Racial antisemitism

With the decreasing role of religion in public life and the simultaneous tempering of religious antisemitism, a combination of growing nationalism, the rise of eugenics, resentment of the perceived socio-economic success of Jews, and the influx of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe to Central Europe, soon led to the newer, and often more virulent, racist antisemitism.

[4] Scientific racism, the ideology that genetics played a role in group behavior and characteristics, was highly respected and accepted as factual between 1870 and 1940.

[5] This acceptance of race science made it possible for antisemites to clothe their hatred of Jews in "scientific theory" and propose grand, sweeping political solutions in coming decades, from relocation to Madagascar to compulsory sterilization to mass extermination.

The first statute of purity of blood appeared in Toledo in 1449,[8] where an anti-converso riot lead to conversos being banned from most official positions.

However, some antisemitic racial theorists of the time argued that the Semitic peoples arose from the blurring of distinctions between previously separate races.

[9] The term semiticization was first used by Gobineau to label the blurring of racial distinctions that, in his view, had occurred in the Middle East.

Gobineau had created an essentialist model of race which was based on the three distinct racial groups, but he did not give a clear account of how this division arose.

The Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg developed a variant of this theory in his writings, arguing that Jewish people were not a "real" race.

[citation needed] Modern European antisemitism has its origins in 19th century theories—now most of them are considered pseudo-scientific, but back then, they were accepted as credible—that said that the Semitic peoples, including the Jews, are entirely different from the Aryan, or Indo-European, populations, and they would not be able to assimilate.

[14] In the view of racial antisemitism, Jews are not opposed on account of their religion, instead, they are opposed on account of their supposed hereditary or genetic racial characteristics: greed, a special aptitude for money-making, aversion to hard work, clannishness and obtrusiveness, lack of social tact, low cunning, and especially, lack of patriotism.

[15][16][17][18] In Nazi Germany, the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 placed severe restrictions on "aliens" such as Jews or anyone of Jewish heritage.

These laws established that on the basis of their race, all Jews, even quarter- and half-Jews, were no longer citizens of their own country (their official title became "subject of the state").

In 1936, Jews were banned from all professional jobs, effectively preventing them having any influence in politics, higher education and industry.

By April 1939, nearly all Jewish companies had either been confiscated, collapsed under financial pressure and declining profits, or had been persuaded to sell out to the Nazi government.