Antisemitism

The word antisemitism means prejudice against or hatred of Jews.

The Holocaust, the state-sponsored persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945, is history’s most extreme example of antisemitism.

In 1879, German journalist Wilhelm Marr originated the term antisemitism, denoting the hatred of Jews, and also hatred of various liberal, cosmopolitan, and international political trends of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often associated with Jews. The trends under attack included equal civil rights, constitutional democracy, free trade, socialism, finance capitalism, and pacifism. (1)

The Nazis targeted Jews because the Nazis were radically antisemitic. This means that they were prejudiced against and hated Jews. In fact, antisemitism was a basic tenet of their ideology and at the foundation of their worldview.

The Nazis falsely accused Jews of causing Germany’s social, economic, political, and cultural problems. In particular, they blamed them for Germany’s defeat in World War I (1914–1918). Some Germans were receptive to these Nazi claims. Anger over the loss of the war and the economic and political crises that followed contributed to increasing antisemitism in German society. The instability of Germany under the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), the fear of communism, and the economic shocks of the Great Depression also made many Germans more open to Nazi ideas, including antisemitism. (2)

French 1898 cartoon showing Rothschild with the world in his hands. (3)

However, the Nazis did not invent antisemitism. Antisemitism is an old and widespread prejudice that has taken many forms throughout history. In Europe, it dates back to ancient times. In the Middle Ages (500–1400), prejudices against Jews were primarily based in early Christian belief and thought, particularly the myth that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. Suspicion and discrimination rooted in religious prejudices continued in early modern Europe (1400–1800). At that time, leaders in much of Christian Europe isolated Jews from most aspects of economic, social, and political life. This exclusion contributed to stereotypes of Jews as outsiders.

As Europe became more secular, many places lifted most legal restrictions on Jews. This, however, did not mean the end of antisemitism. In addition to religious antisemitism, other types of antisemitism took hold in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. These new forms included economic, nationalist, and racial antisemitism. In the 19th century, antisemites falsely claimed that Jews were responsible for many social and political ills in modern, industrial society. Theories of race, eugenics and Social Darwinism falsely justified these hatreds. Nazi prejudice against Jews drew upon all of these elements, especially racial antisemitism. Racial antisemitism is the discriminatory idea that Jews are a separate and inferior race. (2)

Learn more about Kristallnacht

On November 9–10, 1938, Nazi leaders unleashed a series of pogroms against the Jewish population in Germany and recently incorporated territories. This event came to be called Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) because of the shattered glass that littered the streets after the vandalism and destruction of Jewish-owned businesses, synagogues, and homes.

Learn more about the Enabling Act

The Enabling Act allowed the Reich government to issue laws without the consent of Germany’s parliament, laying the foundation for the complete Nazification of German society. The law was passed on March 23, 1933, and published the following day. Its full name was the “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich.”

The Nazi Ideology of Race

Adolf Hitler, the Führer (Leader) of the Nazi Party, formulated and articulated the ideas that came to be known as Nazi ideology. He thought of himself as a deep and profound thinker, convinced that he had found the key to understanding an extraordinarily complex world.

Hitler believed that a person's characteristics, attitudes, abilities, and behaviour were determined by his or her so-called racial make-up. In Hitler's view, all groups, races, or peoples (he used those terms interchangeably) carried within them traits that were passed from one generation to the next. No individual could overcome the qualities of race. All of human history could be explained in terms of racial struggle. (4)

The Nazis defined Jews as a “race.” Regarding the Jewish religion as irrelevant, the Nazis attributed a wide variety of negative stereotypes about Jews and “Jewish” behaviour to an unchanging biologically determined heritage that drove the “Jewish race,” like other races, to struggle to survive by expansion at the expense of other races.

While it classified Jews as the priority “enemy,” the Nazi ideological concept of race targeted other groups for persecution, imprisonment, and annihilation. These groups included Roma (Gypsies), people with disabilities, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and Afro-Germans. The Nazis also identified political dissidents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and so-called "asocials" as enemies and security risks either because they consciously opposed the Nazi regime or some aspect of their behaviour did not fit Nazi perceptions of social norms. They sought to eliminate domestic non-conformists and so-called racial threats through a perpetual self-purge of German society.

The Nazis believed that superior races had not just the right but the obligation to subdue and even exterminate inferior ones. They believed that this struggle of races was consistent with the law of nature. The Nazis pursued a strategic vision of a dominant German race ruling subject peoples, especially the Slavs and the so-called Asiatics (by which they meant the peoples of Soviet Central Asia and the Muslim populations of the Caucasus region), whom they judged to be innately inferior. For purposes of propaganda, the Nazis often framed this strategic vision in terms of a crusade to save western civilization from these “eastern” or “Asiatic” barbarians and their Jewish leaders and organizers. (5)

Elimination of Racial Enemies

Hitler and the Nazi Party outlined their racial enemies in clear and unequivocal terms. For Hitler and the Nazis, the Jews represented a priority enemy both within and outside Germany. Their allegedly racial and inferior genetic makeup spawned the exploitative systems of capitalism and communism. In their drive to expand, the Jews promoted and used these systems of government and state organization, including constitutions, proclamations of equal rights, and international peace, to undermine the race-consciousness of superior races like the German race. They diluted superior blood through assimilation and intermarriage.

The Nazis believed that eliminating this "threat" to German survival meant eliminating the people who were labelled by racial ideology as the standard-bearers of that threat. Hitler believed that this was the way nature worked. In the end, Hitler's program of war and genocide stemmed from what he saw as an equation: "Aryan" Germans would have to expand and dominate, a process requiring the elimination of all racial threats—especially the Jews—or else they would face extinction themselves. (6)

This 1938 racist illustration compares “German Youth” with “Jewish Youth.” It is subtitled, “From the face speaks the soul of the race.” Nazis used racist theories to label groups of people as inferior and as the "enemy," and claimed that "superior" races had not just the right but the obligation to subdue and even exterminate "inferior" ones. (7)

Nazi propaganda often portrayed Jews as engaged in a conspiracy to provoke war. Here, a stereotyped Jew conspires behind the scenes to control the Allied powers, represented by the British, American, and Soviet flags. The caption reads, "Behind the enemy powers: the Jew." Circa 1942. (8)

Exploring The Roots Of Antisemitism

This Imperial War Museum film explores the issue of antisemitism and considers some of the origins of the myths and lies about Jewish people.

Timeline of Events, Laws and Decrees

Timeline cards in PDF of the main events tracking the rise of Nazis and their actions against Jews and other minorities.

The Nazis' campaign of persecution

From the mid-1930s until the end of the Second World War, the Nazi regime carried out a campaign of sustained antisemitic persecution that developed into a coordinated programme of mass murder.

But how did this atrocity happen? What was happening in Europe in the 1930s that saw the rise of the Nazi Party and their dangerous ideology?

Teaching Resources

European Antisemitism from Its Origins to the Holocaust

This United States Holocaust Memorial Museum film introduces the history of antisemitism. Although the term was coined in the 19th century, anti-Jewish hostility goes back many centuries—to the era of early Christianity and the Middle Ages. As a religious minority, Jews in Christian-dominant Europe were consistently persecuted as “outsiders.” They became scapegoats and victims of targeted violence in times of severe hardship and economic and political change. (Age-restricted video)

References:

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