Antisemitism
Nazi anti-Semitism, 1933
Antisemitism, in the broadest sense of the term, refers to hostility towards Jews based on a combination of religious, racial, cultural and ethnic prejudices. In a narrow sense, Anti-Semitism is a specific form of racism, since it refers to hostility towards Jews, defined as a race, a modern conception that would have emerged in the mid-19th century; It should not be confused with anti-Judaism, which is hostility to Jews defined as a religious group and whose most developed expression would be Christian anti-Judaism. Pierre-André Taguieff, for his part, proposes to include all the manifestations of hostility, aversion and hatred towards the Jews that have occurred throughout history under the term Judeophobia.
Anti-Semitism can manifest itself in many forms: as individual hatred or discrimination, attacks by groups nucleated for that purpose, or even through police or state violence.
As Michel Wieviorka has pointed out, “anti-Semitism is the problem of all democrats, of all humanists, it is not just a problem of Jews. And the same is true of all other forms of racism."
The meeting that since 2020 has been held under the auspices of the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem of a group of academics from around the world to make a critical evaluation of the IHRA definition and try to clarify aspects of it that cause confusion and concern, proposes, together with five guidelines of a general nature and 10 related to Israel and Palestine, dated March 25, 2021, the following definition of anti-Semitism:
“Anti-Semitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews because of the fact that they are Jews (or against Jewish institutions for being Jewish)”The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism
The birth of the term “antisemitism” in the 19th century
Although the etymology of the term anti-Semitism could imply that it is a prejudice against Semitic peoples in general, the term is used exclusively to refer to hostility against Jews. In order to avoid confusion in reference to other peoples speaking Semitic languages, some authors prefer the use of unambiguous equivalent terms, such as Judeophobia or anti-Jewish, reserving antisemitism for use in historical references to anti-Jewish ideologies of the second half of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century.
The adjective Semitic was coined by the German orientalist August Ludwig von Schlözer in volume VIII of Repertorium für biblische und morgenländische Literatur by J. G. Eichhorn, published in 1781. But Schlözer does not refer to a race —a concept that had appeared fifty years before by the work of the Frenchman Henri de Boulainvilliers who tried to demonstrate the superiority of the "race" Frankish or Germanic about the Gallo-Roman race—but to a group of languages called Semitic—Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic, among others—, which would be those spoken by the descendants of Noah's son, Shem, father of Abraham and ancestor of Eber —the Hebrews—, as well as Yoqtan, ancestor of various peoples of Arabia. This meaning of the word Semitic was used in the XIX century, by other linguists such as German Max Müller, professor at the University of Oxford between 1850 and 1876, who continued to distinguish two types of languages: Semitic and "Aryan", a word he used instead of the Indo-European term, which was the one that would end up prevailing. But at no time did these authors identify language groups with ethnic groups or "races".
However, in the middle of the XIX century, a shift began from the linguistic to the racial concept, that is, from the notion of Semitic languages to that of "race" Semite opposed to the "race" Indo-European or Aryan, all linked to the birth of racism. Between 1853 and 1855, the Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau published his Essay on the inequality of human races, which is the book that inaugurated racism —although Gobineau was not an anti-Semite— and in 1855, the Frenchman Ernest Renan published in Paris Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques, in which he affirms that the Semitic peoples are inferior to the Aryan peoples, for which reason he advocates purifying Christianity of all its Semitic elements., Semitic came into use in the mid-XIX century to designate the speaking peoples of the Semitic languages and their cultural achievements. Despite lacking any ethnic basis, and as with the term Aryan, the word Semite was transferred from its original linguistic meaning to a new racial meaning.
The term antisemitism appeared shortly after, in 1873, by the work of the German journalist Wilhelm Marr. He uses it to disqualify the Jews, defined as an ethnic group, as a 'race', not as the followers of a certain religion, so for Marr and all subsequent anti-Semites the Jews were still Jews even if they converted to Christianity, which differentiated anti-Semitism from the traditional anti-Judaism defended by Christianity since its inception —a Jew converted to Christianity ceased to be a Jew and became a Christian. As many authors have pointed out, resorting to the word "antisemitism" to designate the racial rejection of the Jews "it does not fail to present an internal contradiction: anti-Semitism is directed solely against the Jews, when, strictly speaking, the Arabs are just as Semitic as the Jews&# 34;.
Marr developed the new concept of antisemitism in his book published in 1879 Zwanglose Antisemitische Hefte (and Wilhelm Scherer used the term Antisemiten that same year > in Neue Freie Presse ), although he first used it in an anti-Semitic pamphlet calling for hostility against Jews devoid of any religious connotation. Marr's pamphlet, published in Berne, was very successful (twelve editions in the same year) and a few months later he would found the League of Anti-Semites ( Antisemitenliga ).
In 1886, one of the most powerful anti-Semitic books was published in France, La France juive, essai d'histoire contemporaine by Edouard Drumont, in which race was pointed out &# 34;lower" of the Jews who intends to dominate the "Aryan race", as the one responsible for all the evils that France and the West are suffering. To spread his anti-Semitic ideas more widely, Drumont, a fervent Catholic, founded a newspaper, La libre parole, which would have a special role when the Dreyfus affair broke out in the final decade of the century XIX.
In 1905 the best-known anti-Semitic libel appeared, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, drawn up by a Tsarist police agent, which powerfully influenced My struggle of Adolf Hitler, who proposed a final solution to the Jewish problem.
The birth of anti-Semitism as a current of modern thought is also linked to the emergence of nationalisms in the European XIX century, who had as their common flag the idea "one people, one State" and that is at the origin of the concept of nation state. In the heat of this idea, various European States were formed, arising from the dismemberment of empires or through the unification of States with similar culture and language, (such as Italy and Germany). Parallel to this nationalist development, and crossing it on many occasions, modern anti-Semitism evolved, which essentially considered the Jews as a stateless people, alien to the body of the nation and its potential enemies.
Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism (racist)
There are historians who restrict the use of the term anti-Semitism to the Contemporary Age —when racism and anti-Semitism were invented as a derivative of it. To designate the hatred and rejection of the Jews of earlier times, they propose using the term anti-Judaism. This is the case of the French Hispanist, Joseph Pérez, who, when referring to the discrimination of the Jews from the IV and V centuries d. C. and throughout the Middle Ages he speaks of "anti-Judaism, not anti-Semitism." His argument is as follows:
In the Middle Ages, Jews have had bad press; they have been persecuted, mistreated, discriminated, but not because they belonged to a cursed race, in the sense that the word race It will take time, but because they remain faithful to the religious creed regarded as incompatible with the dominant religion — Islam or Christianity—; the day that a Jew becomes, ceases to be Jewish, at least in the opinion of the authorities and the elites, not so among the masses. [...] What was in the Middle Ages, in Spain, as in all Christianity, was not anti-Semitism, but anti-Judaism; an anti-Judaism constantly claimed by the Catholic Church since the origins of Christianity.
However, the hostility towards the Jewish converts in the medieval Iberian kingdoms —as evidenced by the anti-convert revolt in Toledo in 1449— and in the subsequent Spanish Monarchy —with the introduction of statutes of purity of blood, to differentiate the new Christians from old Christians - raises doubts about the sharp separation between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, since in this case the hostility and discrimination towards Jews would not be based on their religious identity but on a certain "racial" identity. Michel Wieviorka assures that "in this context, anti-Judaism becomes racism before the existence of the term" —he goes so far as to affirm that "the inventors of "race" Jewish are, in the first place, the Spanish and Portuguese political powers of that time and the religious authorities on whom they rely, who will lead the Inquisition"—, although he warns that "outside of this obsession with the purity of blood, until the In the 19th century we must speak of "anti-Judaism", and not of anti-Semitism".
For his part, Joseph Pérez considers that the discrimination of the «new Christians», with the creation of the statutes of purity of blood, «did not refer to supposed biological characteristics of the Jews; it was a social and not a racial concept: it alluded to lineage, not race; It was a reaction of plebeians against hidalgos, a kind of ideological compensation: one can buy the nobility if they have the money for it, but they cannot buy the purity [of blood] which is, therefore, a natural nobility superior to the other". Joseph Pérez recalls that the word «blood» in the XVI century is equivalent to lineage, so the expression «purity of blood » (pureté de sang in France), would be equivalent to the absence of heresy among the ancestors of a family.
- "Racial anti-Semitism"
Christian Geulen has proposed calling anti-Semitism that emerged in the second half of the 19th century "racist anti-Semitism". Geulen points out that as the century progressed it was the Jews "who became the preferred objects of racist ideologies" and that the term "anti-Semitism" was born in the German Empire in the years 1870-1880 "to give a name to a vision of the world that he saw the foundations of all cultural development in the differentiation and struggle between the "Aryan" and the "Semitic"». In this sense "racist anti-Semitism," according to Geulen, "was by no means a simple aversion to Jews. At the end of the 19th century, and not only in Germany, anti-Semitism was a party program and a philosophy of history, a political point of view, and a natural and social doctrine; it was an essential means of understanding themselves..."
According to Geulen, the fundamental reason for "racial" hostility towards Jews lay not in traditional Christian anti-Judaism but in the fact that, especially in Germany, they constituted "the only important minority cultural community." «In that status of “established marginals” [«the integration of the Jews in European society reached its culminating point in the second half of the 19th century, and especially in Germany»] a good part of the anti-Semitic propaganda was focused». For the German ultranationalist anti-Semites "Judaism was not merely the enemy of a so-called German race, but also an enemy of racism as a doctrine and interpretation of the world" and therefore it acquired for the anti-Semites more and more the traits of a fundamentally hostile race. —». One of the first to express this new antisemitism was the Berlin historian Heinrich von Treitschke who wrote in 1879: "The Jews are our misfortune." It soon became clear, as the Dreyfus affair demonstrated, that the new antisemitism fueled by racial theories was not just a German phenomenon. In France the founder of "academic antisemitism" was Ernest Renan, but, according to Pierre-André Taguieff, " it is Jules Soury who makes the move to action. He denounces the absolute domination of the Jews over the political apparatus, the institutions, etc. […] The “struggle of the races” is reinterpreted as the main manifestation of the “struggle for existence” in humans. The combat between the "Aryan" and the "Semite" is a fight to the death".
History
Periodization
Anti-Semitism has taken various forms over time and these are not always recognized as such. The Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato expressed in 1979 that the forms assumed by anti-Semitism are often completely incongruent with each other:
Violating [...] the aristotelian logic, the anti-Semite will say successively—and even simultaneously—that the Jew is a banker and Bolshevik, greedy and dispendious limited to his ghetto and placed everywhere. [...] Judeophobia is of such nature that it feeds in any way. The Jew is in such a situation that whatever he does or says will serve to revive the unfounded resentment.Sabato, Apologies and rejections1979.
The accusations against the Jews are fundamentally contradictory:
The Jews were accused by the nationalists of being generators of communism; by the communists of governing capitalism. If they live in non-Jewish countries, they are accused of double allegiances; if they live in the Jewish country, of being racist. When they spend their money, they are reproved to be ostentatious; when they do not spend it, to be greedy. They are tilded from cosmopolitans without roots or from cobbled chauvinists. If they are assimilated to the middle, they are accused of fifth-columnists, if not, of enlisting themselves.Perednik, Spain derailed2005
Specialists tend to distinguish three clearly distinguishable eras in the history of anti-Semitism, which has given rise to three types of very different nature:
- Religious anti-Semitism or anti-judaism: Christianity, which began as a movement within Judaism, demonized the Jew through all kinds of dragonflies and fomented anti-Jewish hatred throughout Europe for centuries. In addition to religious hostility, there were conversions to force, which led to the phenomenon of marranism. The persecutions were usually local. Many expelled Jews settled in lands of Islam, where they ran differently according to places and times, from legal tolerance as a lower social group (see dhimmi) to eventual persecutions and massacres, but in general they did not suffer the harassment to which their European correspondents were subjected, nor were they forced directly to convert to the Muslim faith (although there were documented forced conversions), although the situation was inferior. invitation to become Islam.
- Racial anti-Semitism or anti-Semitism (properly said): This is the most lethal form. At the end of the centuryXIXWhen religious prejudices begin to be discredited by liberalism and the ideas of the Enlightenment, a new phase of anti-Semitism – anti-Semitism by antonomasia – arises in Germany and then in France, this time linked to the notion of race and the construction of nations, without religious connotations, but nationalists and racists, and mainly confined to Europe. He had his greatest expression during the Nazism.
- Ideological anti-Semitism or neo-anti-Semitism: After the Holocaust was known and after the Second Vatican Council, traditional anti-Semitism, based on race or religion, had almost disappeared. According to some authors, a new anti-Semitism emerges, which this time would be associated with the new post-sentayochist left and the Islamic world, and focuses on the legitimacy of the State of Israel and the territorial conflict in the Middle East. In the opinion of the authors advocating the concept, this new anti-Semitism “demonizes” Zionism (as it becomes synonymous with “colonialism”, “imperialism”, “supremacism” and “racism”) and “Israel” (as an abstraction that again embodies absolute evil, “global justice” and “Jewish ethern”). Although not all anti-Zionism is anti-Semite, this concept has served as a refuge for a new anti-Semitism.
Jerome Chanes outlines six phases in the history of the development of anti-Semitism:
- Pre-Christian anti-Jewishism in ancient Greece and Rome, which was initially ethnic.
- Christian anti-Semitism in antiquity and in the Middle Ages whose basis was first religious and extended to modern times.
- Traditional Muslim anti-Semitism which at first was based on Jews being a protected class.
- Political, social and economic anti-Semitism in the Illustration and European Post-Illustration which laid the foundation for racial anti-Semitism.
- Racial anti-Semitism which emerged in the centuryXIX and culminated with Nazism in the centuryXX..
- Contemporary anti-Semitism which has been called by some as Neoanti-Semitism.
Chanes suggests that these six phases can be lumped into three categories: "old anti-Semitism," which was primarily ethnic in character; "Christian anti-Semitism", religiously based; and "racial antisemitism" of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Anti-Judaism
The ancient world
The earliest example of anti-Judaism dates back to Alexandria in the III century BCE. C. Alexandria was during this period, home to the largest Jewish community in the Diaspora, and the place where the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, was created. Manetho, an Egyptian historian and priest of that era, wrote about the Jews referring to them in a humiliating way, embodying popular hatred. He considered the Jews descendants of the usurping Hyksos, he called them "tribe of lepers"; and he said that they were expelled for their sacrilege and their impiety, since they were taught by Moses not to "worship the gods". He described them as retarded, lepers, whom the Egyptians expelled from their country for fear that they would contaminate their population. These themes are repeated in Cheremon of Alexandria, Lysimachus, Poseidonius, Apollonius Molon, and in Apion and Tacitus. Agatharchids of Cnidus ridiculed the practices of the Jews and the "absurdity of their law", mocking the way in which Ptolemy I managed to invade Jerusalem in the year 320 a. as a consequence of its inhabitants being honoring the Sabbath. On this basis, the origins of anti-Semitism can be traced to Egypt, from where it would spread by "the Greek spread of ancient Egyptian prejudices".
One of the first anti-Jewish decrees was promulgated by Antiochus IV Epiphanes around 167-170 B.C. C., causing the revolution of the Maccabees in Judea.
The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria describes an attack on the Jews of Alexandria in AD 38. in which hundreds of Jews died. The violence in Alexandria may have been caused by the portrayal of Jews as misanthropes. Tcherikover argues that the reason for hatred against Jews in the Hellenistic period was their separation into the cities the polis. However, Bohak has argued that early hostility against Jews cannot be considered anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic unless it stems from attitudes held solely against Jews, and that Greeks have shown hostility against any group considered to be barbarians. Statements against the Jews and their religion can be found in many works by the Greeks and Romans. Edward Flannery has written that what signaled the Jews was their refusal to accept Greek social and religious norms. Hecataeus of Abdera, a Greek historian of the III century B.C. C., wrote that Moses & # 34; as a memory of the exile of his people, he instructed them in a misanthropic and inhospitable way of life & # 34;. Edward Flannery describes antisemitism in ancient times as essentially cultural, taking the form of nationalistic xenophobia in the political environment".
There are examples of Hellenistic rulers desecrating the Temple in Jerusalem and forbidding Jewish religious practices, such as circumcision, keeping the Sabbath, studying Jewish religious books, etc. Another example can be found in the anti-Jewish riots in Alexandria in the III century BCE. c.
The Jewish diaspora on the Elephantine island of the Nile, which was founded by mercenaries, also experienced the destruction of their Temple in 410 B.C. C.
Relations between the Jewish people and the occupiers of the Roman Empire were often antagonistic and resulted in serious rebellions. According to Suetonius, the Emperor Tiberius expelled the Roman Jews who had come to live there. Historian Edward Gibbon points to the year 160 AD. C. as a more tolerant period in Judeo-Roman relations. However, once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the state's attitude against the Jews worsened.
James Carroll states: "Jews made up 10% of the total population of the Roman Empire. Based on this ratio, if factors such as pogroms and conversions had not intervened, there should be 200 million Jews in the world today instead of around 13 million.
In conclusion, “before Christianity, it doesn't seem like we had to deal with structured hate in the form of discourse. (...) It seems that, in Antiquity, the Egyptians detested the Jews; the Greeks rather despised them, due to their strong attachment to polytheism, which for them was a sign of civilization; and to the Romans they aroused uneasiness, for their religion held a profound attraction."
Persecutions in the Middle Ages
Since the IX century d. C., the medieval Islamic world has classified Jews (and Christians) as dhimmi, and has allowed Jews to practice their religion more freely than in Medieval Christian Europe. Under Islamic law, until the late 11th century the 11th century was a golden era in Spanish Jewish culture. when Muslim pogroms against the Jews took place in the Iberian Peninsula, including the pogroms that occurred in Córdoba in 1011 and in Granada in 1066. Numerous decrees ordering the destruction of synagogues were also propagated in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Yemen since the 11th century century. In addition, Jews were forced to convert to Islam or face death in parts of Yemen, Morocco, and Baghdad between the 12th and 13th centuries. The Almohads, who took control of the Almoravid territories of the Maghreb and Andalusia in 1147, were even more fundamentalist in their outlook compared to their demeanor, and treated the dhimmi harshly. Many Jews and Christians emigrated faced with the choice between death or conversion. Some, like Maimonides' family, fled to the more tolerant Muslim territories of the East, while others went north to settle in Christian kingdoms in growth.
Persecution against Jews took place in numerous parts of Europe during the Middle Ages, through blood libels, expulsions, forced conversions, and massacres. The main justification for prejudice against Jews in Europe was religiously based. Persecution reached its first peak during the Crusades. In the first crusade (1096) hundreds and thousands of Jews were killed with the advent of the crusades. This was the first Christian outburst of anti-Jewish violence in Europe outside of Spain and was cited by Zionists in the XI as the need for a State of Israel.
In the Second Crusades (1147) Jews in Germany were subjected to numerous massacres. Jews were also targets in the attacks of the Shepherd Boys' Crusades between 1251 and 1320. The Crusades were followed by expulsions, including the expulsion of all English Jews in 1290; the expulsion of 100,000 Jews from France in the year 1396; and the expulsion of thousands of Jews from Austria in 1421. Many of the expelled Jews fled to Poland.
In medieval and Renaissance Europe, one of the major factors contributing to the rise of anti-Semitic sentiment and legal action among Christian populations was the fervent popular preaching of reform by religious orders, the Franciscans (especially Bernardino de Feltre) and the Dominicans (especially Vincent Ferrer), who toured Europe and promoted anti-Semitism through their fierce emotional invocations.
As the Black Death epidemic ravaged Europe in the mid-14th century, killing a much of the population, the Jews were used as a scapegoat. Rumors spread that these were the cause of the plague through the premeditated poisoning of water sources. Hundreds of Jewish communities were destroyed. Although Pope Clement IV tried to protect them by issuing two papal bulls in 1348, 900 Jews were burned alive in Strasbourg, a city not yet affected by the plague.
The 17th century
During the mid to late 17th century century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Republic of Two Nations) was devastated by numerous conflicts, in which the Commonwealth lost a third of its population (approximately three million people), and thousands of Jews were among them. The first of these conflicts was the Khmelnytsky Rebellion, when supporters of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky massacred tens of thousands of Jews in the latter's controlled eastern and southern areas (now Ukraine). The precise number of those killed will never be known, but the population decline from this time is estimated to be between 100,000 and 200,000, which also includes emigration, death from disease, and captivity in the Ottoman Empire.
European immigrants to the United States brought antisemitism to the United States in the early 17th century century. Peter Stuyvesant, the Danish governor of New Amsterdam, implemented plans to prevent the settlement of Jews in this city. During the colonial era, the American government limited the political and economic rights of the Jews. Only after the American Revolution did they gain legal rights, including the right to vote. However, the restrictions for Jews in the United States were never as strict as in Europe.
Illustration
In 1744, Frederick II the Great of Prussia limited the number of Jews allowed to live in Wroclaw to only "protected" and he encouraged a similar practice in other Prussian cities. In 1750 the "protected" they were faced with the alternative of "abstain from marriage or leave Berlin".
Maria Theresa I of Austria, the Archduchess of Austria was arguably the most anti-Semitic monarch of the time as she inherited all the traditional prejudices of her ancestors to which she added new ones due to her deep religious devotion. In 1750, she ordered Jews to leave Bohemia, but later changed his position on the condition that the Jews pay for their readmission every ten years. This extortion is known as Malkegeld (from Yiddish, queen's money). In 1752, she introduced the law limiting Jews to having only one child. In 1777 she wrote about the Jews: «I know of no greater plague than that race because their falsehood, their usury and their avarice are leading us to ruin. Therefore, as far as possible, Jews should be isolated and avoided." In 1782, Joseph II of Habsburg abolished most persecution practices in the Toleranzpatent, on the condition that Yiddish and Hebrew be removed from public records and that judicial autonomy be annulled. Moses Mendelssohn wrote that "Such tolerance...is an even more dangerous game in tolerance than in open persecution."
In 1742, Russia disenfranchised the Jews of the empire and has treated them as a foreign population ever since.
In 1772, Empress Catherine II of Russia forced the Jews of the Settlement Area to stay in their shtetls and forbade them to return to the villages they inhabited before the division of Poland. A decree of January 3, 1792 formally initiated the settlement stockade regime, according to which Jews were allowed to reside freely only in the westernmost part of the Empire and without approaching the large Russian urban centers. This started a stage of informal anti-Semitism that degenerated into violent discrimination in the later periods of the Empire.
According to Arnold Ages, "Voltaire's works are full of comments about Jews and Judaism and the vast majority are negative." Paul H. Meyers added: "There is no I doubt that Voltaire, especially in his later years, fueled violent hatred against the Jews and it is just as certain that his hostility... had a considerable impact on public opinion in France'. Thirty of the 118 articles in the Philosophical Dictionary de Voltaire was associated with the Jews and consistently portrayed them in negative terms.
Islamic anti-Judaism in the 19th century
Historian Martin Gilbert wrote that it was in the 19th century that the position of Jews worsened in Muslim countries. Benny Morris argued that the phenomenon of stone-throwing at Jews by Muslim children symbolizes such degradation. Morris quotes a salesman from the 19th century: "I have seen a little man of six years of age, with a troop of kids as young as three and four teaching them to throw rocks at a Jew, and a most cold-blooded urchin advanced on the man and literally spat on his raincoat. To all this the Jew was forced to bow down, if he hit the Mohammedan it would be worth his life & # 34;.
In the mid-19th century, J.J. Benjamin wrote about life among the Jews of Persia, describing conditions and beliefs dating back to the 16th century: " …they are forced to live in separate parts of the cities… Under the pretext of being impure, they are treated very severely and in case of entering a street, inhabited by Muslims, they are harassed by the youth and the crowd with stones and dirt …".
Anti-Semitism
Contemporary or modern antisemitism
The term contemporary antisemitism —also called modern antisemitism— refers to antisemitism that arose in the second half of the XIX century in Europe and which presents important novelties regarding the Christian anti-Judaism of the previous centuries. The first is that the Jews are considered to be the enemies of the entire human race—not just of Christ and his Church, although that perception remains—since, according to the new anti-Semites, the Jews have set in motion a great worldwide conspiracy. destined to dominate all the peoples of the earth. The second is the very definition of the Jew, who ceases to be identified with a religious group, to become so with a "race", although these new anti-Semites will not stop resorting to the old accusations against the Jews — as desecrators of hosts or perpetrators of ritual crimes—characteristic of the clichéd medieval diabolical image of the Jew that is still alive in contemporary anti-Semitism.
According to the Spanish historian Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida, the new anti-Semitism is explained by the change in the position of the Jews within Western European societies after the liberal revolutions that put an end to the legal discrimination they suffered —however, in Eastern Europe, led by Russia, held. Thus "the old Jewish communities, discriminated against and locked up in their ghettos" they became flourishing and emancipated communities increasingly integrated into gentile society and with some of their members experiencing rapid social ascent, such as the Rothschild bankers. It is precisely this rise of the "former ghetto outcasts" which largely provokes the anti-Semitic reaction of certain sectors. "At a time of crisis of traditional identities and construction of new national ones, there was the rejection of the upstart Jew who wanted to integrate, erasing the old barriers".
In the elaboration of the myth of the Jewish conspiracy, the novel Coningsby (1844) by Benjamin Disraeli —the future British prime minister who was of Jewish origin but ignorant of religion and culture— played an essential role Hebrews—in which there is talk of the existence of a secret world government of the Jews that controls governments, dominates finances and manages socialists and revolutionaries, and even the Jesuits at will. Another milestone in the construction of the myth was the activities of the Alliance Israelite Universelle founded by French Jews to help Jewish communities that were persecuted or in difficulty, which fueled the idea of the cosmopolitan Jew without a homeland who only acts in defense of his own interests. and whose purpose is to dominate the country that welcomes it.
It is in the 1870s and 1880s that contemporary anti-Semitism developed in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, France and Italy. In Germany it is where it acquires a more clearly racist character, while in the rest of the countries the Christian root predominated. In France it was the publication of the work "Jewish France" by Édouard Drumont, the one that promoted the anti-Semitic movement —the book had 145 editions in less than two years, and fifty more until 1914— which reached its zenith in the last decade of the century on the occasion of the Dreyfus affair.
- The birth of the myth of the superiority of the “Aryan race” on the “semitic race”
In the middle of the XIX century, the myth of the superiority of the Indo-European or Aryan «race» over the Semitic «race» from the works of historical philology that distinguish two great families of languages: the Indo-European languages and the Semitic languages. In France Ernest Renan published in 1855 his Histoire générale et système comparé des langues semitiques in whose introduction he stated: «The Semitic race is recognized almost exclusively negative characters». In this way Renan, according to Pierre-André Taguieff, is "the true founder of scholarly anti-Semitism [antisémitisme savant] in France, a non-political, strictly speculative anti-Semitism, which does not call for persecution".
A few years later, the biological-racial determinist Jules Soury affirms that the brains of "Aryans" and "Semites" are not the same and that the "Semitic spirit" is not capable of feeling generosity, idealism, a sense of honor, patriotism, etc. The "struggle of the races", according to Soury, is the main manifestation of the "struggle for existence", so the combat between the "Aryan" and the "Semite" is a fight to the death.
Georges Vacher de Lapouge is more radical when he considers the Jews as the most fearsome enemies. He claims that "the only dangerous opponent of the Aryan at present is the Jew", but according to him, the Jews are destined to be defeated because they are incapable of "productive work", they are devoid of "political sense" and "military spirit"..
The 19th century
In 1850 the German composer Richard Wagner published Das Judenthum in der Musik (Judaism in Music) under the pseudonym K. Freigedank (K. Freethought). The article began with an attack on Jewish composers, particularly Wagner's contemporaries (and opponents) Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer, but expanded to accuse Jews of being a harmful and alien element in German culture.
Anti-Semitism can also be seen in the tales of the Grimm brothers, published between 1812 and 1857. The Jews are mainly characterized as the villains of the story, as in "A Good Deal" and "The Jew in the Thorns".
The mid-19th century saw continued harassment of Jews, especially in eastern Europe under the influence tsarist. For example, in 1846, 80 Jews attacked the governor of Warsaw to retain the right to wear their traditional dress, but were immediately reprimanded by forcibly cutting off their hair and beards.
The German politician Wilhelm Marr is known for having been the "father" of modern anti-Semitism, by privileging the supposed racial characteristics of the Jews over the religious ones. He is responsible for having popularized the term antisemitism in 1881.
In 1889, the French journalist Édouard Drumont founded the Antisemitic League of France. The league organized anti-Semitic demonstrations, distributed pamphlets and posters at election times.
In the United States, influential figures such as Walt Whitman tolerated bigotry against Jews. During his time as editor of the Brookling Eagle (1846-1848), the newspaper published historical sketches in which they portrayed the Jews in a negative light.
The Dreyfus Affair was an anti-Semitic event in the late 19th century and early XX. Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French army, was charged in 1894 with revealing confidential data to the Germans. As a consequence of these charges, Dreyfus was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island for the crime of high treason. In 1896, Colonel Georges Picquart, head of the counterintelligence service, verified that the real spy had been Commander Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. The event caused a great uproar among the French, with the public choosing whether Dreyfus was guilty or not. The General Staff refused, however, to reconsider his decision and removed Picquart from France, posting him to North Africa. The writer Émile Zola accused the army of corrupting the French judicial system. However, the general consensus held that Dreyfus was guilty: 80% of the French press condemned him.
In 1898, the Supreme Court resumed the case, Dreyfus was sentenced again, albeit to ten years of hard labor, but citing "extenuating circumstances." In 1906 his innocence was officially recognized by the Court of Cassation through a sentence that annulled the 1899 trial and Dreyfus was reinstated in the army with the rank of Commander.
However, the attitude of the majority of the population of France reveals the underlying antisemitism of that period.
Adolf Stoecker, a Lutheran priest, founded in 1878 the anti-Semitic and anti-liberal political party called the "Christian Social Workers Party". This party always remained small and its support waned after his death, and most of its members joined larger conservative groups such as the German National People's Party.
Some studies consider Karl Marx's essay "On the Jewish Question" as an antisemite, arguing that in his writings he used antisemitic epithets.These studies argue that in his essays Marx equates Judaism with capitalism. Some even argue that the essays influenced National Socialism and Soviet and Arab antisemitism. Marx himself was of Jewish ancestry, and Albert Lindemann and Hyam Maccoby argue that he was ashamed of his ancestry. Others argue that Marx consistently supported families Prussian Jews to get equal political rights. These studies argue that "On the Jewish Question" it is a critique of Bruno Bauer's arguments that Jews must convert to Christianity before being emancipated, and is a general critique of liberal rights and capitalism discourses.
The 20th century
Between 1900 and 1924, approximately 1.75 million Jews immigrated to the United States, most of them from Eastern Europe. Before the year 1900 American Jews formed less than 1% of the population but around the year 1930 they formed about 3.5% of the population. This increase, combined with the upward mobility of some Jews, contributed to a revival of anti-Semitism. In the first half of the 20th century in the United States, Jews were discriminated against in terms of jobs, access to residential areas and recreation centers, memberships to clubs and organizations, as well as enrollment quotas and teaching positions at colleges and universities. In the year 1915, the lynching of Leo Frank by a notable crowd of citizens in Marietta, Georgia focused anti-Semitism in the United States. This case was also used to obtain support for the renewal of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been inactive since 1870.
In the early 20th century, the Beilis trial in Russia symbolized incidents of blood libel in Europe. Christians used complaints against Jews who accused them of killing Christians as a justification for killing Jews. Anti-Semitism in the United States reached its peak during the interwar period. Automotive industry pioneer Henry Ford propagated anti-Semitic ideas in his newspaper & # 34; The Dearborn Independent & # 34; (published by Ford from the year 1919 to the year 1927). Father Coughlin's radio speeches in the late 1930s attacked Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and promoted the idea of a Jewish financial conspiracy. Some of the leading politicians shared these views: Louis T McFadden, Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, asserted that the Jews controlled the American economy, and that the United States had to choose between 'God and the money changers'. of money that take our gold and our legitimate money'. He himself blamed the Jews for Roosevelt's decision to abandon the gold standard and claimed that "in the United States today, the gentiles have pieces of paper while the Jews have all the legitimate money.";.
In the early 1940s, aviator Charles Lindbergh and numerous leading Americans led the First American Committee opposing any involvement in the war against fascism.
During the 1930s, the German-American Federation organized parades in New York, where its members wore Nazi uniforms and swastika flags among the American flags. With the beginning of the United States' involvement in World War II, most of the federation's members were placed in draft camps or were deported at the end of the war.
There were also race riots, such as in Detroit in 1943, which were aimed at looting and burning Jewish businesses.
In Germany, Nazism led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, which rose to power on January 30, 1933, instituted repressive legislation denying Jews basic civil rights. Hitler described in his book My Struggle his aversion to what he believes are the twin evils of the world: Marxism and Judaism, and stated that his purpose was to eradicate them. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws prohibited sexual relations and marriage between "aryans" and Jews considering it as Rassenschande (race shame) and annulled the citizenship of all German Jews, including those who were 1/4 or 1/2 Jews (becoming officially "subjects of the State").
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In 1936, Jews were eliminated from all professions, with the expectation that they would have some influence in education, politics, university teaching, and industry. Between the night of November 9 and 10, 1938, a series of pogroms known as the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht) took place, in which many Jews were murdered, their property was attacked, and synagogues were burned down.
The anti-Semitic movement, propaganda and laws spread in Europe under the conquest of German rule. In Eastern Europe, the Third Reich forced Jews to live in ghettos such as Warsaw, Kraków, Lviv, Lublin and Radomsko.
After the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, mass murder took place, led by the Einsatzgruppen (operative groups), ending the systematic genocide between 1942 and 1945: the Holocaust. Eleven million Jews were targeted for Nazi extermination, and approximately six million Jews were murdered.
Anti-Semitism was commonly used as an instrument of personal conflict, beginning with the conflict between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky and continuing through numerous conspiracy theories spread by official propaganda. Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union reached new heights after the 1948 campaign against the "rootless cosmopolitans" (a euphemism for "Jewish"), in which numerous Yiddish-language painters, sculptors, poets and writers were killed or arrested. This culminated in what became known as the Doctors Plot (1952- 1953). Similar antisemitic propaganda in Poland caused surviving Polish Jews to flee the country.
Post-war, the Kielce pogrom and the March 1968 events in communist Poland featured anti-Semitic incidents in Europe. Anti-Jewish violence in post-war Poland has as its common theme rumors of blood libels.
In 1965, Pope Paul VI issued a papal decree to dissolve the cult of Simon of Trent, and the sanctuary erected to him was dismantled.
Current situation
In March 2008, a report by the United States Department of State established that there has been a rise in anti-Semitism around the world and that both ancient and modern anti-Semitic manifestations continue to persist.
A 2012 report by the US Department of State's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor also noted a continued rise in anti-Semitism around the world and established that Holocaust denial and opposition to Israeli politics are often used to promote or justify blatant anti-Semitism.
In 2018, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights interviewed 16,395 Jews, and concluded that anti-Semitism has become so common that most victims no longer bother to report incidents. Other conclusions are:
- 89% of respondents consider anti-Semitism on the Internet to be a problem in their country.
- Twenty-eight per cent said they had experienced some form of harassment in the last 12 months, 2 per cent was physically assaulted.
- 38% have considered the possibility of emigrating over the past five years concerned with their safety.
- 95% of the French Jews consider anti-Semitism to be a fairly serious or very serious problem.
Forms of Antisemitism
Some of the most persistent forms of traditional anti-Semitism are based on stereotypes, smears, and myths that have endured for centuries, and still leave their traces in language, culture, and idioms. Others, such as the myth of world dominance, are more modern and fully valid formulations. The following are some of the more well-known forms of anti-Semitism:
Myth of Deicide
Deicide – the killing of God – is the oldest and most important anti-Semitic myth, until the emergence of the current myth of world domination. Its basis is in a trinitarian interpretation of Matthew 27:15-25. In this passage the inhabitants of Jerusalem led by the high priest Caiaphas demand that Pilate condemn Jesus Christ. According to the doctrine of the trinity, killing Jesus would be equivalent to killing God himself made flesh. The deicide myth was first invoked by Melito, bishop of Sardis, around the year 150: "God has been slain, the King of Israel was slain by an Israelite hand." For centuries, this was repeated, generation after generation, and although it was never an official doctrine of the Church, it was so ingrained in Christian sermons that the Second Vatican Council in 1965 had to deal with it. In his statement Nostra Aetate he stated that “it cannot be imputed indistinctly to all the Jews then living, nor to the Jews of today. The Jews are not to be pointed out as reprobates of God and cursed. Thanks to the council and the sharp papal interventions (both John XXIII and John Paul II actively opposed traditional anti-Semitism), but also to the loss of centrality of religious disputes in Western societies, the myth of deicide is in clear retreat.
The Betrayal of Judas
Judas Iscariot has passed into later Christian tradition as the quintessential traitor. The popular animosity towards the character is faithfully expressed in the ritual burning, stoning or lynching of numerous dolls called Judas at Carnival, Holy Week, New Year or other popular festivals in various celebrations in Spain and Latin America. This animosity towards Judas, and also towards the Jewish priests who hired his services, was misdirected into contributing to anti-Semitism, facilitating the formation of a negative stereotype about the Jewish people. This was helped by the similarity between the personal name Judas and the word Jew, a term that derives from the name of the kingdom of Judah (from the Hebrew יְהוּדָה, Yehudah, son of Jacob). The generalization was successful despite the fact that Judas was evidently not the only Jew among the apostles, that the other Jewish apostles did not betray Jesus, and that Jesus himself was a Jew.
Anti-Semitic Legends
Legends with an anti-Semitic character, spread in Western traditions. Among the best known are the legend of the wandering Jew and the legends about Judas.
Blood libel
Basically, it consists of the accusation that Jews murder non-Jews (especially Christians, or children, both their own and others) in order to use their blood at Passover or in other rituals. There were hundreds of libels based on this belief, with new variants being added over the centuries. A first version is documented in 1182 in Zaragoza (Spain) and ended up being included in The Code of Seven Items (1263): “We have heard that in certain places on Good Friday the Jews they kidnap children and mockingly place them on the cross.” They were not just legends to entertain the audience: these myths triggered numerous persecutions, cruelty, and crimes. The expulsions of Jews were preceded by a hostile climate created by this kind of libel.
Despite their variants, all blood libels follow a similar pattern:
- There was a body (usually a child and near the Christian Passover).
- The Jews were accused of having killed him and using his blood for ritual purposes (e.g., to overwhelm the Hebrew Passover bread).
- The main rabbis were tortured until they confessed to the alleged crime.
- The result was the expulsion of the entire Jewish community from that region, or directly its extermination.
This myth has been so ingrained in Spanish religious culture that it is very easy to trace it through numerous churches that pay homage to children supposedly victims of the Jews. Literature also offers numerous samples: from The innocent child of La Guardia, by Lope de Vega to La rosa de pasión by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, both about the holy child martyr de La Guardia, the blood libel that preceded the expulsion of the Jews in 1492.
Another myth related to the blood libel is that of the "desecration of the host", which consisted of accusing the Jews of stealing the hosts from the sacristy in order to "torment" them and repeat the suffering of the passion and the deicide. It used to have equally dire consequences for the Jews in the form of persecutions and massacres. An example is the celebration in Segovia of an alleged desecration in 1415 that, it is said, caused an earthquake and that resulted in the confiscation of the synagogue and the execution of the rabbis.
World domination myth
As early as 1807, the Jesuit canon of Notre-Dame Cathedral, Augustin Barruel, alerted the French government to an alleged international Jewish plot "that would transform churches into synagogues." However, the best-known embodiment of this myth is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a libel written in 1902 that, despite being reliably false, continues to be reissued without rest, especially in Arab countries. There are other widespread variants of the myth of world domination, such as the "Judeo-Masonic conspiracy" (recurrently used by the Franco regime) or the "Jewish lobby" (the claim that "the Jews" are a homogeneous entity that acts coordinated worldwide), the latter especially in force among the political left and, in general, among supporters of conspiracy theories.
Current Antisemitism
During 2013, there was an increase in anti-Semitic reports worldwide. The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) published a study on the situation of antisemitism.
The study was carried out in 8 main European countries in which 90% of the European Jewish population, approximately one million Jews, live: Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Almost 6,000 people participated in the survey.
Among the main results, it can be seen that 76% of the participants feel that anti-Semitism has worsened in the last 5 years. According to the data obtained in the study, 77% of the acts of verbal or physical violence are not reported due to the low probability that such complaints will be dealt with. 38% of the interviewed Jews say they do not go out with Jewish symbols such as the Star of David. 33% fear suffering an anti-Semitic attack. 25% suffered at least one verbal insult in the last year and 50% fear suffering some type of insult or harassment over the next year. Among the countries in which the greatest increase in anti-Semitism is found are Hungary, France, Belgium, and Sweden.
Anti-Semitism on the Internet is also a problem in recent years. 75% of those surveyed in the FRA study see anti-Semitism on Internet sites such as YouTube, blogs and social networks among others. This is a latent problem in their countries and has increased in the last 5 years.
According to the annual report on denunciations of cases of anti-Semitism published by the Delegation of Argentine Israeli Associations (DAIA) in 2013, 40% of anti-Semitic attacks were through the Internet, becoming the most used route, 19% They were on the street and 5% in the workplace.
On the Internet, especially on social media, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have a new channel of diffusion. For example, in Chile and Argentina it is common to see the dissemination on different Internet pages of the Andinia Plan, which contains the anti-Semitic idea that the Jews have a plan to conquer Patagonia. In Venezuela, defamation was also common through this medium, that Israel was to blame for the death of Hugo Chávez.
Outside of social networks, it is worth noting the existence of very popular anti-Semitic websites that function without any disturbance.
At the end of 2013, the Quenelle, a gesture created by Dieudonné M'bala M'bala (arm extended downwards as a greeting), spread in France and then in other European countries and the world in general inverted Nazi and the other arm crossed). This gesture spread rapidly through the internet and mainly on social networks. Generally the gesture is made provocatively in the vicinity of Jews or places significant to the Jewish religion: synagogues, cemeteries, and Holocaust memorial sites. Such a gesture has even reached sports when the English league footballer Nicolas Anelka celebrated one of his goals with such a gesture, generating great controversy.
Europe
According to the 2004 report [update] published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, anti-Semitism has increased significantly in Europe since 2000., with a significant increase in verbal attacks against Jews and vandalism such as graffiti, bombings in Jewish schools, desecration of synagogues and cemeteries. Germany, France, Great Britain, and Russia are the countries with the highest rates of antisemitism. The Netherlands and Sweden also show high rates of antisemitic attacks since 2000.
Some claim that the recent anti-Semitic violence in Europe can be seen as a sequel to the Arab-Israeli conflict because many of the perpetrators belong to immigrant Muslim communities in European cities. However, compared to France, the United Kingdom and most of the rest of Europe, in Germany Arab and pro-Palestinian groups are involved in only a small percentage of antisemitic incidents. According to the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, most of the most extreme attacks on Jewish sites and physical attacks on Jews in Europe come from Islamist and Muslim militant groups, and many of the attacks on Jews tend to be attacks in countries where Muslim youth groups reside immigrants.
On January 1, 2006, Britain's Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks warned that a "tsunami of anti-Semitism" it is spreading worldwide. In an interview with BBC Radio 4, Sacks said: 'Many of my fellow rabbis in Europe have been assaulted and assaulted in the streets. There were desecrated synagogues. We have had Jewish schools burned down – not here but in France. People are trying to silence and even abolish Jewish societies on university campuses on the grounds that Jews should support the State of Israel, and therefore should be banned, which is quite extraordinary because British Jews are often seen as themselves as British citizens. For it is this kind of feeling of uncertainty about what is going to happen next that makes some European Jewish communities uncomfortable".
Following a rise in anti-Semitism in 2012, which included the murder of three children at a Jewish school in France, the European Jewish Congress called for preventive measures. The congress president, Moshe Kantor, explained, "We call on the authorities to adopt a more proactive strategy so that there would be no reason for statements of regret and accusation. All these small attacks remind me of the small tremors before an earthquake. The Jewish community cannot afford to be subjected to an earthquake and the authorities cannot say that it was not written on the wall". He also added that European countries must take legislative measures to prohibit all forms of incitement, as well as to equip the authorities with the necessary tools to deal with any attempt to increase terrorist and violent activities against Jewish communities in Europe.
In the framework of the 2014 European elections, the far-right National Front led by Marine Le Pen won 25% of the vote. There was also a rise in right-wing parties in Germany, Italy, and Greece. In total, they would have 100 of the 700 members of the European Parliament.
Germany
German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble outlined Germany's official policy: "We will not tolerate any form of extremism, xenophobia or anti-Semitism."
Over the past few years, the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Germany has remained relatively high.
The data shows that there has been a decline in the number of registered anti-Semitic crimes and acts of violence in Germany since 2009 for political reasons. The vast majority of these are committed by extremist rightists. Regarding the anti-Semitic crimes registered in 2011, 692 consisted of incitement against people. 267 cases in crimes of anti-Semitic propaganda in 2011. Something similar also happens with anti-Semitic acts of violence. In addition, the Antonio Amadeu Foundation reported a decrease in the number of anti-Semitic incidents.
In July 2012, two women were assaulted in Germany, sprayed with tear gas, also shown the "Hitler salute," apparently for wearing a Star of David pendant.
In late August 2012, the Berlin police investigated the attack on a 53-year-old rabbi and his 6-year-old daughter, allegedly perpetrated by 4 Arab teenagers, for which the rabbi was being treated in hospital for injuries to his head. The police classified this attack as a hate crime. Jüdische Allgemeine reported that the rabbi was wearing a kippah and approached one of the teenagers who had asked if he was Jewish. The teen attacked the rabbi as he yelled anti-Semitic remarks and threatened to kill his daughter. The mayor of Berlin condemned the attack, saying that "Berlin is an international city in which intolerance, xenophobia and anti-Semitism are not tolerated. The police will carry out all efforts to find and arrest those responsible".
In October 2012, several historians, including Dr. Julius H. Schoeps, a prominent German-Jewish historian and member of the German Interior Ministry's anti-Semitism commission, accused most of the deputies of the German Bundestag for failing to understand anti-Semitism and for the imperative of periodic legislative reports on German anti-Semitism. Schoeps cites various anti-Semitic statements by members of the German parliament. The report in question found that 15% of Germans are anti-Semitic, while more than 20% advocate "latent anti-Semitism," but the report has been criticized for downplaying the degree of anti-Semitism in Germany, thus such as for not having examined anti-Israel media coverage in Germany.
There is a rise in anti-Semitism at soccer stadiums in Germany. Neo-Nazi groups are increasingly making use of sports clubs to promote their ideology. In recent months, the word "Juden" (Jews) has become a frequent insult in sports stadiums, even when there is not a single player of Jewish origin on the pitch.
In July 2014, during Operation Protective Edge, demonstrations were held in different parts of the country in which anti-Semitic phrases were proclaimed. In the city of Essen, 14 people were arrested for planning to attack one of the most important synagogues in the place. Numerous anti-Semitic acts have also occurred, such as the desecration of monuments commemorating the Holocaust, anti-Semitic postcards were sent to inhabitants of Jewish origin, among others.
According to the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Dieter Graumann, the Jews of Germany are "experiencing an outburst of violent and dire hatred" also claiming that "it is not about criticism to a specific policy of the Israeli government, but simply hatred of the Jews".
Chancellor Angela Merkel also called the anti-Jewish cheers an "attack on freedom and tolerance," as well as "an attempt to weaken our democratic and liberal order".
Austria
In March 1938, Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany and thousands of Austrians and Austrian Jews who fought against the Nazi occupation were sent to concentration camps. Of the 65,000 Viennese Jews deported to concentration camps, only around 2,000 survived, and approximately 800 survived World War II in hiding.
Anti-Semitism did not cease to exist after World War II and remains a part of Austrian political life and culture, with strong roots in political parties and the media. Bernd Marin, an Austrian sociologist, has characterized antisemitism in 1945 successor Austria as "antisemitism without Jews," since Jews constitute only 0.1 percent of the Austrian population and it is common among people who have not had nor do they have any personal contact with Jews.
Anti-Semitism in Austria today seems to focus more on widespread and traditional stereotypes than on acts of physical aggression. This is the main ideological component of most far-right groups. Extremist right-wing and neo-Nazi groups have intensified their activities since 2000, encouraged by the electoral success of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) in March 1999.
According to the CFCA (the Coordinating Forum for the Fight against Anti-Semitism) there have been more than 15 anti-Semitic incidents during the years 2012-2013. Most of them include swastika graffiti, Jewish grave desecration, painting the "Stolpersteine" and even the expulsion of a religious man from a vacation apartment for being Jewish.
Belgium
In 2012, there was an almost 20% increase in the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Belgium. This increase is accompanied by the increase in Islamic extremism among part of the country's Muslims.
In May 2014, an attack took place in the museum located in the Sablon district, in the center of Brussels, the motive of which is anti-Semitic. Four people died in the attack.
Spain
France
France is the largest home to the Jewish community on the European continent (about 600,000 Jews). Jewish leaders condemned the rise of anti-Semitism in France, mainly by Muslim Arabs or African descendants, but also by Caribbean islanders from French colonies. At the time, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy denounced the assassination. of Ilan Halimi on February 13, 2006 as an anti-Semitic crime.
In March 2012, Mohammed Merah shot at a Jewish school in Toulouse, killing a teacher and three children. Then-President Nicolas Sarkozy called it an "obvious" anti-Semitic attack. After a 32-hour siege and confrontation with police in front of his house, and a team from France's RAID (Recherche Assistance Intervention Dissuasion), Merah jumped out of the window and was shot and killed with a shot in the head. the head. During the confrontation, Merah told the police that he intended to continue attacking, and that he loves death in the same way that the police love life. He also claimed connections to al-Qaeda.
Four months later, in July 2012, a French Jewish teenager wearing a "badge with a religious symbol" he was the victim of a violent anti-Semitic attack on a train traveling from Toulouse to Lyon. The teen was first verbally harassed and then beaten by two assailants.
Another incident that occurred in July 2012 consisted of the vandalism of the Noisy-le-Grand synagogue in the Seine-Saint-Denis district of Paris. The synagogue was vandalized three times in a ten-day period. Prayer books and shawls were thrown to the ground, windows were smashed, drawers were looted, and walls, tables, clocks, and floors were vandalized. Authorities were alerted to the events by the Bureau National de Vigilance Contre L'Antisémtisme (BNVCA), a French anti-Semitism watchdog group, which called for further action to prevent future hate crimes. The president of the BNVCA, Sammy Ghozlan, stated that, "Despite the measures taken, the matter continues, and I think we need additional legislation, because the Jewish community is upset."
In August 2012, Abraham Cooper, the dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, met with Minister Manuel Valls and reported that anti-Semitic attacks against Jews have increased by 40% since the Merah attack in Toulouse. Cooper pressed Valls to take extra steps to ensure the safety of French Jews, as well as discuss strategies to combat the growing trend of Internet terrorists.
In 2012, the Toulouse bombing saw a whopping 58% increase in the number of incidents against Jews. During 2013 the level of antisemitism against Jews in France was again very high. During 2013 there were around 200 registered cases including four violent attacks.
Recently, the Quenelle, an inverted raised-arm salute created by the comedian Dieudonné M'bala M'bala, became fashionable, which was disseminated on social networks and reached have a large global reach. This greeting became even more famous after the French soccer player Nicolas Anelka celebrated a goal with this gesture.
In July 2014, young pro-Palestinians clashed with the police on several occasions, setting cars on fire, looting shops and attacking two synagogues in the suburbs of Paris. For the same reason, two pro-Palestinian demonstrations took place in Paris and in Sarcelles despite having been prohibited by the French authorities during which clashes between protesters and police and acts of violence occurred, denounced by the French government as "anti-Semitic" 3. 4;. France had banned these two demonstrations, after violent acts were reported in the previous week near a synagogue at the end of a demonstration and a firebomb was thrown at a synagogue. In another demonstration in Paris thousands of people have protested with the gesture of the quenelle.
Greece
Anti-Semitism is mainly promoted by the leaders of Golden Dawn and by a certain part of the Greek Orthodox Church, making use of classical anti-Semitism and arguing that "Greece was sold and is dominated by the Jews"". The number of incidents almost doubled compared to 2012. These included cases of Holocaust denial by well-known figures and desecration of monuments and tombstones. The economic problems Greece is experiencing have apparently increased extremist ideas.
In 2014, a Greek court sentenced a doctor for failing to treat Jews.
Hungary
During the communist period in Hungary, anti-Semitism did not present itself in its classical form but rather represented the Hungarian fascist ideology. Therefore the ruling elite made sure that all anti-Semitic literature was destroyed after World War II.
During the transition from communism to democracy in 1989, and the introduction of free speech and press, anti-Semitism resurfaced almost immediately. This phenomenon has given rise to much debate: was it economic and social changes that caused a sudden increase in it, or was it covert hostility towards Jews that surfaced as a consequence of new civil liberties.
One of the main representatives of the institutionalized anti-Semitic ideology is the Hungarian people's party Movement for a Better Hungary (Jobbik), which received 20.5% of the votes in the national elections of April 2014, thus becoming the third largest political force of the country.
Contemporary anti-Semitic rhetoric has been updated and expanded, but it is still based on old anti-Semitic concepts. Traditional accusations and themes include phrases such as the Jewish occupation, the international Jewish conspiracy, Jewish responsibility for the Treaty of Trianon, Judeo-Bolshevism, and blood libels against the Jews. However, in recent years, this has increased along with the Palestinianization of the Hungarian people, the resurgence of the blood libel and an increase in the relativization and denial of the Holocaust, and the currency crisis has sparked references to " the Jewish banker class".
Italy
Since World War II, anti-Semitic prejudices in Italy have rarely taken aggressive forms. However, with the increase in the number of far-right groups since the beginning of the 1990s, the situation has changed. The political conflict between Israel and Palestine has played an important role in the development and expression of antisemitism in the XXI century also in Italy. The Second Intifada, which began at the end of September 2000, has developed unexpected mechanisms, in which traditional prejudices against Jews are mixed with policy-based stereotypes.
Israeli Jews were charged with full responsibility for the fate of the peace process and the conflict is portrayed as the embodiment of the struggle between good (the Palestinians) and evil (the Jews of Israel).
A 2010 study reveals that 44% of Italians are prejudiced against Jews and 12% harbor anti-Semitic sentiments. According to the CDEC, which regularly publishes articles and research on its "Observatory on Contemporary Anti-Jewish Prejudice" portal, of that 44%, 12 openly declare themselves "anti-Semitic", a group shares stereotypes "classics" against Jews (10%), while another endorses "modern" (11%)
According to the Milan Contemporary Jewish Documentation Center (CDEC), in 2012 anti-Semitic episodes almost doubled.
Norway
In 2010, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation after a year of research, revealed that anti-Semitism is common among the eighth, ninth and tenth grades in Oslo schools. Teachers in schools with large numbers of Muslims revealed that Muslim students often "praise or admire Adolf Hitler for the murder of Jews," that "Jewish hatred is legitimate in many Muslim student groups" and that "Muslims laugh when it comes to educating about the Holocaust." Furthermore, "while some students protest when terrorism is supported, no one objects when students express hatred of Jews", saying in the Qur'an it is written "that you will kill Jews, all true Muslims". they hate Jews". Most of these students were born and raised in Norway. A Jewish father stated that his son had been taken by a large number of Muslims after school (although the boy managed to escape), reportedly & # 34; that he was taken to the jungle and hanged because he was Jewish & # 34;.
In October 2012, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) issued a report regarding anti-Semitism in Norway, criticizing Norway for rising anti-Semitism in the country and blaming Norwegian officials for not confront antisemitism".
Netherlands
A Dutch Jewish watchdog group reported a 23 percent increase in the number of anti-Semitic incidents last year, from 2012.
According to the Hague Center for Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI), there was a general increase in anti-Semitic incidents: 147 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded in 2013 compared to 114 in the previous year, verbal attacks against Jews rose from 14 to 21. During 2013, the anti-Israel phenomenon increased in the Netherlands, which stands out more than the phenomenon of classical anti-Semitism in the country. This type of anti-Semitism is found both within the framework of Muslim anti-Semitism and within that of the extreme right. A documentary broadcast on the public television channel, which contained anti-Semitic and xenophobic expressions against the Jews by teenagers of Turkish origin, sparked a scandal among the Jewish community. As a consequence, a survey was carried out among the Turkish community in the Netherlands and according to the results it is not about organized anti-Semitism but about anti-Semitic expressions related to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
In 2010, Raphaël Evers, an Orthodox rabbi in Amsterdam, told the Norwegian daily Aftenposten that Jews can no longer be safe in the city due to the risk of violent assault.
According to the Anne Frank Foundation, antisemitism in the Netherlands in 2011 was about the same as in 2010. Antisemitic incidents increased from 19 in 2010 to 30 in 2011. Verbal incidents dropped slightly from 1,173 in 2010 to 1,098 in 2011. Anti-Semitism is more frequent in the 23-27 age group. According to a published report, titled "Racism, antisemitism and violence of the extreme right in the Netherlands", the number of antisemitic incidents registered in the Netherlands during the year 2012 is 2,077, showing an increase of more than 25% with compared to the year 2011.
This study also shows that a large proportion of anti-Semitic incidents are related to soccer. The word "Jew" is used in an offensive way, especially in incidents that take place between groups of supporters of soccer teams in the south of the Netherlands and supporters of Ajax.
Poland
In 2019, the newspaper Tylko Polska (Poland Only) which is sold in the Warsaw Parliament, put a headline in red letters "How to recognize a Jew", in which the criteria to follow to achieve said identification. As he says, it is necessary to expressly monitor "surnames and names, anthropological features, the way of speaking, appearance and appearance, character and methods of action." The publication is run by Leszek Bubel, who calls himself "Poland's ultimate anti-Semite".
United Kingdom
During the second half of the 20th century, after the Holocaust, racial hatred against Jews became unacceptable in British society. The Jewish community was affected by occasional attacks of anti-Semitism from far-right groups whose energy was focused on other minority groups.
During the 21st century, anti-Semitism is apparently based on anti-racism. Jews are no longer accused of killing Christ, or of possessing sinister racial traits. Contemporary antisemitism in Britain has become more subtle, complex and multifaceted in nature. It is perpetrated differently by different groups within society and for this reason it is difficult to identify. Anti-Semitic words and acts can be separated into the following two groups: acts of violence and abuse against Jews or their personal and communal property and anti-Semitism in public and private rhetoric, for example the language and tone adopted by the mass media. communication, political groups, organizations and individuals.
In the 21st century the dominant source of contemporary antisemitism in the UK is the far right. Holocaust denial and Jewish conspiracy theories remain mainstays of far-right ideology. However, contemporary antisemitism is also found on the left of the political spectrum. Criticism of Israel, especially from the left, has been further heightened by the second Palestinian intifada and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Sicher, Efraim (2011).
Another source of anti-Semitism is found in certain parts of the British Muslim community. The roots of this type of anti-Semitism are complex: from a mixture of historical positions, political and national tensions between communities, to the globalization of the Middle East conflict. One hypothesis is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has fueled a sense of anger and injustice among the British Muslim community, thereby creating a more hospitable climate for radical Islamist ideology such as contemporary anti-Semitism.
During 2013, Britain continued to become a central focus of anti-Semitic activity in Europe, with the emphasis placed on anti-Zionism and the delegitimization of the State of Israel.
The anti-Israel protests against the Israel-Gaza conflict in July 2014 have led to an increase in anti-Semitic acts. Since the beginning of the conflict there have been various demonstrations in which protesters cursed people of Jewish origin passing by (including "Heil Hitler") and eggs and drink containers were thrown at them. Various anti-Semitic acts were also committed, such as physical and verbal attacks on Jews and acts of vandalism against Jewish institutions. According to the CST (Community Security Trust) 70 anti-Semitic incidents were reported since the beginning of July, twice the number expected during a normal time.
Russia
Due to pressure from the Orthodox Church, born after the schism of 1054, Jews had been prohibited from entering Russia since the Middle Ages. It is not surprising, therefore, that during the Modern Age the Russian Jewish community was numerically insignificant. However, the annexation of territories after the war against the Ottoman Empire (1768-1774) and the successive divisions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795 between Austria, Prussia and Russia —which caused the disappearance of the Polish State until 1918— forced the Russian government to think about the hundreds of thousands of newly incorporated Jews.
Before the territorial expansions, the Russian emperors or tsars had already verified the ineffectiveness of attempts to incorporate their few Jewish subjects into the national Orthodox Church. But the subsequent policy of some members of the Romanov dynasty, which ruled Russia from 1613 to 1917, turned out to be a nightmare for the Jews who fell into their power.
Tsarina Catherine II's decision to impose a residence zone or settlement zone on Jews made the already hard life of Russian Jews even more difficult. They lost the possibility of escaping from the pogroms that caused so many deaths.
During the reign of Nicholas I (1825-1855) repression increased. In 1827 the tsar approved cantonism, a military regime that forced the poorest male Jews to join the army. Forced to be baptized, many of these young people ended up committing collective or individual suicides and others resorted to self-mutilation or feigned conversions.
During communist Russia, despite the expectations that the Jews had with the birth of the Soviet Union, the anti-Semitism of tsarist Russia was not completely reversed, but the prejudice against the Jews continued unscathed, and even, in some times was revitalized.
In post-Soviet Russia, anti-Semitism has been and is one of the most common expressions of xenophobia, even among some groups of politicians. Thus, there are a large number of anti-Semitic neo-Nazi groups in the republics of the former Soviet Union.
In January 2005, a group of 15 Duma members demanded that Judaism and Jewish organizations be banned in Russia. In June of the same year, 500 prominent Russians, including some 20 members of the Russian nationalist Rodina party, demanded that the state prosecutor investigate ancient Jewish texts as "anti-Russian" and outlaw Judaism. The investigation was launched, but was halted after an international outcry.
Today, anti-Semitic incidents, mostly led by extremist and nationalist groups, range from random acts of violence against Jews and acts of vandalism against Jewish institutions to the detonation of explosives in Jewish communities. Most of the anti-Semitic incidents are in Jewish cemeteries and buildings (community centers and synagogues), such as the assault on the Jewish community center in Perm in March 2013 and the attack on the Jewish kindergarten in Volgograd in August 2013..
Sweden
Sweden has the highest rate of antisemitic incidents in Europe after Germany and Austria. A 2006 government study estimated that 15% of Swedes agree with the statement: "Jews have too much influence in today's world". 5% of the total adult population and 39% of adult Muslims hold consistent antisemitic views.
In 2009, a synagogue belonging to the Malmö Jewish community was burned down. Jewish cemeteries were repeatedly desecrated, clergymen were abused as they returned home after prayers, and masked men chanted "Hitler" in the streets.
Judith Popinski, an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor, said she is no longer invited to schools with a large Muslim presence to tell her story as a Holocaust survivor.
In December 2010, the Jewish human rights organization Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a travel advisory concerning Sweden, advising Jews to exercise "extreme caution" when visiting the southern regions of the country, due to an alleged increase in verbal and physical harassment of Jewish citizens in the city of Malmö.
During 2013 there was a large increase in antisemitic incidents in Sweden. During the first half of 2013, the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents increased by almost 40% compared to the parallel period in 2012. There was also growing concern in the country's Jewish community (some 20,000 people) for anti-Semitic attacks.
Ukraine
During the Russian revolution, the Jewish community has suffered significant losses and a large number of pogroms have taken place, which escalated during the Second World War. Among them were the Lvov pogroms of 1941 in which thousands of Jews were murdered by Ukrainian nationalists and by Ukrainian militias.
In the 1990s and 2000s there were a large number of right-wing nationalist and anti-Semitic groups in Ukraine. Among the most notorious was MAUP, a private university with extensive financial ties to Islamic regimes.
In September 1993 riots broke out in Vinnytsia, where UNAS-UNOS members attacked the offices of the local Jewish mayor Dmitrii Dvorkis. During the same period, other Jewish mayors—Eduard Gurwits of Odessa and Yukhym Zvyahilsky of Donetsk—also became the subject of antisemitic campaigns.
During Ukraine's elections, candidates such as Yulia Tymoshenko and Arseniy Yatsenyuk have been "indicted" of being Jewish, in what would be smear campaigns. The 2010 presidential election involved Jews, Israel, and anti-Semitism becoming a "prominent issue," as some officials made anti-Semitic statements, while others They condemned these statements.
More recently Jewish organizations inside and outside Ukraine have accused the Ukrainian political party "Svoboda" of sympathizing with Nazi ideology and being openly anti-Semitic. In May 2013, the World Jewish Congress listed the party as a neo-Nazi party. "Svoboda" he has denied being antisemitic.
In the 2012 Ukrainian parliamentary election "Svoboda", won for the first time place in the Ukrainian Parliament, obtaining 10.44% of the vote and becoming the 4th largest national party in parliament.
Recently, from the beginning of 2014 with the clashes between Ukraine and Russia, several anti-Semitic events took place in different cities of Ukraine.
North America
United States
In November 2005, the United States Commission on Civil Rights examined anti-Semitism on college campuses. The report reported that "incidents of threatening bodily harm, physical intimidation, or property damage are rare today," but anti-Semitism still takes place in many student camps and presents a " 34;serious problem".
On September 19, 2006, Yale University founded the Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism (YIISA), the first North American university-based center for the study of the subject, as part of the Institution of Political and Social Studies. The center's director, Charles Small, noted the rise in recent years of anti-Semitism around the world, prompting the "need to understand the current manifestation of this disease." In June 2011, Yale voted to close this initiative. After carrying out routine supervision, the university's oversight committee said the initiative did not meet research and teaching standards. Donald Green, director of Yale's Institution for Political and Social Studies, argued that not enough articles had spread in major academic journals or attracted enough students. Therefore, like other programs that were previously in a similar situation, the initiative was cancelled.
This decision was criticized by prominent people such as former director of the United States Commission on Civil Rights director Kenneth L. Marcus, who is now director of the Initiative to Combat Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israelism in the Educational Systems of United States at the Institute for Judaism and Jewish Community Research, and Deborah Lipstadt, who described the decision as "bizarre" and strange".
A 2007 survey by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) concluded that 15% of Americans hold an anti-Semitic outlook, which is still on the same average line for the past ten years but declining over the past sixty years. The survey concluded that education is a strong predictor, "the more educated Americans are, the freer they are in prejudiced views." The conviction that "the Jews have too much power" it was considered by the ADL as the most antisemitic perspective. Other perspectives pointing to anti-Semitism, according to the survey, include the view that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the United States, and that they are responsible for the death of Jesus of Nazareth. The survey argued that anti-Semitic Americans tend to be intolerant in general, for example with regard to immigration and free speech. This survey has also found that 29% of foreign-born Hispanics and 32% of African-Americans hold a strong anti-Semitic belief, three times that of whites (10%).
A 2009 study published in the Boston Review found that about 25% of non-Jewish Americans blamed Jews for the 2008-2009 economic crisis, with a higher percentage among Democrats than Republicans.
In August 2014, the California State Assembly passed a non-binding resolution which "motivates university leaders to combat a wide range of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel actions," although the resolution & #34;it is purely symbolic and has no political implications".
Latin America
Argentina
An international survey by the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith organization, conducted between July 2013 and February 2014, has shown that one in four Argentines manifests anti-Semitic prejudices. However, in this survey, Argentina shows a lower degree of anti-Semite in relation to other South American countries.
In the report on anti-Semitic events in Argentina during 2012 carried out by the DAIA, a decrease in complaints about anti-Semitic episodes in the country has been noted. However, a marked increase in anti-Semitism can be observed in the virtual media.
Bolivia
During the government of Evo Morales, the press published several anti-Semitic articles. The president of the Chamber of Deputies indicated that the Holocaust had not been enough for the Jews. On September 13, 2014, there was an attack against the cemetery of the Israelite Association in the city of Cochabamba.
Costa Rica
In 2013, then-representative Manrique Oviedo of the Citizen Action Party was accused of making anti-Semitic accusations when he stated in the legislative plenary session that then-Vice President Luis Liberman Ginsburg was using his position to benefit other Jews. Said statements were condemned by various actors including the government of Costa Rica, the leaders of the Partido Acción Ciudadana Ottón Solís and Luis Guillermo Solís, the heads of the parliamentary fractions of Congress including that of Oviedo and representatives of the Jewish community such as Gilberth Meltzer, president of the Israelite Zionist Center and Luis Fishman deputy and former vice president.
Honduras
With the Honduran constitutional crisis of 2009, the local Jewish community became embroiled in controversy. Rumors swirled in the Honduran media about the participation of Jews and Israelis in the coup. After what happened, thousands of protesters took to the streets of the main Honduran cities, in one of their demonstrations a wall of the Cathedral of Tegucigalpa was painted with the message that read the prayer: "Get out the Jews of Honduras!". Because of this, various Israeli and Jewish portals condemned anti-Semitic expressions in Honduras.
Anti-Semitism increased during the presidency of Juan Orlando Hernández, who has led a pro-Israeli government since his election in 2014. During this period, Israel sold Honduras several military ships and weapons, and since then it has become one of its greatest allies. In addition to Israel being the first country to recognize the re-election of President Hernández after the massive accusations of electoral fraud, which generated protests and subsequent repression that caused the death of 30 Hondurans. Because of this in recent years, some Honduran Jews have made aliyah to Israel.
Uruguay
In 2014, in Paysandú, a group of people held a public demonstration in a city square, carrying a large banner that read Jews out of Paysandú. On March 9, 2016, David Fremd, a merchant of Jewish origin, was assassinated in this same city by a Uruguayan convert to Islam who called himself Abdulah Omar.
Venezuelan
In a 2009 note, Michael Rowan and Douglas E. Schoen wrote: "In a Christmas Eve speech several years ago, Chávez said that the Jews killed Christ and have been gobbling it up ever since. riches and causing poverty and injustice around the world".
In February 2012, Henrique Capriles, an opposition candidate in the 2012 Venezuelan presidential election, was subjected to what foreign journalists characterized as vicious attacks by state media sources.
The Wall Street Journal mentioned that Capriles was "maligned in a campaign in which Venezuela's state media insinuated that he was, among other things, a homosexual and a Zionist agent."
On February 13, 2012, an opinion piece on the state-run Radio Nacional de Venezuela, titled "The enemy is Zionism," attacked Capriles' Jewish ancestors and linked him to Jewish groups because of an encounter he had with the leaders of the local Jewish community, saying, "This is our enemy, the Zionism that Capriles represents today... Zionism, along with capitalism, are responsible for 90% of world poverty and imperialist wars".
The Chavista deputy Adel El Zabayar Samara, a member of the Venezuelan National Assembly, carried out anti-Semitic demonstrations through the television channel Al Manar, in which he affirmed that Hitler murdered the Jews belonging to the progressive organizations that Hitler's main financiers it was the Zionist Jews: “If we look at who financed Hitler before World War II, we will see that the main financiers were the Zionists…”, “If we analyze who Hitler assassinated, we will see that the victims were progressive Jews (…) not will find representatives of international Zionism among the dead. In 1934 they minted a coin symbolizing the friendship between Zionism and German Nazism."
Middle East
Arab anti-Semitism is believed to have been widespread since the 19th century. Jews, like other minority groups within the Muslim world, were subject to various restrictions. Antisemitism in the Arab world has risen sharply in modern times, for many reasons: the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire and traditional Islamic society; European influence, brought about by Western imperialism and Christian Arabs, Nazi propaganda, resentment of Jewish nationalism (see Zionism); and the rise of Arab nationalism. The rise of political Islam during the 1980s onwards provided a new form of Islamic anti-Semitism, which gave hatred against Jews a religious component.
A 2011 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center showed that all Muslim-majority Middle Eastern countries surveyed hold strongly negative views of Jews. On questioning, only 2% of Egyptians, 3% of Lebanese Muslims, and 2% of Jordanians stated that they had a positive view of Jews. Muslim-majority countries outside the Middle East displayed similarly negative views, with just 4% of Turks and 9% of Indonesians viewing Jews in a favorable light. According to a 2011 exhibit at the Washington Holocaust Museum in the United States, some of the rhetoric of Middle Eastern media and commentators about Jews bears a striking resemblance to Nazi propaganda.
Muslim clerics in the Middle East have frequently referred to Jews as descendants of monkeys and pigs, both of which are conventional epithets for Jews and Christians.
According to Professor Robert Wistrich, director of the Vidal Sassoon Center (SICSA), the call for the destruction of Israel by Iran or Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, or the Muslim Brotherhood, represents a modern mode of genocidal anti-Semitism.
Saudi Arabia
In 2004, the website of Saudi Arabia's supreme tourism commission initially stated that Jews will not be granted tourist visas to enter the country. The Saudi Arabian embassy in the United States reneged on the statement, which was later removed.
In 2001, Saudi Arabian Radio and Television produced a 30-part television miniseries titled 'Rider Without a Horse,' a dramatization of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Saudi Arabian government claimed that hatred of Jews is justifiable.
Saudi textbooks slander Jews (and non-Muslim Christians and Wahhabis): According to The Washington Post, Saudi textbooks, themselves hailed as cleansed of anti-Semitism, still call Jews apes (and the Christians, pigs); require students to avoid and not make friends with Jews; they claim that the Jews worship the devil; and encourage Muslims to engage in Jihad to defeat the Jews.
The Freedom House Center for Religious Freedom reviewed textbooks in Islamic studies courses for elementary and secondary school students from the Saudi Ministry of Education. Investigators found statements promoting hatred of Christians, Jews, "polytheists" and other "infidels". The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were taught as historical fact. The texts describe the Jews and Christians as enemies of Muslim believers and the clash between the two as an ongoing struggle that will end in victory over the Jews. Jews are accused of virtually all "subversion" and of all the wars of the modern world.
Palestinian National Authority
Mudar Zahran, a Palestinian, in a post for the Gatestone Institute wrote that "Palestinians have been used as fuel for the new form of anti-Semitism, which has harmed Palestinians by exposing them to abuses by Arab governments. who are deliberately ignored by the media, including those who claim to care for the Palestinians, yet only bear hatred of the Jews. This has given rise to the Palestinian protest for justice, equality, freedom and basic human rights ignored while the world is consumed with the delegitimization of Israel through ignorance or malice".
In March 2011, the Israeli government released a document stating that "anti-Israeli messages and anti-Semitic messages are regularly heard in the government, in private media, in mosques and are taught in books schoolchildren", to the extent that they form" an integral part of the fabric of life within the Palestinian National Authority".
In August 2012, the director general of Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs Yossi Kuperwasser claimed that incitement to Palestinian anti-Semitism "happens all the time" and that it is "worrying and disturbing". At the institutional level, he said the Palestinian Authority has promoted three key messages to the Palestinian people which form an incitement: "that the Palestinians finally be the sole sovereigns over all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, that the Jews, especially those living in Israel, are not really human beings, but rather ≪the dregs of humanity≫; and that all tools are legitimate in the fight against Israel and the Jews".
Egypt
In Egypt, the Dar al-Fadhilah published a translation of Henry Ford's anti-Semitic tract, The International Jew, with a clearly anti-Semitic image on the front page.
On May 5, 2001, after Shimon Peres visited Egypt, the online newspaper Al Akhbar said that "lies and deceit are not foreign to the Jews [...]. For this reason, God changed their form and turned them into monkeys and pigs".
In July 2012, Egypt's Al Nahar channel tricked the actors into thinking they were being part of an Israeli TV show and filmed their reactions when they were told it was an Israeli TV show. In response, some of the actors released anti-Semitic speech and dialogue, and many even turned violent. Actress Mayer El Beblawi said "Allah did not curse the worm and the moth as much as he cursed the Jews," while actor Mahmoud Abdel Ghaffar had a violent outburst, saying: "They put someone who resembles a Jew… I hate Jews to death" after discovering that it was a prank.
After the elections in Egypt, with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to the government, many Jews chose to flee the country for fear of persecution.
Iran
In its annual report, the US Committee on International Religious Freedom strongly criticized the "troubling situation" in Iran. “There is growing anti-Semitism and repeated instances of Holocaust denial by senior government officials and religious leaders, which continue to create an atmosphere of fear in the Jewish community.” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former president of Iran, has frequently denied the Holocaust.
In July 2012, the Anti-Defamation League condemned the winning anti-Semitic cartoon in an Iranian contest in which the winning drawing depicts three religious Jews praying in front of a depiction of the Western Wall in Jerusalem with a tag reading &# 34;Wall Street, New York". Other cartoons that entered the contest were also anti-Semitic. The national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, condemned that cartoon, stating that "Iran once again rewards those who promote anti-Semitism".
Iraq
In 2017, Sarah Idan, Miss Iraq, the most beautiful woman in the country, was threatened with death and forced to leave her country with her family after posting a photo on Instagram with Adar Gandelsman, Miss Israel.
Jordan
Jordan does not allow entry to Jews with visible signs of Judaism or even with personal religious items in their possession. The Jordanian ambassador to Israel responded to a complaint by a religious Jew denied entry that security concerns necessitated travelers entering the Hashemite Kingdom not doing so with prayer shawls (Tallit) and phylacteries (Tefillin). The Jordanian authorities state that the policy is to ensure the safety of Jewish tourists.
Lebanon
In 2004, Al-Manar, a Hezbollah-affiliated media network, aired a drama series called 'The Diaspora'. Observers allege that it is based on historical anti-Semitic accusations. BBC correspondents who have seen the show say the series quotes extensively from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Libya
In October 2011, the only Jew living in Libya, psychoanalyst David Gerbi, left his home country amid tensions that led to anti-Semitic demonstrations in Tripoli and Benghazi, including an attempt to break into his hotel to drag him out strength.
Syria
Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke visited Syria in November 2005 and made a speech that was broadcast live on Syrian television.
Asian
Indonesia
The Indonesian constitution recognizes only six religions: Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism, but not Judaism. In order to obtain an identity document without which one does not have access to public services, the majority of Jews must lie and declare themselves to be Christians.
Muslims who show an interest in Judaism arouse hostility.
Malaysia
Although Malaysia currently does not have a sizable Jewish population, the country has become an example of the phenomenon called 'Jewless Anti-Semitism'. In the book on Malay identity 'The Malay Dilemma', published in 1970, former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad wrote: 'Jews are not only hook-nosed... but they also instinctively understand about money... Jewish greed and its financial spells gained economic control of Europe and sparked anti-Semitism that waxed and waned across Europe throughout the centuries".
Pakistan
The first US State Department report on Global Anti-Semitism mentions strong sentiment of anti-Semitism in Pakistan. In Pakistan, a country without Jewish communities, antisemitic sentiment is fueled by numerous antisemitic articles in the press.
After Israel's independence in 1948, violent incidents took place against Pakistan's small Jewish community of about 2,000 Jews.
The Magain Shalom Synagogue in Karachi was attacked, as were individual Jews. The persecution of the Jews led to their exodus to Israel through India, the United Kingdom, Canada, and other countries. The Jewish community in Peshawar ceased to exist although a small community still exists in Karachi.
Large numbers of people in Pakistan believe that the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York were a secret Jewish conspiracy organized by Israel's Mossad, as did the September 7 London bombings. July 2005, allegedly committed by Jews to discredit Muslims. Such accusations echo traditional antisemitic theories. The 2008 bombing of the headquarters of the Jewish religious movement Chabad-Lubavitch in India was incited by Pakistani-linked militants led by Ajmal Kasab.
Turkey
The main ideological sources of anti-Semitism in Turkey are Islam, the anti-Zionist left, and far-right nationalism.
In recent decades, synagogues have been the target of a series of terrorist attacks. In 2003, the Neve Shalom Synagogue was the target of a car bomb attack, killing 21 Turkish Muslims and 6 Jews.
During Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's tenure, My Struggle, the book written by Hitler, has once again become the best-selling book in Turkey.
There are also anti-Semitic manifestations in the media, such as in 2009, the year in which an anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli soap opera aired for the first time in Turkey, and was also broadcast in Arab countries.
According to Nesim Güvenis, vice president of the Association of Turkish Jews in Israel, anti-Semitism, triggered by harsh statements by the Turkish government, had caused the emigration of hundreds of young Jews from Turkey to the United States or Europe even before the events of MV Mavi Marmara.
Along with the events in the Middle East during July 2014, there has been an increase in anti-Semitic demonstrations. For example, Yildiz Tilbe, a famous pop singer in the country, posted on her Twitter account that "if God allows it, it will be the Muslims who will bring the end of those Jews again, it is near"; to which he continued "May God bless Hitler". Also, a group of protesters has thrown stones at the Israeli consulate in Istanbul.
Neo-antisemitism and controversies over the current use of the term
Currently, some critics of the policies of the Israeli government denounce that the term antisemitism is sometimes improperly used to dismiss or delegitimize those authors who criticize Israel's policies. This is the opinion of authors such as Alex Cokburn or Rabbi David Saperstein (representative in Washington of the Movement for the Reform of Judaism), among others:
There are many arguments, from the Palestinian standpoint, that Israel is indeed a terrorist State. Even so, if this was not the case, such assertion would not in itself be evidence of anti-Semitism. Only if a banner said "All Jews are terrorists," would Fox be right. The rhetorical problem is to equip "Israel" or "the State of Israel" with "Jews," and argue that they are synonyms. Ergo, criticizing Israel is being anti-Semite.A. Cokburn, see The Free Press.
Examples of this use of the term are the fact that the BBC has been accused by the Israeli government of anti-Semitism for making a documentary about a kamikaze terrorist, or that the American economist Paul Krugman (Nobel Prize winner in Economics) has He has also been accused of anti-Semitism for an article he wrote in the New York Times. In it, Krugman opined that the leaders of Arab countries were drawn into holding anti-Israel and anti-American discourse due to the fact that the policies of these countries fuel these sentiments in Arab countries. This opinion provoked an avalanche of criticism of the author, including anti-Semitism.
However, other authors consider that, although anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are conceptually distinct, anti-Zionism is the politically correct form that anti-Semitism often takes.
Professor Edward Kaplan of Yale University, in collaboration with Charles Small, conducted a statistical study entitled "Anti Israel Sentiment predicts Antisemitism in Europe: a statistical study" published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, where it showed that criticism of Israel is closely related to anti-Semitic sentiments. According to the study by Kaplan and Small, 56% of those who have extreme sentiments against Israel also They turned out to be anti-Semitic.
For their part, Israel's defenders generally accept criticism of Israel's policies as perfectly legitimate, as long as they are like those of any other government; but, when it comes to an extreme anti-Israeli position (such as denying more or less explicitly the right to the existence of said State, as anti-Zionism does), they often consider it a modern form of anti-Semitism (or Judeophobia), Perednik note:
Even though from a strictly theoretical point of view it could be anti-Zionist and non-Judeophobic, anti-Zionism proposes actions that would lead to the death of millions of Jews. Therefore in the world the two expressions of hatred [to Israel and the Jews] They are intimately intertwined, as they often reveal their own voices.
According to Pilar Rahola, legitimate criticism of Israel that is accompanied by certain expressions (trivialization of the Holocaust, minimization of Palestinian terrorism, etc.), can lead to anti-Semitism.
It must be remembered, however, that there are also anti-Zionist Jews, such as the Neturei Karta and other ultra-Orthodox religious groups, as well as left-wing secular Jews. Conversely, there are also non-Jewish Zionists as is the case of Zionist Christians, Zionist Muslims, etc.
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