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v t e

Antisemitism^[a] or Jew-hatred^[2] is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against, Jews.^[3][4][5] This sentiment is a form of racism,^[b][6][7] and a person who harbours it is called an antisemite. Primarily, antisemitic tendencies may be motivated by negative sentiment towards Jews as a people or by negative sentiment towards Jews with regard to Judaism. In the former case, usually presented as racial antisemitism, a person's hostility is driven by the belief that Jews constitute a distinct race with inherent traits or characteristics that are repulsive or inferior to the preferred traits or characteristics within that person's society.^[8] In the latter case, known as religious antisemitism, a person's hostility is driven by their religion's perception of Jews and Judaism, typically encompassing doctrines of supersession that expect or demand Jews to turn away from Judaism and submit to the religion presenting itself as Judaism's successor faith—this is a common theme within the other Abrahamic religions.^[9][10] The development of racial and religious antisemitism has historically been encouraged by the concept of anti-Judaism,^[11][12] which is distinct from antisemitism itself.^[13]

There are various ways in which antisemitism is manifested, ranging in the level of severity of

In recent times, the idea that there is a variation of antisemitism known as "new antisemitism" has emerged on several occasions. According to this view, since the State of Israel is a Jewish state, expressions of anti-Zionist positions could harbour antisemitic sentiments.^[16][17]

Due to the root word Semite, the term is prone to being invoked as a misnomer by those who incorrectly assert (in an etymological fallacy) that it refers to racist hatred directed at "Semitic people" in spite of the fact that this grouping is an obsolete historical race concept. Likewise, such usage is erroneous; the compound word antisemitismus was first used in print in Germany in 1879^[18] as a "scientific-sounding term" for Judenhass (lit. 'Jew-hatred'),^{[19][20][21][22][23]} and it has since been used to refer to anti-Jewish sentiment alone.^[19][24][25]

The word "Semitic" was coined by German orientalist August Ludwig von Schlözer in 1781 to designate the Semitic group of languages—Aramaic, Arabic, Hebrew and others—allegedly spoken by the descendants of Biblical figure Sem, son of Noah.^[26][27]

The origin of "antisemitic" terminologies is found in the responses of orientalist

Pseudoscientific theories concerning race, civilization, and "progress" had become quite widespread in Europe in the second half of the 19th century, especially as Prussian nationalistic historian Heinrich von Treitschke did much to promote this form of racism. He coined the phrase "the Jews are our misfortune" which would later be widely used by Nazis.^[30] According to Falk, Treitschke uses the term "Semitic" almost synonymously with "Jewish", in contrast to Renan's use of it to refer to a whole range of peoples,^[31] based generally on linguistic criteria.^[32]

According to philologist Jonathan M. Hess, the term was originally used by its authors to "stress the radical difference between their own 'antisemitism' and earlier forms of antagonism toward Jews and Judaism."^[33]

In 1879, German journalist Wilhelm Marr published a pamphlet, Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum. Vom nicht confessionellen Standpunkt aus betrachtet (The Victory of the Jewish Spirit over the Germanic Spirit. Observed from a non-religious perspective) in which he used the word Semitismus interchangeably with the word Judentum to denote both "Jewry" (the Jews as a collective) and "Jewishness" (the quality of being Jewish, or the Jewish spirit).^[34][35][36] He accused the Jews of a worldwide conspiracy against non-Jews, called for resistance against "this foreign power", and claimed that "there will be absolutely no public office, even the highest one, which the Jews will not have usurped".^[37]

This followed his 1862 book Die Judenspiegel (A Mirror to the Jews) in which he argued that "Judaism must cease to exist if humanity is to commence", demanding both that Judaism be dissolved as a "religious-denominational sect" but also subject to criticism "as a race, a civil and social entity".^[38][39] In the introductions to the first through fourth editions of Der Judenspiegel, Marr denied that he intended to preach Jew-hatred, but instead to help "the Jews reach their full human potential" which could happen only "through the downfall of Judaism, a phenomenon that negates everything purely human and noble."^[38]

This use of Semitismus was followed by a coining of "Antisemitismus" which was used to indicate opposition to the Jews as a people^[40] and opposition to the Jewish spirit, which Marr interpreted as infiltrating German culture.

The pamphlet became very popular, and in the same year Marr founded the Antisemiten-Liga (League of Antisemites),^[41] apparently named to follow the "Anti-Kanzler-Liga" (Anti-Chancellor League).^[42] The league was the first German organization committed specifically to combating the alleged threat to Germany and German culture posed by the Jews and their influence and advocating their forced removal from the country.^{[citation needed]}

So far as can be ascertained, the word was first widely printed in 1881, when Marr published Zwanglose Antisemitische Hefte, and Wilhelm Scherer used the term Antisemiten in the January issue of Neue Freie Presse.^{[citation needed]}

The

The word "antisemitism" was borrowed into English from German in 1881. Oxford English Dictionary editor James Murray wrote that it was not included in the first edition because "Anti-Semite and its family were then probably very new in English use, and not thought likely to be more than passing nonce-words... Would that anti-Semitism had had no more than a fleeting interest!"^[44] The related term "philosemitism" was used by 1881.^[45]

From the outset the term "anti-Semitism" bore special racial connotations and meant specifically prejudice against

The term may be spelled with or without a hyphen (antisemitism or anti-Semitism). Many scholars and institutions favor the unhyphenated form.[1]^[50][51][52] Shmuel Almog argued, "If you use the hyphenated form, you consider the words 'Semitism', 'Semite', 'Semitic' as meaningful ... [I]n antisemitic parlance, 'Semites' really stands for Jews, just that."^[53] Emil Fackenheim supported the unhyphenated spelling, in order to "[dispel] the notion that there is an entity 'Semitism' which 'anti-Semitism' opposes."^[54]

Others endorsing an unhyphenated term for the same reason include the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance,^[1] historian Deborah Lipstadt,^[19] Padraic O'Hare, professor of Religious and Theological Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations at Merrimack College; and historians Yehuda Bauer and James Carroll. According to Carroll, who first cites O'Hare and Bauer on "the existence of something called 'Semitism'", "the hyphenated word thus reflects the bipolarity that is at the heart of the problem of antisemitism".^[55]

The

Though the general definition of antisemitism is hostility or prejudice against Jews, and, according to Olaf Blaschke, has become an "umbrella term for negative stereotypes about Jews",^[60]: 18 a number of authorities have developed more formal definitions.

Holocaust scholar and City University of New York professor Helen Fein defines it as "a persisting latent structure of hostile beliefs towards Jews as a collective manifested in individuals as attitudes, and in culture as myth, ideology, folklore and imagery, and in actions—social or legal discrimination, political mobilization against the Jews, and collective or state violence—which results in and/or is designed to distance, displace, or destroy Jews as Jews."^[61]

Elaborating on Fein's definition, Dietz Bering of the University of Cologne writes that, to antisemites, "Jews are not only partially but totally bad by nature, that is, their bad traits are incorrigible. Because of this bad nature: (1) Jews have to be seen not as individuals but as a collective. (2) Jews remain essentially alien in the surrounding societies. (3) Jews bring disaster on their 'host societies' or on the whole world, they are doing it secretly, therefore the anti-Semites feel obliged to unmask the conspiratorial, bad Jewish character."^[62]

For Sonja Weinberg, as distinct from economic and religious anti-Judaism, antisemitism in its modern form shows conceptual innovation, a resort to 'science' to defend itself, new functional forms, and organisational differences. It was anti-liberal, racialist and nationalist. It promoted the myth that Jews conspired to 'judaise' the world; it served to consolidate social identity; it channeled dissatisfactions among victims of the capitalist system; and it was used as a conservative cultural code to fight emancipation and liberalism.^{[60]: 18–19}

Bernard Lewis defined antisemitism as a special case of prejudice, hatred, or persecution directed against people who are in some way different from the rest. According to Lewis, antisemitism is marked by two distinct features: Jews are judged according to a standard different from that applied to others, and they are accused of "cosmic evil". Thus, "it is perfectly possible to hate and even to persecute Jews without necessarily being anti-Semitic" unless this hatred or persecution displays one of the two features specific to antisemitism.^[63]

There have been a number of efforts by international and governmental bodies to define antisemitism formally. The United States Department of State states that "while there is no universally accepted definition, there is a generally clear understanding of what the term encompasses." For the purposes of its 2005 Report on Global Anti-Semitism, the term was considered to mean "hatred toward Jews—individually and as a group—that can be attributed to the Jewish religion and/or ethnicity."^[64]

In 2005, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and

It provides contemporary examples of ways in which antisemitism may manifest itself, including promoting the harming of Jews in the name of an ideology or religion; promoting negative stereotypes of Jews; holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of an individual Jewish person or group; denying the Holocaust or accusing Jews or Israel of exaggerating it; and accusing Jews of dual loyalty or a greater allegiance to Israel than their own country. It also lists ways in which attacking Israel could be antisemitic, and states that denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor, can be a manifestation of antisemitism—as can applying double standards by requiring of Israel a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation, or holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the State of Israel.^[65]

The definition wrong and negative perception of people with Jewish descent has been adopted by the

In 1879, Wilhelm Marr founded the Antisemiten-Liga (Anti-Semitic League).^[79] Identification with antisemitism and as an antisemite was politically advantageous in Europe during the late 19th century. For example, Karl Lueger, the popular mayor of fin de siècle Vienna, skillfully exploited antisemitism as a way of channeling public discontent to his political advantage.^[80] In its 1910 obituary of Lueger, The New York Times notes that Lueger was "Chairman of the Christian Social Union of the Parliament and of the Anti-Semitic Union of the Diet of Lower Austria.^[81] In 1895, A. C. Cuza organized the Alliance Anti-semitique Universelle in Bucharest. In the period before World War II, when animosity towards Jews was far more commonplace, it was not uncommon for a person, an organization, or a political party to self-identify as an antisemite or antisemitic.

The early Zionist pioneer Leon Pinsker, a professional physician, preferred the clinical-sounding term Judeophobia to antisemitism, which he regarded as a misnomer. The word Judeophobia first appeared in his pamphlet "Auto-Emancipation", published anonymously in German in September 1882, where it was described as an irrational fear or hatred of Jews. According to Pinsker, this irrational fear was an inherited predisposition.^[82]

Judeophobia is a form of demonopathy, with the distinction that the Jewish ghost has become known to the whole race of mankind, not merely to certain races... Judeophobia is a psychic disorder. As a psychic disorder, it is hereditary, and as a disease transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable... Thus have Judaism and Jew-hatred passed through history for centuries as inseparable companions... Having analyzed Judeophobia as a hereditary form of demonopathy, peculiar to the human race, and represented Jew-hatred as based upon an inherited aberration of the human mind, we must draw the important conclusion, that we must give up contending against these hostile impulses, just as we give up contending against every other inherited predisposition.^[83]

In the aftermath of the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, German propaganda minister Goebbels announced: "The German people is anti-Semitic. It has no desire to have its rights restricted or to be provoked in the future by parasites of the Jewish race."^[84]

After 1945 victory of the Allies over Nazi Germany, and particularly after the full extent of the Nazi genocide against the Jews became known, the term antisemitism acquired pejorative connotations. This marked a full circle shift in usage, from an era just decades earlier when "Jew" was used as a pejorative term.^[85][86] Yehuda Bauer wrote in 1984: "There are no anti-Semites in the world ... Nobody says, 'I am anti-Semitic.' You cannot, after Hitler. The word has gone out of fashion."^[87]

The study of antisemitism has become politically controversial because of differing interpretations of the Holocaust and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

The contextual approach treats antisemitism as a type of racism and focuses on the historical context in which hatred of Jews emerges.[94] Some contextualists restrict the use of "antisemitism" to refer exclusively to the era of modern racism, treating anti-Judaism as a separate phenomenon.^[95] Historian David Engel has challenged the project to define antisemitism, arguing that it essentializes Jewish history as one of persecution and discrimination.^[96] Engel argues that the term "antisemitism" is not useful in historical analysis because it implies that there are links between anti-Jewish prejudices expressed in different contexts, without evidence of such a connection.^[91]

Antisemitism manifests itself in a variety of ways. René König mentions social antisemitism, economic antisemitism, religious antisemitism, and political antisemitism as examples. König points out that these different forms demonstrate that the "origins of anti-Semitic prejudices are rooted in different historical periods." König asserts that differences in the chronology of different antisemitic prejudices and the irregular distribution of such prejudices over different segments of the population create "serious difficulties in the definition of the different kinds of anti-Semitism."^[97]

These difficulties may contribute to the existence of different taxonomies that have been developed to categorize the forms of antisemitism. The forms identified are substantially the same; it is primarily the number of forms and their definitions that differ.

• Political and economic antisemitism, giving as examples Cicero^[101] and Charles Lindbergh;^[102]
• Theological or religious antisemitism, also called "traditional antisemitism"^[103] and sometimes known as anti-Judaism;^[104]
• Nationalistic antisemitism, citing Voltaire and other Enlightenment thinkers, who attacked Jews for supposedly having certain characteristics, such as greed and arrogance, and for observing customs such as kashrut and Shabbat;^[105]
• Nazis.^[106]

Louis Harap, writing in the 1980s, separated "economic antisemitism" and merges "political" and "nationalistic" antisemitism into "ideological antisemitism". Harap also adds a category of "social antisemitism".^[108]

• Religious (Jew as Christ-killer),
• Economic (Jew as banker, usurer, money-obsessed),
• Social (Jew as social inferior, "pushy", vulgar, therefore excluded from personal contact),
• Racist (Jews as an inferior "race"),
• Ideological (Jews regarded as subversive or revolutionary),
• Cultural (Jews regarded as undermining the moral and structural fiber of civilization).

Although the origins of antisemitism are rooted in the Judeo-Christian conflict, other forms of antisemitism have developed in modern times. Frederick Schweitzer asserts that "most scholars ignore the Christian foundation on which the modern antisemitic edifice rests and invoke political antisemitism, cultural antisemitism, racism or racial antisemitism, economic antisemitism, and the like."[109] William Nicholls draws a distinction between religious antisemitism and modern antisemitism based on racial or ethnic grounds: "The dividing line was the possibility of effective conversion [...] a Jew ceased to be a Jew upon baptism." From the perspective of racial antisemitism, however, "the assimilated Jew was still a Jew, even after baptism.[...] From the Enlightenment onward, it is no longer possible to draw clear lines of distinction between religious and racial forms of hostility towards Jews[...] Once Jews have been emancipated and secular thinking makes its appearance, without leaving behind the old Christian hostility towards Jews, the new term antisemitism becomes almost unavoidable, even before explicitly racist doctrines appear."^[110]

Some Christians such as the Catholic priest Ernest Jouin, who published the first French translation of the Protocols, combined religious and racial antisemitism, as in his statement that "From the triple viewpoint of race, of nationality, and of religion, the Jew has become the enemy of humanity."^[111] The virulent antisemitism of Édouard Drumont, one of the most widely read Catholic writers in France during the Dreyfus Affair, likewise combined religious and racial antisemitism.^{[112][113][114]} Drumont founded the Antisemitic League of France.

The underlying premise of economic antisemitism is that Jews perform harmful economic activities or that economic activities become harmful when they are performed by Jews.^[115]

Linking Jews and money underpins the most damaging and lasting

Derek Penslar writes that there are two components to the financial canards:^[117]

a) Jews are savages that "are temperamentally incapable of performing honest labor"

b) Jews are "leaders of a financial cabal seeking world domination"

Abraham Foxman describes six facets of the financial canards:

1. All Jews are wealthy^[118]
2. Jews are stingy and greedy^[119]
3. Powerful Jews control the business world^[120]
4. Jewish religion emphasizes profit and materialism^[121]
5. It is okay for Jews to cheat non-Jews^[122]
6. Jews use their power to benefit "their own kind"^[123]

Léon Poliakov asserts that economic antisemitism is not a distinct form of antisemitism, but merely a manifestation of theologic antisemitism (because, without the theological causes of economic antisemitism, there would be no economic antisemitism). In opposition to this view, Derek Penslar contends that in the modern era, economic antisemitism is "distinct and nearly constant" but theological antisemitism is "often subdued".^[127]

An academic study by Francesco D'Acunto, Marcel Prokopczuk, and Michael Weber showed that people who live in areas of Germany that contain the most brutal history of antisemitic persecution are more likely to be distrustful of finance in general. Therefore, they tended to invest less money in the stock market and make poor financial decisions. The study concluded, "that the persecution of minorities reduces not only the long-term wealth of the persecuted but of the persecutors as well."^[128]

Racial antisemitism is prejudice against

Racial antisemitism is the idea that the Jews are a distinct and inferior race compared to their host nations. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, it gained mainstream acceptance as part of the eugenics movement, which categorized non-Europeans as inferior. It more specifically claimed that Northern Europeans, or "Aryans", were superior. Racial antisemites saw the Jews as part of a Semitic race and emphasized their non-European origins and culture. They saw Jews as beyond redemption even if they converted to the majority religion.^[131]

Racial antisemitism replaced the hatred of Judaism with the hatred of Jews as a group. In the context of the

According to Viktor Karády, political antisemitism became widespread after the legal emancipation of the Jews and sought to reverse some of the consequences of that emancipation.[140]

Louis Harap defines cultural antisemitism as "that species of anti-Semitism that charges the Jews with corrupting a given culture and attempting to supplant or succeeding in supplanting the preferred culture with a uniform, crude, "Jewish" culture."^[141] Similarly, Eric Kandel characterizes cultural antisemitism as being based on the idea of "Jewishness" as a "religious or cultural tradition that is acquired through learning, through distinctive traditions and education." According to Kandel, this form of antisemitism views Jews as possessing "unattractive psychological and social characteristics that are acquired through acculturation."^[142] Niewyk and Nicosia characterize cultural antisemitism as focusing on and condemning "the Jews' aloofness from the societies in which they live."^[143] An important feature of cultural antisemitism is that it considers the negative attributes of Judaism to be redeemable by education or by religious conversion.^[144]

Starting in the 1990s, some scholars have advanced the concept of

Jewish scholar Gustavo Perednik posited in 2004 that anti-Zionism in itself represents a form of discrimination against Jews, in that it singles out Jewish national aspirations as an illegitimate and racist endeavor, and "proposes actions that would result in the death of millions of Jews".^[153] It is asserted that the new antisemitism deploys traditional antisemitic motifs, including older motifs such as the blood libel.^[152]

Critics of the concept view it as trivializing the meaning of antisemitism, and as exploiting antisemitism in order to silence debate and to deflect attention from legitimate criticism of the State of Israel, and, by associating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, misusing it to taint anyone opposed to Israeli actions and policies.^[154]

Many authors see the roots of modern antisemitism in both pagan antiquity and early Christianity. Jerome Chanes identifies six stages in the historical development of antisemitism:^[155]

1. Pre-Christian anti-Judaism in ancient Greece and Rome which was primarily ethnic in nature
2. Christian antisemitism in antiquity and the Middle Ages which was religious in nature and has extended into modern times
3. Traditional Muslim antisemitism which was—at least, in its classical form—nuanced in that Jews were a protected class
4. Political, social and economic antisemitism of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Europe which laid the groundwork for racial antisemitism
5. Racial antisemitism that arose in the 19th century and culminated in Nazism in the 20th century
6. Contemporary antisemitism which has been labeled by some as the
   New Antisemitism

Chanes suggests that these six stages could be merged into three categories: "ancient antisemitism, which was primarily ethnic in nature;

In the late 6th century CE, the newly Catholicised Visigothic kingdom in Hispania issued a series of anti-Jewish edicts which forbade Jews from marrying Christians, practicing circumcision, and observing Jewish holy days.[170] Continuing throughout the 7th century, both Visigothic kings and the Church were active in creating social aggression and towards Jews with "civic and ecclesiastic punishments",^[171] ranging between forced conversion, slavery, exile and death.^[172]

From the 9th century, the

The Almohads, who had taken control of the Almoravids' Maghribi and Andalusian territories by 1147,^[178] were far more fundamentalist in outlook compared to their predecessors, and they treated the dhimmis harshly. Faced with the choice of either death or conversion, many Jews and Christians emigrated.^{[179][180][181]} Some, such as the family of Maimonides, fled east to more tolerant Muslim lands,^[179] while some others went northward to settle in the growing Christian kingdoms.^[179]

In medieval Europe, Jews were persecuted with blood libels, expulsions, forced conversions and massacres. These persecutions were often justified on religious grounds and reached a first peak during the Crusades. In 1096, hundreds or thousands of Jews were killed during the First Crusade.^[182] This was the first major outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in Christian Europe outside Spain and was cited by Zionists in the 19th century as indicating the need for a state of Israel.^[183]

In 1147, there were several massacres of Jews during the Second Crusade. The Shepherds' Crusades of 1251 and 1320 both involved attacks, as did the Rintfleisch massacres in 1298. Expulsions followed, such as the 1290 banishment of Jews from England, the expulsion of 100,000 Jews from France in 1394,^[184] and the 1421 expulsion of thousands of Jews from Austria. Many of the expelled Jews fled to Poland.^[185]

In medieval and Renaissance Europe, a major contributor to the deepening of antisemitic sentiment and legal action among the Christian populations was the popular preaching of the zealous reform religious orders, the Franciscans (especially

During the mid-to-late 17th century the

European immigrants to the United States brought antisemitism to the country as early as the 17th century. Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, implemented plans to prevent Jews from settling in the city. During the Colonial Era, the American government limited the political and economic rights of Jews. It was not until the American Revolutionary War that Jews gained legal rights, including the right to vote. However, even at their peak, the restrictions on Jews in the United States were never as stringent as they had been in Europe.^[191]

In the

Enlightenment

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In 1744, Archduchess of Austria

Under the French Second Empire, the popular counter-revolutionary Catholic journalist Louis Veuillot propagated Bonald's arguments against the Jewish "financial aristocracy" along with vicious attacks against the Talmud and the Jews as a "deicidal people" driven by hatred to "enslave" Christians.^[206][205] Between 1882 and 1886 alone, French priests published twenty antisemitic books blaming France's ills on the Jews and urging the government to consign them back to the ghettos, expel them, or hang them from the gallows.^[205] Gougenot des Mousseaux's Le Juif, le judaïsme et la judaïsation des peuples chrétiens (1869) has been called a "Bible of modern antisemitism" and was translated into German by Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg.^[205]

Thousands of Jews were slaughtered by Cossack

At the time of the Dreyfus trial in France, "Muslim comments usually favoured the persecuted Jew against his Christian persecutors".[214]

In 1850, the German composer Richard Wagner – who has been called "the inventor of modern antisemitism"^[215] – published Das Judenthum in der Musik (roughly "Jewishness in Music"^[215]) under a pseudonym in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. The essay began as an attack on Jewish composers, particularly Wagner's contemporaries, and rivals, Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer, but expanded to accuse Jews of being a harmful and alien element in German culture, who corrupted morals and were, in fact, parasites incapable of creating truly "German" art. The crux was the manipulation and control by the Jews of the money economy:^[215]

According to the present constitution of this world, the Jew in truth is already more than emancipated: he rules, and will rule, so long as Money remains the power before which all our doings and our dealings lose their force.^[215]

Although originally published anonymously, when the essay was republished 19 years later, in 1869, the concept of the corrupting Jew had become so widely held that Wagner's name was affixed to it.^[215]

Antisemitism can also be found in many of the Grimms' Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, published from 1812 to 1857. It is mainly characterized by Jews being the villain of a story, such as in "The Good Bargain" ("Der gute Handel") and "The Jew Among Thorns" ("Der Jude im Dorn").

The middle 19th century saw continued official harassment of the Jews, especially in Eastern Europe under Czarist influence. For example, in 1846, 80 Jews approached the governor in Warsaw to retain the right to wear their traditional dress but were immediately rebuffed by having their hair and beards forcefully cut, at their own expense.^[216]

Even such influential figures as Walt Whitman tolerated bigotry toward the Jews in America. During his time as editor of the Brooklyn Eagle (1846–1848), the newspaper published historical sketches casting Jews in a bad light.^[217]

The

Others argue that Marx consistently supported Prussian Jewish communities' struggles to achieve equal political rights. These scholars argue that "On the Jewish Question" is a critique of Bruno Bauer's arguments that Jews must convert to Christianity before being emancipated, and is more generally a critique of liberal rights discourses and capitalism.[229]^{[230][231][232]} Iain Hamphsher-Monk wrote that "This work [On The Jewish Question] has been cited as evidence for Marx's supposed anti-semitism, but only the most superficial reading of it could sustain such an interpretation."^[233]

David McLellan and Francis Wheen argue that readers should interpret On the Jewish Question in the deeper context of Marx's debates with Bruno Bauer, author of The Jewish Question, about Jewish emancipation in Germany. Wheen says that "Those critics, who see this as a foretaste of 'Mein Kampf', overlook one, essential point: in spite of the clumsy phraseology and crude stereotyping, the essay was actually written as a defense of the Jews. It was a retort to Bruno Bauer, who had argued that Jews should not be granted full civic rights and freedoms unless they were baptised as Christians".^[234] According to McLellan, Marx used the word Judentum colloquially, as meaning commerce, arguing that Germans must be emancipated from the capitalist mode of production not Judaism or Jews in particular. McLellan concludes that readers should interpret the essay's second half as "an extended pun at Bauer's expense".^[235]

Between 1900 and 1924, approximately 1.75 million Jews migrated to America, the bulk from Eastern Europe escaping

killed in pogroms.^[238]

In Germany, shortly after

In September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws prohibited sexual relations and marriages between "Aryans" and Jews as Rassenschande ("race disgrace") and stripped all German Jews, even quarter- and half-Jews, of their citizenship (their official title became "subjects of the state").^[242] It instituted a pogrom on the night of 9–10 November 1938, dubbed Kristallnacht, in which Jews were killed, their property destroyed and their synagogues torched.^[243] Antisemitic laws, agitation and propaganda were extended to German-occupied Europe in the wake of conquest, often building on local antisemitic traditions.

In 1940, the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh and many prominent Americans led the America First Committee in opposing any involvement in a European war. Lindbergh alleged that Jews were pushing America to go to war against Germany.^{[244][245][246]} Lindbergh adamantly denied being antisemitic, and yet he refers numerous times in his private writings – his letters and diary – to Jewish control of the media being used to pressure the U.S. to get involved in the European war. In one diary entry in November 1938, he responded to Kristallnacht by writing "I do not understand these riots on the part of the Germans. ... They have undoubtedly had a difficult Jewish problem, but why is it necessary to handle it so unreasonably?", acknowledgement on Lindbergh's part that he agreed with the Nazis that Germany had a "Jewish problem".^[247] An article by Jonathan Marwil in Antisemitism, A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution claims that "no one who ever knew Lindbergh thought him antisemitic" and that claims of his antisemitism were solely tied to the remarks he made in that one speech.^[248]

In the east the Third Reich forced Jews into ghettos in Warsaw, in Kraków, in Lvov, in Lublin and in Radom.^[249] After the beginning of the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1941, a campaign of mass murder, conducted by the Einsatzgruppen, culminated from 1942 to 1945 in systematic genocide: the Holocaust.^[250] Eleven million Jews were targeted for extermination by the Nazis, and some six million were eventually killed.^{[250][251][252]}

There have continued to be antisemitic incidents since WWII, some of which had been state-sponsored. In the

In the 20th century, Soviet and Russian antisemitism underwent significant transformations, shaped by political, social, and ideological shifts. During the early Soviet period, the Bolsheviks initially condemned antisemitism, seeing it as incompatible with Marxist ideology. However, under Joseph Stalin's regime, antisemitism reemerged, often cloaked in 'anti-Zionist' rhetoric. As early as 1943, Stalin and his propagandists intensified attacks against Jews as "rootless cosmopolitans".^[255] The Party issued confidential directives to fire Jews from positions of power, but state-controlled media did not openly attack Jews until the late 1940s.^[255] The Doctors' Plot of 1952, a fabricated conspiracy accusing predominantly Jewish doctors of attempting to assassinate Soviet leaders, exemplified this resurgence. This campaign fostered widespread antisemitic sentiments and resulted in the arrest and execution of numerous Jewish professionals.

In that same year, the antisemitic Slánský show trial alleged the existence of an 'international Zionist conspiracy' to destroy Socialism. Izabella Tabarovsky, a scholar of the history of antisemitism, argues that, "Manufactured by the Soviet secret services, the trial tied together Zionism, Israel, Jewish leaders, and American imperialism, turning 'Zionism' and 'Zionist' into dangerous labels that could be used against one's political enemies."^[256] In the post-Stalin era, state-sanctioned antisemitism persisted and intensified.In February of 1953, the Soviet Union severed diplomatic relations with the State of Israel and "soon the state media was saturated with anti-Zionist propaganda, depicting bloated, hook-nosed Jewish bankers and all-consuming serpents embossed with the Star of David."^[257] The 1963 publication of the antisemitic book Judaism Without Embellishment, written under orders from the central Soviet government, echoed Nazi propaganda, alleging a global Jewish conspiracy to subvert the Soviet Union.^[256] It was the beginning of a new wave of government-sponsored anti-Semitism.

The Six-Day War in 1967 led to an intensification in Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda as the Soviets had backed the defeated Arab states.^[256] This propaganda often blurred the lines with antisemitism, leading to discriminatory policies against Jews and restricting their emigration. By the end of the war, "the "corporate Jew", whether "cosmopolitan" or "Zionist", became identified as the enemy. Popular anti-Semitic stereotyping had been absorbed into official channels, generated by chauvinist needs and totalitarian requirements."^[258] The Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public shut down and expropriated synagogues, yeshivas, and Jewish civil organisations and prohibited the learning of Hebrew. It also engaged in a wide-scale propaganda campaign between 1967 and 1988 overseen by the KGB and published pamphlets featuring antisemitic conspiracy theories, for example falsely claiming that Zionist Jews collaborated with the Nazi regime in the Holocaust and of inflating the significance and scale of anti-Jewish persecution.^[256]

Their propaganda frequently borrowed directly from the forged

Physical assaults against Jews in Europe have included beatings, stabbings, and other violence, which increased markedly, sometimes resulting in serious injury and death.^[262][263] A 2015 report by the US State Department on religious freedom declared that "European anti-Israel sentiment crossed the line into anti-Semitism."^[264]

This rise in antisemitic attacks is associated with both Muslim antisemitism and the rise of far-right political parties as a result of the economic crisis of 2008.^[265] This rise in the support for far-right ideas in western and eastern Europe has resulted in the increase of antisemitic acts, mostly attacks on Jewish memorials, synagogues and cemeteries but also a number of physical attacks against Jews.^[266]

In Eastern Europe the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the instability of the new states brought the rise of nationalist movements and the accusation against Jews for the economic crisis, taking over the local economy and bribing the government, along with traditional and religious motives for antisemitism such as blood libels. Writing on the rhetoric surrounding the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Jason Stanley relates these perceptions to broader historical narratives: "the dominant version of antisemitism alive in parts of eastern Europe today is that Jews employ the Holocaust to seize the victimhood narrative from the 'real' victims of the Nazis, who are Russian Christians (or other non-Jewish eastern Europeans)".^[267] He calls out the "myths of contemporary eastern European antisemitism – that a global cabal of Jews were (and are) the real agents of violence against Russian Christians and the real victims of the Nazis were not the Jews, but rather this group."^[267]

Most of the antisemitic incidents in Eastern Europe are against Jewish cemeteries and buildings (community centers and synagogues). Nevertheless, there were several violent attacks against Jews in Moscow in 2006 when a neo-Nazi stabbed 9 people at the Bolshaya Bronnaya Synagogue,

According to Paul Johnson, antisemitic policies are a sign of a state which is poorly governed.^[272] While no European state currently has such policies, the Economist Intelligence Unit notes the rise in political uncertainty, notably populism and nationalism, as something that is particularly alarming for Jews.^[273]

Robert Bernstein, founder of Human Rights Watch, says that antisemitism is "deeply ingrained and institutionalized" in "Arab nations in modern times".^[274]

In a 2011 survey by the Pew Research Center, all of the Muslim-majority Middle Eastern countries polled held significantly negative opinions of Jews. In the questionnaire, only 2% of Egyptians, 3% of Lebanese Muslims, and 2% of Jordanians reported having a positive view of Jews. Muslim-majority countries outside the Middle East similarly held markedly negative views of Jews, with 4% of Turks and 9% of Indonesians viewing Jews favorably.^[275]

According to a 2011 exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, United States, some of the dialogue from Middle East media and commentators about Jews bear a striking resemblance to

Muslim clerics in the Middle East have frequently referred to Jews as descendants of apes and pigs, which are conventional epithets for Jews and Christians.[278]^[279][280]

According to professor

After the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October, antisemitism and anti-Jewish hate crimes around the world increased significantly.^{[282][283][284]} Multiple universities and university officials have been accused of systemic antisemitism.^{[285][286][287]} On 1 May 2024, the United States House of Representatives voted 320-91 in favour of adopting a bill enshrining the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism into law.^[288] The bill was opposed by some who claimed it conflated criticism of Israel with antisemitism, while Jewish advocacy groups like the American Jewish Committee and World Jewish Congress generally supported it in response to the increase in antisemitic incidents on university campuses.^[289][290] An open letter by 1,200 Jewish professors opposed the proposal.^[291]

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In 2022, the

Black Hebrew Israelites believe that Jewish people are "imposters", who have "stolen" Black Americans' true racial and religious identity.[293] Black Hebrew Israelites promote the Khazar theory about Ashkenazi Jewish origins.^[293] In 2019, 4% of African-Americans self-identified as being Black Hebrew Israelites.^[292]

Antisemitism has been explained in terms of racism, xenophobia, projected guilt, displaced aggression, and the search for a scapegoat.^[297]

Antisemitism scholar Lars Fischer writes that "scholars distinguish between theories that assume an actual causal (rather than merely coincidental) correlation between what (some) Jews do and antisemitic perceptions (correspondence theories), on the one hand, and those predicated on the notion that no such causal correlation exists and that 'the Jews' serve as a foil for the projection of antisemitic assumptions, on the other."^[298] The latter position is exemplified by Theodor W. Adorno, who wrote that 'Anti-Semitism is the rumour about Jews'.^[299][300]

As an example of the correspondence theory, an 1894 book by Bernard Lazare questions whether Jews themselves were to blame for some antisemitic stereotypes, for instance arguing that Jews traditionally keeping strictly to their own communities, with their own practices and laws, led to a perception of Jews as anti-social; he later abandoned this belief and the book is considered antisemitic today.^{[301][302][303]} As another example, Walter Laqueur suggested that the antisemitic perception of Jewish people as greedy (as often used in stereotypes of Jews) probably evolved in Europe during medieval times where a large portion of money lending was operated by Jews.^[304] Among factors thought to contribute to this situation include that Jews were restricted from other professions,^[304] while the Christian Church declared for their followers that money lending constituted immoral "usury",^[305] although recent scholarship, such as that of historian Julie Mell shows that Jews were not overrepresented in the sector and that the stereotype was founded in Christian projection of taboo behaviour on to the minority.^{[298][306][307]}

In Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013), historian

1. The idea that Jews have collectively failed some crucial test (e.g. they rejected Jesus, or Mohammed, or do not have the Aryans' capacity for 'culture', or do not satisfy Stalin's criteria for being a 'nation', or lack a mystical 'connection to the land', etc);
2. The idea that Jews cause pollution – for instance that they are poisoning the water supply, or that they desecrate holy sites and artefacts – which is often extended, semi-metaphorically, to the idea that Jews are pollution/vermin/rotten/cancer etc.;
3. Blood libels, the classic one being that Jews kidnap and murder non-Jewish children and consume their blood in religious rituals;
4. The incorporation of an entity called 'The Jews' deeply into the fabric of many cultures as the eternal enemy bent on destroying whatever that culture values; and
5. Conspiracy theories, especially theories that 'The Jews' are secretly 'behind' the events of history and current affairs.

British medievalist historian Richard Landes has further argued that,

This Pattern, Deutsch observes, is always present, but is most likely to cause persecution, expulsions and mass murder when there is a serious threat it, to the legitimacy of hurting Jews. Such a threat appeared when Europeans, previously Pattern-compliant in their belief in Jewish deicide, became 'Enlightened,' and so had difficulty blaming the Jews for killing a God in which they no longer believed.^[310] The key to people's behavior in this regard, he argues, is the need to preserve the legitimacy of hurting Jews, for being Jews. This legitimacy is much more important than actually hurting Jews. And it targets only the Jews. It is not, accordingly, either a hatred or a fear, a form of racism or prejudice in the conventional sense, even though it can lead to those feelings and attitudes. But it is actually unique. No other group can substitute for the Jews as the target whom it is legitimate to hurt.^[311]

Education plays an important role in addressing and overcoming prejudice and countering social discrimination.^[312] However, education is not only about challenging the conditions of intolerance and ignorance in which antisemitism manifests itself; it is also about building a sense of global citizenship and solidarity, respect for, and enjoyment of diversity and the ability to live peacefully together as active, democratic citizens. Education equips learners with the knowledge to identify antisemitism and biased or prejudiced messages and raises awareness about the forms, manifestations, and impact of antisemitism faced by Jews and Jewish communities.^[312]

Some Jewish writers have argued that public education about antisemitism through the prism of the Holocaust is unhelpful at best or actively deepening antisemitism at worst. Dara Horn wrote in The Atlantic that "Auschwitz is not a metaphor", arguing "That the Holocaust drives home the importance of love is an idea, like the idea that Holocaust education prevents anti-Semitism, that seems entirely unobjectionable. It is entirely objectionable. The Holocaust didn't happen because of a lack of love. It happened because entire societies abdicated responsibility for their own problems, and instead blamed them on the people who represented—have always represented, since they first introduced the idea of commandedness to the world—the thing they were most afraid of: responsibility."^[313]

Instead, she argues that perhaps "a more effective way to address anti-Semitism might lie in cultivating a completely different quality, one that happens to be the key to education itself: curiosity. Why use Jews as a means to teach people that we're all the same, when the demand that Jews be just like their neighbors is exactly what embedded the mental virus of anti-Semitism in the Western mind in the first place? Why not instead encourage inquiry about the diversity, to borrow a de rigueur word, of the human experience?"^[314]

A March 2008 report by the

In August 2024, the Israeli Ministry of the Diaspora announced a new antisemitism monitoring project.[319]^[320] The goal of the project is to measure levels of antisemitism in various countries, as well as identify instigators and trends.^[319] In the event that antisemitism in a given country gets bad, the Israeli government may reach out to the local government to try to rectify the situation.^[319]