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Antisemitism
The word antisemitism means prejudice and hostility toward Jews. It has existed for hundreds of years. Hatred of Jews has often spread through myths and conspiracy theories.
View this term in the glossary
Antisemitism is a starting place for trying to understand the tragedy that would befall countless numbers of people during the Holocaust.
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.
An antisemitic cartoon published in Dr. Kurt Plischke's Der Jude als Rassenschaender: Eine Anklage gegen Juda und eine Mahnung an die deutschen Frauen und Maedchen (The Jew as Race Defiler: An Accusation against Judah and a Warning to German Women and Girls). Germany, ca. 1935.
Antisemitic children's book published in 1936 in Nuremberg, Germany. The title, in German, is translated as "You Can't Trust a Fox in the Heath and a Jew on his Oath: A Picture Book for Young and Old." The cover depicts a fox in the heath and a caricature of a Jew taking an oath.
Hanne's family owned a photographic studio. In October 1940, she and other family members were deported to the Gurs camp in southern France. In September 1941, the Children's Aid Society (OSE) rescued Hanne and she hid in a children's home in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Her mother perished in Auschwitz. In 1943, Hanne obtained false papers and crossed into Switzerland. She married in Geneva in 1945 and had a daughter in 1946. In 1948, she arrived in the United States.
Ben was one of four children born to a religious Jewish family. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. After the Germans occupied Warsaw, Ben decided to escape to Soviet-occupied eastern Poland. However, he soon decided to return to his family, then in the Warsaw ghetto. Ben was assigned to a work detail outside the ghetto, and helped smuggle people out of the ghetto—including Vladka (Fagele) Peltel, a member of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), who later became his wife. Later, he went into hiding outside the ghetto and posed as a non-Jewish Pole. During the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943, Ben worked with other members of the underground to rescue ghetto fighters, bringing them out through the sewers and hiding them on the "Aryan" side of Warsaw. From the "Aryan" side of Warsaw, Ben witnessed the burning of the Warsaw ghetto during the uprising. After the uprising, Ben escaped from Warsaw by posing as a non-Jew. Following liberation, he was reunited with his father, mother, and younger sister.
Ernest was one of three children born to a Jewish family in the commercial city of Breslau, which had one of the largest Jewish communities in Germany. His father, a World War I veteran, owned a factory that made matzah, the unleavened bread used during the Jewish holiday of Passover. Ernest was 12 when Hitler took power in 1933.
1933-39: Ernest often got in trouble at school because people called him names. "Christ-killer" and "your father kills Christian babies for Passover" were common taunts. Many thought the Nazis were a passing political fad but by 1935 their laws were menacing. Signs appeared declaring, "Jews are forbidden." In 1938, after his synagogue was burned (during Kristallnacht), his family realized they had to flee Germany. Since his family could only get two tickets, Ernest and his mother boarded a ship for Asia, leaving their family behind.
1940-44: Ernest ended up in Japanese-controlled Shanghai, the only place refugees could land without a visa. There, as a volunteer driving a truck for the British army's Shanghai Volunteer Force, he got meals and was better off than many other refugees. After Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, conditions among the city's refugees worsened--American relief funds, the refugees' lifeline, could not reach Shanghai. In 1943, under pressure from Germany, the Japanese set up a ghetto.
Ernest spent two years in the Shanghai ghetto before the city was liberated in 1945. After the war, he worked for the U.S. Air Force in Nanking, China, for several years, and later immigrated to the United States.
Gerhard (Gad) Beck was born in 1923 in Berlin. He had a twin sister, Margot (Miriam). Their father, Heinrich, was a Jewish businessman who moved to Berlin from Austria. Their mother, Hedwig, converted to Judaism to marry her husband. The family celebrated both Christian and Jewish holidays. When Gad and Miriam were born, the Becks lived in the Scheunenviertel, a poor district in central Berlin that was home to many Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. In 1929, the family moved to a larger apartment in a suburban district of the city.
1933-39: Gad was nine years old when the Nazis came to power in 1933. As one of about a dozen Jewish children in his school, he became a target of antisemitic bullying. Gad recalled a classmate asking "Can I sit somewhere else, not next to Gad? It smells like stinking Jewish feet here." As a result of the discrimination he faced in his school, Gad's parents enrolled him in a Jewish school. When he was 12, his parents could not afford the tuition and he had to quit. Gad found work as a shop assistant. In 1938, the Becks were required to give up their beautiful, large apartment and move back to their old neighborhood.
1940-44: In 1940 Gad planned to emigrate to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine. However, he was injured and unable to travel. Around this time, he joined a Jewish youth group. There, he met Manfred Lewin and developed a romantic and sexual relationship with him. In November 1942, Manfred and his family were ordered to report to an assembly camp. The Lewins were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center. Manfred did not survive the Holocaust.
Because the Nazis classified Gad’s mother as “Aryan,” Gad, Miriam, and their father had some protection from Nazi anti-Jewish policies. They were not deported to the east, like Manfred’s family and most other German Jews. But in February 1943, Gad, Miriam, and their father were arrested. They were detained alongside other Jews with Aryan relatives. They were held in the Jewish Community Center located on Rosenstraße. Gad’s mother joined the Aryan women protesting for their loved one’s safe return. After about a week, the Becks were released.
Gad was involved in the Zionist underground resistance, helping Jews escape to Switzerland. In early 1945, he and a number of his friends from the underground were denounced to the Gestapo and arrested. He remained in prison in Berlin until the Red Army conquered the city in April 1945.
Gad’s parents and sister also survived the Holocaust in Berlin. In 1947, Gad immigrated to Mandatory Palestine. He returned to Germany in the late 1970s. He was one of the first openly gay Holocaust survivors to speak about his experiences. His memoir is available in English as An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin. Gad lived in Berlin until his death in 2012 at 88 years old.
An only child of middle-class Jewish parents, Liliana was raised in a mixed neighborhood of Christians and Jews in Poland's capital. Her father ran a jewelry business and was a reserve officer in the Polish army; her mother was a housewife. Liliana dreamed of going to the Sorbonne and becoming Poland's second female district attorney.
1933-39: The worst part of going to school was being harassed and called a "filthy Jew." Liliana petitioned to enter a prestigious Catholic high school where she was exempted from attending Saturday classes, but like other Jewish students, she was seated separately and shoved in the halls and staircases. After a few weeks she quit, and attended a Jewish high school until it was closed by the occupying Germans in September 1939.
1940-44: After the Jews were forced into the ghetto, Liliana became a slave laborer in the Toebbens factory. By April 1943 her family was dead and the ghetto was ablaze and in revolt. She hunkered down in her factory until the Germans came to get them on May 8. In a rage Liliana grabbed a pair of scissors, but before she could do anything a German smashed her in the head with his rifle butt. She lifted her arm to protect herself and he smashed her again and again, knocking her out. When Liliana woke up the next day she was in a dark, crowded cattle car.
Liliana survived as a slave laborer in the Majdanek and Skarzysko-Kamienna camps before being liberated in Czestochowa on January 18, 1945. She immigrated to America in 1950.
A Polish soldier, Samuel was wounded in action and taken by Germany as a prisoner of war. As the war continued, he and other Jewish prisoners received increasingly harsh treatment. Among the camps in which he was interned was Lublin-Lipowa, where he was among those forced to build the Majdanek concentration camp. In 1942, he escaped from the Germans, spending the rest of the war as the leader of an armed partisan group.
Throughout history Jews have faced prejudice and discrimination, known as antisemitism. Driven nearly two thousand years ago by the Romans from the land now called Israel, they spread throughout the globe and tried to retain their unique beliefs and culture while living as a minority. In some countries Jews were welcomed, and they enjoyed long periods of peace with their neighbors. In European societies where the population was primarily Christian, Jews found themselves increasingly isolated as outsiders. Jews do not share the Christian belief that Jesus is the Son of God, and many Christians considered this refusal to accept Jesus' divinity as arrogant. For centuries the Church taught that Jews were responsible for Jesus' death, not recognizing, as most historians do today, that Jesus was executed by the Roman government because officials viewed him as a political threat to their rule. Added to religious conflicts were economic ones. Rulers placed restrictions on Jews, barring them from holding certain jobs and from owning land.
At the same time, since the early Church did not permit usury (lending money at interest), Jews came to fill the vital (but unpopular) role of moneylenders for the Christian majority. In more desperate times, Jews became scapegoats for many problems people suffered. For example, they were blamed for causing the "Black Death," the plague that killed thousands of people throughout Europe during the Middle Ages. In Spain in the 1400s, Jews were forced to convert to Christianity, leave the country, or be executed. In Russia and Poland in the late 1800s the government organized or did not prevent violent attacks on Jewish neighborhoods, called pogroms, in which mobs murdered Jews and looted their homes and stores.
As ideas of political equality and freedom spread in western Europe during the 1800s, Jews became almost equal citizens under the law. At the same time, however, new forms of antisemitism emerged. European leaders who wanted to establish colonies in Africa and Asia argued that whites were superior to other races and therefore had to spread and take over the "weaker" and "less civilized" races. Some writers applied this argument to Jews, too, mistakenly defining Jews as a race of people called Semites who shared common blood and physical features.
This kind of racial antisemitism meant that Jews remained Jews by race even if they converted to Christianity. Some politicians began using the idea of racial superiority in their campaigns as a way to get votes. Karl Lueger (1844-1910) was one such politician. He became Mayor of Vienna, Austria, at the end of the century through the use of antisemitism -- he appealed to voters by blaming Jews for bad economic times. Lueger was a hero to a young man named Adolf Hitler, who was born in Austria in 1889. Hitler's ideas, including his views of Jews, were shaped during the years he lived in Vienna, where he studied Lueger's tactics and the antisemitic newspapers and pamphlets that multiplied during Lueger's long rule.
Key Dates
1890s A concocted Jewish conspiracy In France, a member of the Russian secret police concocts the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols promote claims that there exists a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. These forged documents are presented as the minutes of a supposed meeting of world Jewish leaders in which they finalized plans to dominate the world, and suggest that Jews have formed secret organizations and agencies through which they aim to control and manipulate political parties, the economy, the press, and public opinion. The Protocols are published in countries throughout the world, including the United States, and used by antisemites to reinforce claims of a Jewish conspiracy. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Protocols are used to gain support for Nazi Party antisemitic ideology and policies.
1894 Dreyfus Affair divides France Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, is arrested and falsely accused of handing over to Germany documents involving the national defense of France. After a summary trial before a military court, Dreyfus is found guilty of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island, located off the coast of French Guiana. This case divides the French nation into two opposing groups: those who insist that Dreyfus is guilty (conservatives, nationalists, and antisemitic groups), and those who insist that Dreyfus should receive a fair trial (liberals and intellectuals). In 1899, Dreyfus receives a new trial, but is again found guilty by a military court. However, the president of the French Republic intervenes, granting him a pardon. Shortly before World War I, Dreyfus is fully vindicated by a civilian court. The controversy surrounding the Dreyfus affair reflects latent antisemitism in the French officer corps and other conservative French groups.
APRIL 1897 Karl Lueger, antisemitic mayor of Vienna Karl Lueger is elected mayor of Vienna. He holds this position for 13 years, until his death in 1910. Lueger, co-founder of the Christian Socialist Party, uses economic antisemitism to gain support from the small businessmen and artisans who are suffering after the surge of capitalism during the industrial revolution in Austria. He claims that Jews have a monopoly on capitalism and that they thus compete unfairly in the economic arena. This form of antisemitism is used by other right-wing parties in Austria and Germany in the early twentieth century as a means to broaden their popular appeal. Adolf Hitler, a resident of Vienna during Lueger's mayoral reign, is greatly influenced both by Lueger's antisemitism and by his ability to rally public support. Lueger's ideas are reflected in the Nazi Party Platform in 1920s Germany.
Critical Thinking Questions
Jews were less than 1 percent of the population in Germany in 1933. How and why was antisemitism so important to the Nazi platform and its eventual success?
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