Kate Jones

Historian Raoul Hilberg has summed up the pattern of anti-Semitism as follows:

12th century Crusades – “You have no right to live amongst us as Jews”.

16th century ghettos – “You have no right to live amongst us”.

20th century Nazis – “You have no right to live”.

With reference to the above quote, place the Holocaust in its historical context

This essay will examine the rise of anti-Semitism from ancient times to the Holocaust in Germany in the 1930s and 40s.  This essay will examine the origins of anti-Semitism, the rise of Zionism and the role of Nazi Germany in the persecution and extermination of the Jews.  It was also acknowledge that the end of Nazism did not mean the end of anti-Semitism by looking at more recent examples of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.

The Jewish people have been persecuted throughout history.  Judaism originated in about 1600BCE when Abraham founded the first monotheistic faith in the ancient Babylonian Empire.  Before this time polytheistic faiths were normal.  Legend has it that God made an offer to Abraham that if he would leave his home and his family then God would make him a great nation and bless him.  Abraham accepted this offer and the Jewish people were established ().  In 722BCE, the Assyrians invaded what was then the Jewish people’s homeland. They practised polytheism and did not agree with the Jewish idea of monotheism.  This led to the Jews being persecuted and forced away from their homeland.  In 301BCE, the Greeks invaded, followed by the Romans in 63BCE.  Again both these peoples did not agree with the Jewish idea of worshipping one God so the Jews felt compelled to flee further away from Palestine.  This is known as the Diaspora and leads to the idea of “the wandering Jew”.  By 1500BE, the Jews had spread throughout Europe, North Africa and parts of southern Arabia and many cities had big Jewish populations (class notes 2010).   During the Middle Ages anti-Semitism in Europe was based on religious hostility, the Jews were viewed with suspicion and blamed for the death of Christ and for not accepting Christianity.  Medieval Europe saw Jews forced to live in ghettos and in Venice in 1516, the world’s first ghetto was established, confining and segregating them and prohibiting the jobs they were allowed to do.  The conditions were harsh, their property could be destroyed and they faced threats of violence but the Jews survived and built up a thriving community ( 2010).  This sense of community, stemming from their shared experience of persecution, meant that most Jews kept a strong sense of ethnic identity regardless of where they lived but meant that they stayed as outsiders and scapegoats (Farmer, A.,  2009, pp 14-15).  However by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Western Europe many countries had accepted Jews and they were integrated into society and indeed, in 1871 the new German Empire gave Jews total civil equality (ibid pp 16).  

However, political conditions in Europe after 1870 saw much disruption as newly independent nations emerged who fought against supposed threats from minority groups living within them.  This included the Jews who were seen as aliens and extrinsic.   It was against this backdrop that Wilhelm Marr, a German journalist, invented the phrase “anti-Semitism” in the 1870s.  Previously, anti-Jewish sentiment had been largely based on religion, but Marr’s concept was focussed on biological descent.  Marr thought that Jews had corrupted society, dominated business and ruled cultural life bringing about an ongoing struggle between the Jews and native Germans.  This idea of the biological threat of Jews to the German nation was further argued by Eugen Duhring, an economist and philosopher, who felt that Jews infiltrated society causing harm, even if they were not practising members of the faith and said “...I return therefore to the hypothesis that the Jews are to be defined solely on the basis of race, and not of the basis of religion” (Cohn-Sherbok, D., 2003. pp 273-274).  This marked a turning point in the rise of anti-Semitism as the persecution was no longer based on religion, but race.  In Germany the idea of “Volk” or Germans being the superior master race, gave rise to a militant form of nationalism.  In their eyes, the Jews stood for all that “volkisch” ideologies despised: liberalism, socialism, pacifism and modernism (Farmer, A., 2009. pp17).  By the late nineteenth century, despite only making up one percent of the German population, the Jews in Germany were regarded as a problem.  Increasing economic and social change easily encouraged those affected by this transformation in society, the peasant farmers, shopkeepers and skilled workers, to blame the Jews for all that was wrong in Germany. However, despite the presence of anti-Semitism in Germany, Jews here were more favourably treated than those in France or Russia where pogroms and legal discrimination were the norm (ibid pp 18-19).

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The rise in anti-Semitism at this time corresponded with a rise in Zionism or Jewish nationalism.  Pogroms in Russia in the 1880s had forced many Jews to emigrate.  Many ended up in the United States but several thousand also went to Palestine where they became shopkeepers and craftsmen.  Other Jews, combining Marxist ideals with ardent Jewish nationalism, became farmers and labourers.  It was during this time that Leon Pinsker (1821-91), a famous Russian physician, published his significant work “Autoemancipation”, which called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine which would secure the liberation for the Jewry.  By ...

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