History of antisemitism

Manetho, an Egyptian priest and historian of that time, wrote scathingly of the Jews and his themes are repeated in the works of Chaeremon, Lysimachus, Poseidonius, Apollonius Molon, and in Apion and Tacitus.

[6] Hecateus of Abdera is quoted by Flavius Josephus as having written about the time of Alexander the Great that the Jews "have often been treated injuriously by the kings and governors of Persia, yet can they not be dissuaded from acting what they think best; but that when they are stripped on this account, and have torments inflicted upon them, and they are brought to the most terrible kinds of death, they meet them after an extraordinary manner, beyond all other people, and will not renounce the religion of their forefathers".

[6] Edward Flannery describes the form of antisemitism which existed in ancient times as being essentially "cultural, taking the shape of a national xenophobia which was played out in political settings".

[43] The earliest recorded instance of an accusation of deicide against the Jewish people as a whole – that they were collectively responsible for the death of Jesus – occurs in a sermon of 167 CE attributed to Melito of Sardis entitled Peri Pascha, On the Passover.

Local rulers and church officials closed many professions to Jews, pushing them into marginal roles which were considered socially inferior, such as tax and rent collecting and moneylending, occupations which were only tolerated as a "necessary evil".

The number of Jews permitted to reside in different places was limited; they were concentrated in ghettos and were not allowed to own land; they were subject to discriminatory taxes on entering cities or districts other than their own and were forced to swear special Jewish Oaths, and they suffered a variety of other measures.

Organised and official persecution of the Jews became a normal feature of life in southern France only after the Albigensian Crusade, because it was only then that the Church became powerful enough to insist that measures of discrimination be applied.

[92] During the Second Barons' War in the 1260s, Simon de Montfort's followers ravaged the Jewries of London, Canterbury, Northampton, Winchester, Cambridge, Worcester and Lincoln in an effort to destroy the records of their debts to moneylenders.

[citation needed] In Germany, part of the Holy Roman Empire, persecutions and formal expulsions of the Jews were liable to occur at intervals, although it should be said that this was also the case for other minority communities, whether religious or ethnic.

The dearth of resources and lack of common will to establish a strong Church presence in the colonies allowed many Jews to acquire Letters of Denization, granting them the status of English subjects.

[121] In 1744, Frederick II of Prussia limited the number of Jews allowed to live in Breslau to only ten so-called "protected" Jewish families and encouraged a similar practice in other Prussian cities.

[136][137][138][139] Bonald's article Sur les juifs (1806) was one of the most venomous screeds of its era and furnished a paradigm which combined anti-liberalism, traditional Christian antisemitism, and the identification of Jews with bankers and finance capital, which would in turn influence many subsequent right-wing reactionaries such as Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux, Charles Maurras, and Édouard Drumont, nationalists such as Maurice Barrès and Paolo Orano, and antisemitic socialists such as Alphonse Toussenel and Henry Hyndman.

[134][142] In the 1840s, the popular counter-revolutionary Catholic journalist Louis Veuillot propagated Bonald's arguments against the Jewish "financial aristocracy" along with vicious attacks against the Talmud and the Jews as a "deicidal people" driven by hatred to "enslave" Christians.

Between 1882 and 1886 alone, French priests published twenty antisemitic books blaming France's ills on the Jews and urging the government to consign them back to the ghettos, expel them, or hang them from the gallows.

[156] Although Jews played only a minor role in the nation's commercial banking system, the prominence of Jewish investment bankers such as the Rothschilds in Europe, and Jacob Schiff, of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in New York City, made the claims of antisemites believable to some.

The Tsar's minister Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev stated that the aim of the government with regard to the Jews was that: "One third will die out, one third will leave the country and one third will be completely dissolved [into] the surrounding population".

A 19th-century traveler observed: "I have seen a little fellow of six years old, with a troop of fat toddlers of only three and four, teaching [them] to throw stones at a Jew, and one little urchin would, with the greatest coolness, waddle up to the man and literally spit upon his Jewish gaberdine.

[162] In the 20th century, antisemitism and Social Darwinism culminated in a systematic campaign of genocide, called the Holocaust, in which some six million Jews were exterminated in German-occupied Europe between 1941 and 1945 under the National Socialist regime of Adolf Hitler.

The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution ended official discrimination against the Jews but was followed, however, by massive anti-Jewish violence by the anti-Bolshevik White Army and the forces of the Ukrainian People's Republic in the Russian Civil War.

Action Française and other right-wing groups launched a vicious antisemitic press campaign against Blum which culminated in an attack in which he was dragged from his car and kicked and beaten while a mob screamed 'Death to the Jew!

'[177] Catholic writers such as Ernest Jouin, who published the Protocols in French, seamlessly blended racial and religious antisemitism, as in his statement that "from the triple viewpoint of race, of nationality, and of religion, the Jew has become the enemy of humanity.

[180] In Germany, following World War I, Nazism arose as a political movement incorporating racially antisemitic ideas, expressed by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (German: My Struggle).

[187][188][189] On 20 January 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, deputed to find a "final solution to the Jewish question", chaired the Wannsee Conference at which all the ethnic Jews and many of part-Jews resident in Europe and North Africa were marked to be exterminated.

[citation needed] In the first half of the 20th century, Jews in the United States faced discrimination in employment, in access to residential and resort areas, in membership in clubs and organizations and in tightened quotas on Jewish enrollment and teaching positions in colleges and universities.

Lindbergh gave a speech in Des Moines, Iowa in which he expressed the decidedly Ford-like view that: "The three most important groups which have been pressing this country towards war are the British, the Jews, and the Roosevelt Administration.

[200][201] Poland's later "March events" of 1967–1968 was a state anti-Jewish (officially anti-Zionist) political campaign involving the suppression of the dissident movement and a power struggle within the Polish communist party against the background of the Six-Day War and the Soviet Union's and the Eastern Bloc's new radically anti-Israeli policy in support of socialist Arab countries.

[226] In late October, a group of prominent US law firms signed a letter condemning "reports of anti-Semitic harassment, vandalism and assaults on college campuses, including rallies calling for the death of Jews and the elimination of the State of Israel" urging universities to take action.

In the essay, he explains that there are relatively low levels of antisemitism in the English-speaking world, particularly in Britain and the United States, because of the values associated with Protestantism, the rise of capitalism, and the establishment of constitutional governments that protect civil liberties.

Rubenstein attests that another reason as to why "most of these [Protestants] were predisposed to be sympathetic to the Jews" was because they often "view[ed] themselves, like the biblical Hebrews, as a chosen group that had entered into a direct covenant with God.

In further attempts to minimize antisemitism within government, the United States' Declaration of Independence embraced the liberal principles that were previously put forth in England and inspired the formation of a republic that had executive, judicial, and legislative powers and even a law that served to "forbid the establishment of any religion or any official religious test for office holding.