Anti-Semitism

This a series of posts explores anti-Semitism, its origins, the motivations behind it, its various manifestations, its consequences, and its possible future. The series also proposes a method for determining when an act or statement is anti-Semitic and concludes with some suggestions for remedying the consequences of anti-Semitism. A series of discussion questions is also included.

Review of the previous post.

The previous post, post number 4 of 33, was the third of four posts discussing an overview of anti-Semitism and continues the discussion.

Preview of this post.

This post, post number 5 of 33, and the fourth of four posts discussing an overview of anti-Semitism, continues the discussion.

As can be understood from the foregoing posts, it appears that while Jews might have been considered different as long as 1000 years B.C.E., the concept of difference was not considered hatred until those in position to do so in Christianity interpreted its Bible as teaching and commanding anti-Judaism (which while different from anti-Semitism, forms a base from which someone hating Jews can move to anti-Semitism). “Difference” mutated into “hated” at that time, and the mutant hatred finally bred a Holocaust in the twentieth Century and continues to fester in other forms even as this essay is being written.

This anti-Semitism has also been used by governments and individuals seeking to gain power as a means for inciting people to follow them to solve the problems of their society (such as unemployment, inflation, foreign conquest, etc) which these individuals identified as being caused by Jews. One example of this is the mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, who played on latent anti-Semitism to whip up crowds and enhance his popularity. Of course, the most virulent example of this is Hitler’s use of the fears of the German people regarding jobs, economics^[1], degradation and humiliation at the hands of the Allies after WW I to enhance his own power by blaming the Jews for all the woes of the German citizen and thus whipping up support for his Nazi party who would cleanse the German population of such vermin and inferior beings who were preying on the German people, diluting the supreme nature of those people, taking their jobs, taking over industries, economically depressing them, and working with the enemies of Germany to overthrow the German Nation. The anti-Semitism was already there, the fears of the common people (unemployment, inflation, conquest by a foreign power, fears of loss of sovereign territory, humiliation, the feeling of helplessness and degradation) were already there, Hitler simply used, enhanced, modified and focused the combination of fear and anti-Semitism for his own purposes whereby he used fear that the Jews (and those whom the Jews represented) were out to subjugate the German people and had already begun this process in order to gain control of the government headed by a weak leader so it was weak and unable to resist these forces, so he could represent his Nazi party as the strong force that could stop this march of the Jews to conquer Germany and the world and protect Germany and its people from the forces that wanted to destroy, deprive, degrade, humiliate and conquer the once-proud but now degraded and humiliated and weakly-led German people; the Nazi party was the party of the common German and should replace the current weak government who allowed this catastrophe to occur so the Nazi party could, and would, be a strong and vigorous champion of the cause of Germany against its enemies, who were specifically identifiable as the Jews, with the word “Jew” being used as a shorthand notation for a composite person who embodied all the myths, stereotypes and character traits of everything and everyone that was hated and feared by the common German of the 1920’s – 1930’s^[2].

Preview of the next post.

The next post, post number 6 of 33, is the first of two posts discussing Jews’ fear of assimilation as being one reason for the rise of anti-Semitism.

[1] The crash of the American stock market in 1929 was felt all over the world, including in Germany and caused unemployment like other countries, including the US, falling commodity prices and shrinking markets. These economic difficulties created high taxes, increased tariffs, cuts in government spending and deflationary policies, all of which caused great pain to the common German thereby making him quite receptive to an argument that his pain was caused by a weak government as well as outside forces from “others” (as represented by the “Jews”); and receptive to someone, or some party (Nazi) that was strong and would cure these ills in a way that the previous government did, and could, not.

[2] Of course, it is one thing to prey on fear for one’s own purposes, and it is quite another thing to incite people to commit, or at least allow, murder and genocide of the object identified as the source of the problem that is causing the fear. Thus, the question of how Hitler and his Nazis moved the German people (or how they moved themselves or allowed the Nazis to move them) from simply fearing, and even perhaps hating, those people whom Hitler identified as the source of the problems causing the fear to murdering and exterminating all of those people, is well beyond the scope of this essay. Attention is directed to books such as Why the Germans? Why the Jews?: Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust (Götz Aly and Jefferson S. Chase, Metropolitan Books, New York 2015) which discuss this issue in great detail.