Anti-Semitism

I

Introduction

Anti-Semitism, political, social, and economic agitation and activities directed against Jews. The term is now used to denote speech and behavior that is derogatory to people of Jewish origin, whether or not they are religious. The word Semitic originally was applied to all descendants of Shem, the eldest son of the biblical patriarch Noah. In later usage, it refers to a group of peoples of southwestern Asia, including both Jews and Arabs. The word anti-Semitism was coined about 1879 to denote hostility toward Jews only. This hostility is supposedly justified by a theory, first developed in Germany in the middle of the 19th century, that peoples of so-called Aryan stock are superior in physique and character to those of Semitic stock. Although the theory was rejected by all responsible ethnologists, widely read books incorporating anti-Semitic doctrines were written by such men as the French diplomat and social philosopher Comte Joseph Arthur de Gobineau and the German philosopher and economist Eugen Dühring. The theory of racial superiority was used to justify the civil and religious persecution of Jews that had existed throughout history.

Many explanations of the phenomenon of anti-Semitism have been advanced. One theory, widely accepted by social scientists, suggests that anti-Semitism is nurtured in periods of social instability and crisis, such as those existing in Germany in the 1880s and in the era preceding World War II (1939-1945). Passions and frustrations engendered during such periods are theoretically deflected onto scapegoats, for example, an available, isolated minority, such as the Jews.

II

Historical Roots of Anti-Semitism

Although the term anti-Semitism was coined in 1879, anti-Jewish agitation has existed for several thousand years. In the ancient Roman Empire, for example, the devotion of Jews to their religion and special forms of worship was used as a pretext for political discrimination against them, and very few Jews were admitted to Roman citizenship. Since the 4th century ad (and possibly before), Jews have been regarded as the killers of Jesus Christ. With the rise and eventual domination of Christianity throughout the Western world, discrimination against Jews on religious grounds became universal, and systematic and social anti-Judaism made its appearance. Jews were massacred in great numbers, especially during the Crusades; segregated in ghettos; required to wear identifying marks or garments; and economically crippled by the imposition of restrictions on the business activities open to them. In the 18th and 19th centuries, which saw the French Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, increasing separation of church and state, and the rise of modern nation-states, Jews experienced less religious and economic persecution and were gradually integrated into the economic and political order; however, acceptance was superficial and ran in cycles, depending on economic and social conditions.

In Germany, the process of Jewish emancipation was completed with the formation of the German Empire in 1871. Although legal reforms put an end to discrimination on religious grounds, hostility, falsely based on racism, grew. Racist theories that had been formulated during the preceding decades provided the basis for a new grouping of anti-Semitic political parties after the Franco-Prussian War and the economic crash of 1873. The German political scene was marked by the presence of at least one openly anti-Semitic party until 1933, when anti-Semitism became the official policy of the government under National Socialism (Nazism).

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The pattern of German anti-Semitism was followed in other parts of western and central Europe. In Austria, for example, a Christian Socialist party advocated more or less anti-Semitic programs. In France, anti-Semitism became an issue in the larger problem of the separation of church and state. Clerical and royalist factions generally adopted anti-Semitic principles based on the racist theories formulated in Germany and fostered in part by the publication of numerous anti-Semitic publications, notably the newspaper La Libre Parole, started in 1892 by the French anti-Semitic journalist and author Edouard Drumont. Anti-Semitism in France culminated in the Dreyfus affair between 1894 and 1906. With the liberation of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army who was imprisoned for alleged treason, anti-Semitism almost disappeared as a political issue in France.

III

Persecution in Eastern Europe: the Pogroms

Opposition to the Jews took a different course in Eastern Europe. Medieval traditions isolating the Jews as an alien economic and social class were never broken. The Jewish emancipation characteristic of Western Europe did not occur. Impediments imposed on Jews since the Middle Ages became increasingly severe. In Russia, measures were adopted to prevent Jews from owning land and to limit the number of Jews admitted to institutions of higher education to 3 to 10 percent of the total enrollment in those institutions.

The persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe was climaxed by a series of organized massacres, known as pogroms, that began in 1881. Some of the worst outbreaks occurred in 1906 as an aftermath of the unsuccessful 1905 revolution in Russia. Involving about 600 villages and cities, the pogroms resulted in the slaughter of thousands of Jews and the looting and destruction of their property. Historians agree that the pogroms were the product of a deliberate government policy aimed at diverting the discontent of Russian workers and peasants into religious bigotry. They were fomented by a new type of mass propaganda, including a notorious forgery known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to reveal details of an international Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. First published in book form in Russia in 1905 and circulated continuously thereafter, it contained material clearly traceable to fictional accounts not even concerned with Jews. Such deliberate distortions were used during the pogrom after the 1917 revolution, which claimed hundreds of thousands of victims.

IV

Origins of Anti-Semitism in the United States

Russian anti-Semitic propaganda was also circulated in the United States, where prejudice against Jews previously had assumed such forms as covert social discrimination. In the United States, the upsurge of anti-Jewish feeling was part of a general wave of resentment of minority groups, also including Roman Catholics and African Americans, that swept the country after World War I ended in 1918. Another element in United States anti-Semitism in the 1920s was its identification of Jews with political radicalism. A notable event was the temporary embracing of anti-Semitism by the American automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, who reprinted the discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his newspaper the Dearborn Independent. Condemned widely, Ford later apologized for this action. The immigration legislation enacted in the United States in 1921 and 1924 was interpreted widely as being at least partly anti-Jewish in intent because it strictly limited the immigration quotas of eastern European nations with large Jewish populations, nations from which 2.5 million Jews had immigrated to the United States by 1920.