Anti-Semitism Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Semites are both Jews and Arabs who emerged from a common ancestral and geographical setting in the Middle East. However, anti-Semitism refers specifically to prejudice against Jews as a relig ious, ethnic, or racial body. It can include a wide range of attitudes and expressions, from individual hostility to legal discrimination and violence against Jews as a group.

Like so many stereotypes, anti-Semitism is based on a myth—one with the power to influence individual attitudes toward Jews and their place in society and, collectively, to impact the larger culture. It has no basis in fact or reason, but its acolytes make vague references to historical or pseudoscientific genetic arguments in support of their prejudices. Accusations against Jews of two millennia ago, or toward some individual Jew today, are portrayed as the collective responsibility of all Jews as a people, who must be punished by strong measures, up to and including genocide.

Religious anti-Semitism attacks Jews as being responsible for the death of Jesus, and for practicing their minority faith, which is portrayed as the devil’s product. It promises a cessation of persecution if Jews give up their faith and assimilate into an approved religion.

Racial anti-Semitism identifies Jews as a genetically distinct race. They are an innately subhuman race that can never assimilate with the superior culture but conspire to pollute the more advanced Aryan race and control the world, its government, and its economy. They must be stopped at all costs. A recent variant is geographic, based in opposition to Zionism and the existence of the state of Israel. Radical Islam and its allies use motifs from anti-Semitic Europe in pursuit of their political goals. All forms of anti-Semitism have been used to justify discrimination and persecution of Jews.

Origins

The term anti-Semitism was concocted by German agitator Wilhelm Marr in about 1880 to indicate hatred of the Jews. Marr favored their forced expulsion from German soil. Jews had faced persecution, enslavement, and dispersion for their monotheism since ancient times. Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, and Alexandrine Greece were early conquerors. However, modern anti-Semitism had its origins in the Roman Empire. In protecting their rituals and beliefs from the Romans, the Jews raised several rebellions against Roman rule, which gave them the reputation of agitators who were threats to imperial stability. When the Romans finally defeated the Jews in 70 CE, their temple was razed, and they were dispersed throughout the empire.

Shortly before this, Jesus preached and died as a Jew living under Roman rule. He was tried in a Jewish court for blasphemy and turned over to the Romans for punishment, which the Roman governor decreed would be execution. By the fourth century the belief emerged among Christians that Jews who were not followers of Jesus were willful unbelievers in the truth, and responsible for his death. After the Emperor Constantine I began the process that made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, this belief was translated into persecution.

During the Middle Ages, nontoleration became a cornerstone of religious policy, and Jews were increasingly identified as usurers and punished in many ways for their refusal to convert, culminating in the violence and murder committed by mobs against various Jewish communities during eight Crusades (intermittently from 1096–1273). In 1215, Pope Innocent III decreed that Jews were to wear a special badge to mark their inferior status whenever they went out. In 1242, Pope Gregory IX was persuaded by an investigating committee of Paris theologians to denounce the Talmud—a fourth-century commentary on rabbinic tradition, Jewish life, and law—as blasphemous and ordered all copies to be burned. Urban Jews were forced to live in special areas, or ghettos, and they were restricted in economic and social life; some of these restrictions lasted until the end of the nineteenth century. As early as 1144, charges were brought against Jews of blood libel, the supposed Jewish drinking of blood of murdered Christian children. When the Black Death swept Europe in the fourteenth century, rumors spread that the Jews were the cause of the plague, and many were massacred. During the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, German theologian and religious reformer Martin Luther, disappointed that the Jews would not convert to his religious views, denounced them as severely as he denounced medieval popes, calling for their property to be confiscated and for their expulsion.

Later Developments

Under Napoleonic rule, following the French Revolution (1789–1799), Jews were offered the opportunity to participate fully in European political, economic, and social life. The defeat of Napoleon in 1815 brought such advances to a temporary halt, but by 1870 many nations of western Europe granted full citizenship to all Jews. However, anti-Semitism lingered. In 1893 Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army, was falsely convicted of treason by a military court. The evidence against Dreyfus had been faked by two fellow officer, and his conviction was supported by leading French conservatives in the army, the Catholic Church, and anti-Semitic writers, such as Edouard Drumont. The efforts of the noted author, Émile Zola, played a central role in reversing Dreyfus’ unjust conviction in 1899, although it took another seven years for him to be restored to the French army. If the Dreyfus affair indicated that anti-Semitism was not eradicated, it came at a time when the conditions of life for most Jews in western Europe had vastly improved.

Destruction of property and massacres of Jews, called pogroms, began in Russia in 1881.The pogroms were instigated by the government to divert the discontent of dissatisfied workers and peasants toward the usual convenient scapegoats, the Jews. Tsarist agents produced a notorious forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to reveal a secret Jewish plot to dominate the world. This work emerged in the United States, where anti-Semitism was so strong in some powerful quarters that it became a factor in blocking the immigration of Jews from Europe to the United States, which Nazi leader Adolf Hitler seemed willing to allow until shortly before World War II (1939–1945) began.

The most virulent and systematically organized form of government-sponsored racial anti-Semitism emerged in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. Following a pattern of gradual escalation, the regime passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which removed Jews from the protection of German law. Jews were excluded from German public life, including business and education, intermarriage with Germans was prohibited, their property was seized, and finally they were imprisoned and forced into slave labor or murdered outright in death camps. As Nazi forces conquered other nations, the Jews in the rest of Europe were doomed, and by 1945 an estimated six million Jews were massacred, executed, or starved to death.

Current Anti-Semitism

After the war, the exposure of the death camps led to the framing of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and a series of trials of former Nazis complicit in mass murder. Christian religious leaders also have made efforts to end religious anti-Semitism.

Still, the racial variety persists today, perpetuated by Holocaust deniers, small gangs, and tiny political parties in many parts of the non-Muslim world. In the Middle East, geographic anti-Semitism is encouraged by governments seeking the destruction of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. This is intertwined with the activities of Muslim extremists who denounce the Judeo-Christian West.

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