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. The hatred of Jewishness and the conspiracy beliefs of past eras are for the most part shared only by tiny numbers of those on the fringes of society although as the World Trade Center and Oklahoma bombings showed, even a handful of extremists can carry out acts of great violence.
There are exceptions, of course: disagreement over policy toward the State of Israel has created opportunities in which the expression "Zionist" — support for Israel as the Jewish homeland — is often used as an antisemitic code word for "Jew" in mainstream debate. Holocaust denial and other recent re-writings of history — such as the false claim that Jews controlled the Atlantic slave trade — lie about the events of the past in order to make Jews seem underhanded and evil. More seriously, many nations in Europe and in the former Soviet empire are struggling, mostly due to unsettled or chaotic economic and social conditions, with movements opposing "foreigners" — including recent immigrants and traditional enemies.
Hitler did not invent the hatred of Jews. He capitalised on antisemitic ideas that had been around for a long time. Hitler was born in Austria in He developed his political ideas in Vienna, a city with a large Jewish community, where he lived from to In those days, Vienna had a mayor who was very anti-Jewish, and hatred of Jews was very common in the city.
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 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. The Roman poet and satirist Juvenal , c. These few examples may point towards the existence of antisemitism in antiquity. Juvenal was every bit as rude about Greeks and other foreigners in Rome as he was about Jews. And yet what part of the dregs comes from Greece? It is in the theology of early Christians that we find the clearest foundations of antisemitism. In his most celebrated work, Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, Justin strove to answer Trypho when he pointed to the contradictory position of Christians who claimed to accept Jewish scripture but refused to follow Torah the Jewish law.
Justin responded that the demands of Jewish law were meant only for Jews as a punishment from God. It was with his fellow Christians. At a time when the distinction between Judaism and Christianity was still blurred and rival sects competed for adherents, he was striving to prevent gentile converts to Christianity from observing the Torah, lest they go over wholly to Judaism. It was an ugly charge, soon levelled again in the works of other Church Fathers, such as Tertullian c.
The objective of using such invective was to settle internal debates within Christian congregations. The allegations did not reflect the actual behaviour or beliefs of Jews. When Tertullian attempted to refute the dualist teachings of the Christian heretic Marcion c.
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