In the Catholic kingdoms of late medieval and early modern Spain, oppressive policies and attitudes led many Jews to embrace Christianity. Portugal followed suit in December However, those expelled could only leave the country in ships specified by the King. When those who chose to leave the country arrived at the port in Lisbon, they were met by clerics and soldiers who used force, coercion and promises to baptize them and prevent them from leaving the country.
This episode technically ended the presence of Jews in Portugal.
Afterwards, all converted Jews and their descendants would be referred to as New Christians or marrano. They were given a grace period of thirty years during which no inquiry into their faith would be allowed. This period was later extended until However, a popular riot in resulted in the deaths of up to four or five thousand Jews, and the execution of the leaders of the riot by King Manuel. Those labeled as New Christians were under the surveillance of the Portuguese Inquisition from until Amsterdam in Holland also became a focus for settlement by the persecuted Jews from many lands in succeeding centuries.
Martin Luther , an Augustinian friar and an ecclesiastical reformer whose teachings inspired the Reformation , wrote antagonistically about Jews in his pamphlet On the Jews and Their Lies , written in He portrays the Jews in extremely harsh terms, excoriates them and provides detailed recommendations for a pogrom against them, calling for their permanent oppression and expulsion. At one point he writes: Luther's harsh comments about the Jews are seen by many as a continuation of medieval Christian antisemitism.
Muslow and Popkin assert that, "the antisemitism of the early modern period was even worse than that of the Middle Ages; and nowhere was this more obvious than in those areas which roughly encompass modern-day Germany, especially among Lutherans. Simon of Trent was a boy from the city of Trento , Italy, who was found dead at the age of two in , having allegedly been kidnapped, mutilated, and drained of blood.
His disappearance was blamed on the leaders of the city's Jewish community, based on confessions extracted under torture, in a case that fueled the rampant antisemitism of the time. Simon was regarded as a saint, and was canonized by Pope Sixtus V in He stated that Jews were "deceitful", "very repugnant", and "hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ". However, religious plurality was already a cultural tradition and a legal obligation in New Amsterdam and in the Netherlands, and his superiors at the Dutch West India Company in Amsterdam overruled him.
During the mid-to-lateth century the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth was devastated by several conflicts, in which the Commonwealth lost over a third of its population over 3 million people. The decrease of the Jewish population during that period is estimated at , to ,, including emigration, deaths from diseases and captivity in the Ottoman Empire. This persecution led many Jews to pin their hopes on a man called Shabbatai Zevi who emerged in the Ottoman Empire at this time and proclaimed himself Messiah in However his later conversion to Islam dashed these hopes and led many Jews to discredit the traditional belief in the coming of the Messiah as the hope of salvation.
In the Zaydi imamate of Yemen , Jews were also singled out for discrimination in the 17th century, which culminated in the general expulsion of all Jews from places in Yemen to the arid coastal plain of Tihamah and which became known as the Mawza Exile. In many European countries the 18th century " Age of Enlightenment " saw the dismantling of archaic corporate, hierarchical forms of society in favour of individual equality of citizens before the law.
How this new state of affairs would affect previously autonomous, though subordinated, Jewish communities became known as the Jewish question. In many countries, enhanced civil rights were gradually extended to the Jews, though often only in a partial form and on condition that the Jews abandon many aspects of their previous identity in favour of integration and assimilation with the dominant society. According to Arnold Ages, Voltaire's "Lettres philosophiques, Dictionnaire philosophique, and Candide, to name but a few of his better known works, are saturated with comments on Jews and Judaism and the vast majority are negative".
In , 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. This was known as malke-geld queen's money. In she introduced a law limiting each Jewish family to one son. In , Joseph II abolished most of these practices in his Toleranzpatent , on the condition that Yiddish and Hebrew were eliminated from public records and that judicial autonomy was annulled.
In accordance with the anti-Jewish precepts of the Russian Orthodox Church , [] Russia's discriminatory policies towards Jews intensified when the partition of Poland in the 18th century resulted, for the first time in Russian history, in the possession of land with a large population of Jews. Following legislation supporting the equality of French Jews with other citizens during the French Revolution , similar laws promoting Jewish emancipation were enacted in the early 19th century in those parts of Europe over which France had influence.
Despite this, traditional discrimination and hostility to Jews on religious grounds persisted and was supplemented by racial antisemitism , encouraged by the work of racial theorists such as the royalist Joseph Arthur de Gobineau and particularly his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Race of — Nationalist agendas based on ethnicity, known as ethnonationalism , usually excluded the Jews from the national community as an alien race. Such theories, usually posited by white Europeans, advocated the superiority of white Aryans to Semitic Jews. The counter-revolutionary Catholic royalist Louis de Bonald stands out among the earliest figures to explicitly call for the reversal of Jewish emancipation in the wake of the French Revolution.
In the s, 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. Civil rights granted to Jews in Germany, following the occupation of that country by the French under Napoleon , were rescinded after his defeat. Pleas to retain them by diplomats at the Congress of Vienna peace conference —5 were unsuccessful.
The essay began as an attack on Jewish composers, particularly Wagner's contemporaries and rivals Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer , but expanded to accuse Jewish influences more widely of being a harmful and alien element in German culture. The term "antisemitism" was coined by the German agitator and publicist, Wilhelm Marr in However, they did not enjoy mass electoral support and at their peak in , had only 16 deputies out of a total of in the parliament. Jews were accused of weakening the national spirit through association with republicanism , capitalism and anti-clericalism , particularly by authoritarian, right wing, clerical and royalist groups.
These accusations were spread in antisemitic journals such as La Libre Parole , founded by Edouard Drumont and La Croix , the organ of the Catholic order of the Assumptionists. Between and 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.
Financial scandals such as the collapse of the Union Generale Bank and the collapse of the French Panama Canal operation were also blamed on the Jews. The Dreyfus affair saw a Jewish military officer named Captain Alfred Dreyfus falsely accused of treason in by his army superiors and sent to Devil's Island after being convicted.
Antisemitism - Wikipedia
Dreyfus was acquitted in , but the case polarised French opinion between antisemitic authoritarian nationalists and philosemitic anti-clerical republicans, with consequences which were to resonate into the 20th century. Between and , approximately three million Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe migrated to America, many of them fleeing pogroms and the difficult economic conditions which were widespread in much of Eastern Europe during this time. Pogroms in Eastern Europe, particularly Russia, prompted waves of Jewish immigrants after Jews, along with many Eastern and Southern European immigrants, came to work the country's growing mines and factories.
Many Americans distrusted these Jewish immigrants.
- Concise History of American Antisemitism (Electronic book text).
- Footprints in the Magic City.
- A Concise History of American Antisemitism.
- Antisemitism in America - Leonard Dinnerstein - Oxford University Press.
- Controlling-Praxis im Mittelstand: Aufbau eines Controllingsystems basierend auf Lexware, DATEV oder SAP (German Edition).
Along with Italians, Irish and other Eastern and Southern Europeans, Jews faced discrimination in the United States in employment, education and social advancement. American groups like the Immigration Restriction League , criticized these new arrivals along with immigrants from Asia and southern and eastern Europe, as culturally, intellectually, morally, and biologically inferior.
Despite these attacks, very few Eastern European Jews returned to Europe for whatever privations they faced, their situation in the U. The Morgan Bonds scandal injected populist antisemitism into the presidential campaign. It was disclosed that President Grover Cleveland had sold bonds to a syndicate which included J.
Morgan and the Rothschilds house, bonds which that syndicate was now selling for a profit. The Populists used it as an opportunity to uphold their view of history, and prove to the nation that Washington and Wall Street were in the hands of the international Jewish banking houses. Another focus of antisemitic feeling was the allegation that Jews were at the center of an international conspiracy to fix the currency and thus the economy to a single gold standard. Since , Jewish minors were conscripted into the cantonist schools for a year military service.
The Tsar's minister Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev stated that the aim of the government with regard to the Jews was that: Between and the outbreak of the First World War, an estimated two and half million Jews left Russia — one of the largest mass migrations in recorded history. Historian Martin Gilbert writes that it was in the 19th century that the position of Jews worsened in Muslim countries.
There was a massacre of Iraqi Jews in Baghdad in In , some Jews in Morocco were killed in Mogador. In , around Jews were killed in Marrakech and Fez in Morocco. In , 18 Jews were killed in Tunis , and an Arab mob looted Jewish homes and stores, and burned synagogues, on Jerba Island. Concerning the life of Persian Jews in the middle of the 19th century, a contemporary author wrote:. Under the pretext of their being unclean, they are treated with the greatest severity and should they enter a street, inhabited by Mussulmans, they are pelted by the boys and mobs with stones and dirt For the same reason, they are prohibited to go out when it rains; for it is said the rain would wash dirt off them, which would sully the feet of the Mussulmans If a Jew is recognized as such in the streets, he is subjected to the greatest insults.
The passers-by spit in his face, and sometimes beat him If a Jew enters a shop for anything, he is forbidden to inspect the goods Should his hand incautiously touch the goods, he must take them at any price the seller chooses to ask for them. One symbol of Jewish degradation was the phenomenon of stone-throwing at Jews by Muslim children. A 19th-century traveler observed: To all this the Jew is obliged to submit; it would be more than his life was worth to offer to strike a Mahommedan.
Account Options
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 and under the National Socialist regime of Adolf Hitler. In Russia, under the Tsarist regime, antisemitism intensified in the early years of the 20th century and was given official favour when the secret police forged the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion , a document purported to be a transcription of a plan by Jewish elders to achieve global domination.
The 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. From —21, between , and , Jews were slaughtered. These groups were critical of the whole political establishment of the Third Republic. Following the Stavisky Affair , in which a Jewish man named Serge Alexandre Stavisky was revealed to be involved in high-level political corruption, these groups encouraged serious rioting which almost toppled the government in the 6 February crisis.
The Vichy government openly collaborated with the Nazi occupiers to identify Jews for deportation.
Antisemitism in America
A law on the status of Jews of that year, followed by another in , purged Jews from employment in administrative, civil service and judicial posts, from most professions and even from the entertainment industry — restricting them, mostly, to menial jobs. Vichy officials detained some 75, Jews who were then handed over to the Germans and sent to their deaths. After Hitler came to power in , the Nazi regime sought the systematic exclusion of Jews from national life. Jews were demonized as the driving force of both international Marxism and capitalism.
The Nuremberg Laws of outlawed marriage or sexual relationships between Jews and non-Jews. As Nazi control extended in the course of World War II, antisemitic laws, agitation and propaganda were brought to occupied Europe, [] often building on local antisemitic traditions. In the German-occupied Poland , where over three million Jews had lived before the war in the largest Jewish population in Europe, Polish Jews were forced into newly established prison ghettos in , including the Warsaw Ghetto for almost half million Jews.
On 20 January , 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. Between and , approximately 1. This dramatic increase and the upward mobility of some Jews was accompanied by a resurgence of antisemitism.
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 the membership of clubs and organizations and in tightened quotas on Jewish enrollment and teaching positions in colleges and universities. Some sources state that the conviction and later lynching of Leo Frank , which turned a spotlight on antisemitism in the United States, also led to the formation of the Anti-Defamation League in October Foxman , the organization's National Director, disputes this, stating that American Jews simply needed an institution to combat antisemitism.
Social tension during this period also led to renewed support for the Ku Klux Klan , which had been inactive since Antisemitism in the United States reached its peak during the s and s. The pioneer automobile manufacturer Henry Ford propagated antisemitic ideas in his newspaper The Dearborn Independent. The pioneer aviator Charles Lindbergh and many other prominent Americans led the America First Committee in opposing any involvement in the new war in Europe. Although America First avoided any appearance of antisemitism and voted to drop Henry Ford as a member for this reason.
Lindbergh gave a speech in Des Moines, Iowa in which he expressed the decidedly Ford-like view that: Whenever the Jewish percentage of the total population becomes too high, a reaction seems to invariably occur. It is too bad because a few Jews of the right type are, I believe, an asset to any country. The German American Bund held parades in the late s which featured Nazi uniforms and flags with swastikas alongside American flags. Rosenfeld" and calling his New Deal the "Jew Deal". Louis refugees in Antisemitism in the Soviet Union reached a peak in — and culminated in the so-called Doctors' Plot that could have been a precursor to a general purge and a mass deportation of the Soviet Jews as nation.
The country's leading Yiddish-writing poets and writers were tortured and executed in a campaign against the so-called rootless cosmopolitans. The excesses largely ended with the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union. However, the discrimination against Jews had continued, leading to a mass emigration once it was allowed in the s, followed by another during and after the breakup of the Soviet Union , mostly to Israel. A common theme behind the anti-Jewish violence in the immediate post-war period in Poland were blood libel rumours. Both of these waves of antisemitism in Poland resulted in the emigration of most of the country's Holocaust survivors during the late s and in , mostly to either Israel or the United States.
During the early s, isolationists on the far right made overtures to anti-war activists on the left in the United States to join forces against government policies in areas where they shared concerns. Antisemitic conspiracism was "peddled aggressively" by right-wing groups. Towards the end of , as the movement against the Gulf War began to build, a number of far-right and antisemitic groups sought out alliances with left-wing anti-war coalitions, who began to speak openly about a " Jewish lobby " that was encouraging the United States to invade the Middle East.
- Spanish Conversation Demystified.
- Capabilities;
- Der Engel von Bremen: Erzählte Zeitgeschichte (German Edition);
- The Book of Punishment?
- TARDIS Eruditorum - An Unauthorized Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 2: Patrick Troughton!
- The Game of Truth - Erotic story.
This idea evolved into conspiracy theories about a " Zionist-occupied government " ZOG , which has been seen as equivalent to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The first years of the 21st century have seen an upsurge of antisemitism. Several authors such as Robert S. Wistrich , Phyllis Chesler , and Jonathan Sacks argue that this is antisemitism of a new type stemming from Islamists , which they call new antisemitism. In , the United Kingdom set up an all-Parliamentary inquiry into antisemitism, which published its findings in The inquiry stated that: State Department found that there was an increase in antisemitism across the world, and that both old and new expressions of antisemitism persist.
Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor also noted a continued global increase in antisemitism, and found that Holocaust denial and opposition to Israeli policy at times was used to promote or justify antisemitism. Rubenstein , a respected author and historian, outlines the presence of antisemitism in the English-speaking world in one of his essays with the same title.
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 does not argue that the treatment of Jews was ideal in these countries, rather he argues that there has been less overt antisemitism in the English-speaking world due to political, ideological, and social structures.
Join Kobo & start eReading today
Essentially, English-speaking nations experienced lower levels of antisemitism because their liberal and constitutional frameworks limited the organized, violent expression of antisemitism. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. A Concise History of American Antisemitism shows how Christianity's negative views of Jews pervaded American history from colonial times to the present.
The book describes the European background to American anti-Semitism, then divides American history into time periods, and examines the anti-Semitic ideas, personalities, and literature in each period. It also demonstrates A Concise History of American Antisemitism shows how Christianity's negative views of Jews pervaded American history from colonial times to the present. It also demonstrates that anti-Semitism led to certain behaviors in some United States officials that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust.
Clear and forceful, A Concise History of American Antisemitism is an important work for undergraduate course use and for the general public interested in the roots of the current rash of anti-Semitism. Hardcover , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book. Dinnerstein argues that deeply ingrained hostility towards Jews embedded in Christian teachings is the mainspring of this prejudice Offers an illuminating analysis of black anti-Semitism since WW II, tracing its roots in many instances to Protestant theology.
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Academic Skip to main content. Choose your country or region Close. Ebook This title is available as an ebook. To purchase, visit your preferred ebook provider. Antisemitism in America Leonard Dinnerstein Gracefully written and monumental in scope, this important volume offers readers the first comprehensive history of antisemitism in the United States, from colonial times to the present.
Antisemitism in America Leonard Dinnerstein. Immigrants in Urban America " Antisemitism in America would be a valuable addition to most church libraries, because of its factual handling of a persistent tendency toward antisemitism in mainstream Christian culture. Immigrants in Urban America " Antisemitism in America is a tour de force --comprehensive, thoughtful, and highly readable. Thieves of Book Row McDade.
Great Crossings Christina Snyder. Sociological Justice Donald Black. The Danube Andrew Beattie.