Why hatred of jews

At the end of the war he, and many other German soldiers like him, could not get over the defeat of the German Empire. The German army command spread the myth that the army had not lost the war on the battlefield, but because they had been betrayed. Hitler bought into the myth: Jews and communists had betrayed the country and brought a left-wing government to power that had wanted to throw in the towel.

By blaming the Jews for the defeat, Hitler created a stereotypical enemy. In the s and early s, the defeated country was still in a major economic crisis. According to the Nazis, expelling the Jews was the solution to the problems in Germany. In the 18th century, as the influence of Christianity began to lessen during the Enlightenment — which celebrated the rights and possibilities of men and women to a far greater extent than ever before — religiously based hatred of Jewishness gave way to non-religious criticism: Judaism was attacked as an outdated belief that blocked human progress.

Jewish separatism was again targeted. As European countries began to take modern shape in the 19th century and national pride grew, Jews, who were still usually deprived of civil rights and lived throughout Europe as outsiders, were subjected to further hostility. This hostility resulted at times in deadly persecution, as in the lateth century Russian pogroms — violent attacks on Jewish communities with the aid or indifference of the government.

At the same time, in response to the decline of Christian belief and the growing number of Jews beginning to join the mainstream of European society a trend known as "assimilation" , antisemites turned to the new "racial science," an attempt, since discredited, by various scientists and writers to "prove" the supremacy of non-Jewish whites.

The opponents of Jews argued that Jewishness was not a religion but a racial category, and that the Jewish "race" was biologically inferior. The belief in a Jewish race would later become Germany's justification for seeking to kill every Jewish person in lands Germany occupied during World War II, whether the person practiced Judaism or not. In fact, even the children or grandchildren of those who had converted to Christianity were murdered as members of the Jewish race.

The Holocaust, as this systematic mass extermination between is known, resulted in the death of six million Jews — more than a third of the world's Jewish population. While the rise to power of the Nazis Germany's leaders during World War II in the s and s involved numerous social and political factors, the views that helped turn antisemitism into official government policy included belief in the inborn superiority of "Aryans," or whites; belief that Jews destroyed societies; that Jews secretly worked together to gain control of the world; and that Jews already controlled world finance, business, media, entertainment, and Communism.

In the half-century since World War II, public antisemitism has become much less frequent in the Western world. While stereotypes about Jews remain common, Jews face little physical danger.

Goldberg says that for 70 years, in the shadow of the death camps, antisemitism was culturally, politically and intellectually unacceptable. It is carved from — and sustained by — powerful precedents and inherited stereotypes. But it also taking on variant forms to reflect the contingent fears and anxieties of an ever-changing world. Understood this way, it is the modern manifestation of an ancient prejudice — one which some scholars believe stretches back to antiquity and medieval times.

Outwardly, Marr was a thoroughly secular man of the modern world. He explicitly rejected the groundless but ancient Christian allegations long made against the Jews, such as deicide or that Jews engaged in the ritual murder of Christian children. Instead, he drew on the fashionable theories of the French academic Ernest Renan who viewed history as a world-shaping contest between Jewish Semites and Aryan Indo-Europeans.

Marr suggested that the Jewish threat to Germany was racial. Antisemites like Marr strove for intellectual respectability by denying any connection between their own modern, secular ideology and the irrational, superstitious bigotry of the past. But this continuing hostility towards Jews from pre-modern to modern times has been manifest to many. In fact, up until the Holocaust, antisemitism flourished just as much in western Europe as in central or eastern Europe.

Consider, for example, how French society was bitterly divided between , after the Jewish army officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus , was falsely accused and convicted of spying for Germany. It saw conservatives squaring up against liberals and socialists, Catholics against Jews. The Russian editor of the infamous Protocols of Zion — a crude and ugly, but tragically influential, forgery alleging a Jewish world conspiracy — was the political reactionary, ultra-Orthodox, and self-styled mystic Sergei Nilus.

So modern antisemitism cannot be easily separated from its pre-modern antecedents. As the Catholic theologian Rosemary Ruether observed:.

The mythical Jew, who is the eternal conspiratorial enemy of Christian faith, spirituality and redemption, was … shaped to serve as the scapegoat for [the ills of] secular industrial society. Some scholars would look to the pre-Christian world and see in the attitudes of ancient Greeks and Romans the origins of an enduring hostility.

Finding examples of hostility towards Jews in classical sources is not difficult. The Roman historian Tacitus , c.