘His blood be on us and on our children’, which has been used as a particular provocation for antisemitism down the ages: but Matt.'s implausible allegation that ‘the whole nation’ was present (an impossibility!) in the praetorium is a good reason for regarding the cry as unhistorical. Moreover in its context the cry does not amount to anti-semitism in the modern sense of an attack upon the Jewish race as such. Matthew's community perhaps suffered persecution from Jews who disputed the Christian claim (Matt. 10: 17) to be faithful to its Jewish inheritance; in which case even the diatribe in Matt. 23 represents one side of an intra-Jewish dispute. Luke continued the trend to diminish the Roman responsibility by recording the centurion's confession when Jesus died that he was ‘innocent’ (Luke 23: 47). At its extreme, antisemitism is represented by John 8: 44, where the Jews are pilloried and demonized as children of Satan—an attitude of bitterness and hostility rarely acquiesced in by the ex-Jew Paul (Rom. 9–11)—and surely repudiated in John 4: 22!

anti-Semitism Hostility towards and discrimination against JEWISH PEOPLE (although there are other Semitic peoples, notably the Arabs, anti-Semitism is only used to refer to prejudice against Jewish people). In the late 19th and early 20th centuries it was strongly evident in France, Germany, Poland, Russia, and elsewhere, many Jewish emigrants fleeing from persecution or POGROMS in south-east Europe to Britain and the USA. After World War I early Nazi propaganda in Germany encouraged anti-Semitism, alleging Jewish responsibility for the nation's defeat. By 1933 Jewish persecution was active throughout the country. The ‘final solution’ which Hitler worked for was to be a HOLOCAUST or extermination of the entire Jewish race; some six million Jews were killed in CONCENTRATION CAMPS before the defeat of Nazism in 1945. Anti-Semitism was a strong feature of society within the former Soviet Union, especially after World War II. Anti-Semitism remains a problem in eastern Europe and in the former Soviet republics, although Jewish people are now allowed to emigrate from these countries. During the early 1990s in western Europe, especially in France and Germany, there was an increase in racist violence by neo-Nazi groups.

an·ti-Sem·i·tism • n. hostility to or prejudice against Jews. DERIVATIVES: an·ti-Sem·ite n. an·ti-Se·mit·ic adj.

ANTI-SEMITISM.

This entry includes two subentries:

antisemitism. See JEWS, CHRISTIAN ATTITUDES TO.

anti‐Semitism, see Jews.