• Those who make this case include Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, and David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard.
• A search for “Jews” and “slave trade” on YouTube pulls up more than 50,000 videos, most posted by the Nation of Islam, Duke and their supporters.
• Mainstream scholars for the most part do not accept their conclusions and see the charges as essentially anti-Semitic.

Did Jews really own slaves?

Yes. Jacob Rader Marcus, a historian and Reform rabbi, wrote in his four-volume history of Americans Jews that over 75 percent of Jewish families in Charleston, South Carolina; Richmond, Virginia; and Savannah, Georgia, owned slaves, and nearly 40 percent of Jewish households across the country did. The Jewish population in these cities was quite small, however, so the total number of slaves they owned represented just a small fraction of the total slave population; Eli Faber, a historian at New York City’s John Jay College reported that in 1790, Charleston’s Jews owned a total of 93 slaves, and that “perhaps six Jewish families” lived in Savannah in 1771.

A number of wealthy Jews were also involved in the slave trade in the Americas, some as shipowners who imported slaves and others as agents who resold them. In the United States, Isaac Da Costa of Charleston, David Franks of Philadelphia and Aaron Lopez of Newport, Rhode Island, are among the early American Jews who were prominent in the importation and sale of African slaves. In addition, some Jews were involved in the trade in various European Caribbean colonies. Alexandre Lindo, a French-born Jew who became a wealthy merchant in Jamaica in the late 18th century, was a major seller of slaves on the island.

Did Jews dominate the slave trade?

Not according to scholars that have closely examined the question. Several studies of the Jewish role in the slave trade were conducted in the 1990s. One of them, by John Jay’s Faber, compared available data on Jewish slave ownership and trading activity in British territories in the 18th century to that of the wider population. Faber concludes that the claim of Jewish domination is false and that the Jewish role in slavery was “exceedingly limited.” According to Faber, British Jews were always in the minority of investors in slaving operations  and were not known to have been among the primary owners of slave fleets. Faber found that, with few exceptions, Jews were minor figures in brokering the sale of slaves upon their arrival in the Americas, and given the urban-dwelling propensity of most American Jews, few accumulated large rural properties and plantations where slave labor was most concentrated. According to Faber, Jews were more likely than non-Jews to own slaves, but on average they owned fewer of them.

Other studies, by Harold Brackman and Saul Friedman, reached similar conclusions. In a 1994 article in the New York Review of Books, David Brion Davis, an emeritus professor of history at Yale University and author of an award-winning trilogy of books about slavery, noted that Jews were one of countless religious and ethnic groups around the world to participate in the slave trade:

The participants in the Atlantic slave system included Arabs, Berbers, scores of African ethnic groups, Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutch, Jews, Germans, Swedes, French, English, Danes, white Americans, Native Americans, and even thousands of New World blacks who had been emancipated or were descended from freed slaves but who then became slaveholding farmers or planters themselves.

Davis went on to note that in the American South in 1830 there were “120 Jews among the 45,000 slaveholders owning twenty or more slaves and only twenty Jews among the 12,000 slaveholders owning fifty or more slaves.”

What’s the origin of the Jewish domination claim?

The claim of Jewish domination first came to wide attention with the Nation of Islam’s 1991 book, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume One. (Two other volumes would follow, addressing different aspects of black-Jewish relations.) The heavily footnoted and seemingly scholarly book, which lists no individual author and was self-published by the Nation of Islam, purports to present “irrefutable evidence” that Jews owned slaves “disproportionately more than any other ethnic or religious group in New World history.” The book makes a point of basing its findings on Jewish sources, including Encyclopaedia Judaica and multiple works by Marcus, though it includes no data on non-Jewish slave owners and traders from which to establish whether the Jewish role was in fact disproportionate. It also routinely ignores claims from the Jewish sources it relies on that undermine its thesis. (Marcus, for example, asserts that Jews “were always on the periphery” of the slave trade and that “sales of all Jewish traders lumped together did not equal that of the one Gentile firm dominant in the business” — an observation The Secret Relationship ignores.)

Nonetheless, the notion of Jewish domination of slaving was embraced by, among others, David Duke, who has promoted it on Twitter and on his website, and by the City College of New York professor Leonard Jeffries, whose 1991 speech echoing the claim of Jewish domination provoked a public controversy that led to his ouster as chair of the college’s black studies department. (A federal judge later reinstated him.) Tony Martin, a tenured professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College drew criticism in 1993 for assigning The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews in his courses. Soon after, Martin published a book entitled The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront. Although the book was condemned by Wellesley’s president and many of Martin’s colleagues, Martin remained on the faculty until his retirement in 2007.

More recently, Jackie Walker, a British activist and major supporter of Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, drew criticism in 2016 for claiming in a Facebook post that Jews were the “chief financiers” of the African slave trade. Walker, who also made other public comments offensive to Jews, was briefly suspended from the party because of her claim, but remained unapologetic and was reinstated within a month. (She was later suspended again for publicly bemoaning Jewish centrality in Holocaust commemorations.)

Is there any merit to the book’s claim?

Mainstream scholars have on the whole rejected it. In addition to the study by Faber cited above, refutations have been published by Davis, the Yale professor mentioned above, and Ralph Austen, an emeritus professor of African history at the University of Chicago. Winthrop D. Jordan, a history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specialized in slavery, wrote that the book employed shoddy scholarly methods and cherry-picked information, ignoring evidence that modified or countered its pre-ordained conclusion. Henry Louis Gates, director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University  called the Nation of Islam’s book “one of the most sophisticated instances of hate literature yet compiled,” and charged that it “massively misrepresents the historical record.”

Is it anti-Semitic to make this claim?

Mainstream scholars and Jewish leaders generally see this claim as anti-Semitic. The Anti-Defamation League, the largest Jewish defense organization, on its website includes  “the false claim that Jews controlled the Atlantic slave trade” in its description of contemporary manifestations of anti-Semitism.

As Yale’s Davis noted in his 1994 article, the claim is similar to numerous other historical efforts to blame Jews for a host of problems and atrocities.

Jews, partly because of their remarkable success in a variety of hostile environments, have long been feared as the power behind otherwise inexplicable evils. For many centuries they were the only non-Christian minority in nations dedicated to the Christianization and thus the salvation of the world. Signifying an antithetical Other, individual Jews were homogenized and reified as a “race”—a race responsible for crucifying the Savior, for resisting the dissemination of God’s word, for manipulating kings and world markets, for drinking the blood of Christian children, and, in modern times, for spreading the evils of both capitalism and communistic revolution.

According to Davis, much of the historical evidence that scholars have relied on to document Jewish involvement in the slave trade is itself anti-Semitic, “biased by deliberate Spanish efforts to blame Jewish refugees for fostering Dutch commercial expansion at the expense of Spain.”

“Given this long history of conspiratorial fantasy and collective scapegoating, a selective search for Jewish slave traders becomes inherently anti-Semitic unless one keeps in view the larger context and the very marginal place of Jews in the history of the overall system,” he continued.

The post Where the False Claim That Jews Controlled the Slave Trade Comes From appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

Though the precise characteristics of a pogrom vary widely depending on the specific incidents, a pogrom is generally considered to be a violent attack against a group based on their ethnic identity, and is mostly used to refer to attacks against Jews in 19th and 20th-century Europe.

Where did pogroms originate?

Most of the original pogroms took place in an area that became known as the Pale of Settlement, a territory the Russian Empire acquired  between 1791–1835. The Russian government forbade its new Jewish subjects from settling in Russian territory outside the Pale of Settlement, an area that included parts of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova and Poland. Although an 1821 attack in Odessa is sometimes considered to be the first pogrom in the Russian Empire, most historians cite 1881 incidents beginning in Elizavetgrad (in present-day Ukraine) as the beginning of the Russian pogrom phenomenon. The Elizavetgrad violence spread rapidly throughout seven provinces in southern Russia and Ukraine, where peasant attackers looted Jewish stores and homes, destroyed property, and raped women. Many individuals were beaten and/or murdered in these pogroms. In 1881 pogroms also occurred in Kiev and Odessa among a hundred other locations. The first Jewish self-defense organizations, initiated by students at Novorossiysk University in Odessa, began to form at this time.

Did the Russian government support pogroms?

Historians disagree about the degree to which the Russian government may have been involved in coordinating these attacks; some argue that it was not involved and some that it must have been. Either way, official response was often slow. In some cases only after days of violence did the police and military intervene to restore order, and they sometimes joined the violent mobs.

What factors led to the pogroms?

The main inspiration for these vicious attacks was the ideology of anti-Semitism, which blamed Jews for weakened economic conditions and political instability, in addition to the claim that Jews murdered Jesus and  the blood libel myth that Jews murdered Christian babies and baked their blood into matzah. It was also rumored that Jews were connected to the 1881 assassination of Czar Alexander II by members of the Narodnaya Volya socialist movement. During the 1880s, the Russian government enacted anti-Jewish legislation limiting the number of Jews who could attend secondary schools and universities and preventing Jewish law school graduates from joining the bar. In 1882 Czar Alexander III (Alexander II’s son and successor) authorized the “May Laws,” which restricted where Jews could settle, forbade non-Jews from issuing mortgages to Jews and prohibited Jews from conducting business on Sundays.

How did Jews respond to pogroms?

Even as the incidence of pogroms slowly lessened in the late 1880s, mostly due to outcry from the West, Jews sought refuge in Western Europe and the United States, in addition to the land of Israel, which was then under Ottoman rule. Pogroms also inspired many Jews to become politically active, joining organizations such as the General Jewish Labor Bund, Bolshevik groups and self-defense leagues. Some Russian Jews found hope in Zionism. The pogroms also spurred American Jews to organize on behalf of their Russian brethren, and was cited as a factor in the establishment of the American Jewish Committee.

What were some of the worst pogroms in history?

Pogroms continued to occur in the early 20th century. Particularly violent were the pogroms from 1903 to 1906. The horrific 1903 pogrom in Kishinev, in what is now Moldova, killed dozens of Jews and resulted in the destruction of hundreds of homes and business, prompting tens of thousands of Russian Jews to flee. The Zionist poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik wrote his famous poem, “City of Slaughter,” in response to the Kishinev pogrom. The 1905 pogrom in Odessa left about 2,500 Jews dead. In 1919 Cossacks (paramilitary fighters who had been absorbed into the Russian military) led a pogrom in Kiev in which they killed 14 people, and injured and raped others.

Did pogroms occur outside Russia?

Street violence against Jews was common in Nazi Germany, and on Nov. 9–10, 1938, the wave of violence known as Kristallnacht was instigated by the Nazi Party. Street violence against Jews continued throughout World War II. In many areas under German occupation, Nazi officials and soldiers supported and encouraged pogroms. After World War II, pogroms continued in Europe. A pogrom occurred in 1946 in Kielce, Poland, against Jewish Holocaust survivors who returned to the town, leaving 42 dead. These pogroms further motivated the already devastated Jewish population to seek refuge outside of Europe.

Is the term “pogrom” still in use today?

The term “pogrom” is still in use describing contemporary events. In 1991 the Jewish media referred to the Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn as a pogrom, and in 2008 Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert used the term to describe Jewish settlers‘ attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank city of Hebron. There is no consensus as to the exact defining characteristics of a pogrom, but the term still tends to refer to coordinated street violence against Jews and sometimes other ethnic groups.

The post What Were Pogroms? appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

The Holocaust is also sometimes referred to as “the Shoah,” the Hebrew word for “catastrophe.” It affected nearly all of Europe’s Jewish population, which in 1933 numbered 9 million people. 

When they came to power in Germany, the Nazis did not immediately start to carry out mass murder. However, they quickly began using the government to target and exclude Jews from German society. The regime persecuted other groups because of politics, ideology, or behavior. The Nazis claimed that Roma, people with disabilities, some Slavic peoples (especially Poles and Russians), and Black people were biologically inferior. Other persecuted groups included Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay men, and people the Nazis called “asocials” and “professional criminals.” 

MAY 7, 1919: Treaty of Versailles

The Treaty of Versailles ending World War I is presented to Germany. Among its provisions, the treaty forces Germany to accept responsibility for the war and commit to enormous reparation payments — a humiliation seen as setting the stage for the rise of Adolf Hitler and his promise to restore German greatness.

FEBRUARY 27, 1925: Hitler Reformulates Nazi Party

Hitler declares the reformulation of the Nazi Party and installs himself as leader in a declaration at the Munich beer hall where he led an aborted coup against the German government in 1923.

JANUARY 30, 1933: Hitler Becomes Chancellor of Germany

The Nazis assume control of Germany with Hitler’s appointment as chancellor.
FROM THE JTA ARCHIVE (1933): Hitler Sworn in as German Chancellor 

FEBRUARY 28, 1933: Reichstag Fire and Aftermath

A day after a fire in the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament building, German President Paul Von Hindenburg approves the Reichstag Fire Decree, an emergency decree that suspends individual rights and due process of law.
THE JTA ARCHIVE (1933): Police Aided By Nazis Search Central Union Premises After Reichstag Fire

MARCH 22, 1933: First Concentration Camp Established

The SS, a Nazi paramilitary group, establishes the first concentration camp to incarcerate political prisoners near the town of Dachau.
THE JTA ARCHIVE (1933): Jewish Lawyer Tortured by Nazis in Concentration Camp 

APRIL 1, 1933: Nazis Stage Boycott of Jewish Businesses

Nazi leadership stages an economic boycott targeting Jewish-owned businesses and the offices of Jewish professionals.
JTA ARCHIVE (1933): Nazi Communique Announces Boycott of Jewish Businesses Throughout Country

SEPTEMBER 15, 1935: Nuremberg Laws

The German parliament (Reichstag) passes the Nuremberg Laws, institutionalizing many of the Nazis’ racial theories and providing the legal grounds for the persecution of Jews in Germany.
Read the full text here.

AUGUST 1, 1936: Opening of Berlin Olympics

The Summer Olympic Games open in Berlin, providing the Nazi government with a major propaganda success by enabling it to present itself as a respectable member of the international community.

MARCH 11, 1938: Germany Annexes Austria

Germany invades Austria and incorporates it into the German Reich, provoking a wave of street violence against Jews in Vienna.
JTA ARCHIVE (1938): Anschluss Proclaimed in Plebiscite

SEPTEMBER 29, 1938: The Munich Agreement

The Munich agreement is signed, ceding the Sudetenland, a region in Czechoslovakia with a large ethnic German population, to Germany and prompting British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to declare the achievement of “peace for our time.”
JTA ARCHIVE (1938): Munich Pact Abandons Minorities to Nazi Terror

NOVEMBER 9, 1938: Kristallnacht

A night of violent anti-Jewish pogroms known as Kristallnacht results in the destruction of hundreds of synagogues, the looting of thousands of Jewish-owned businesses and the deaths of nearly 100 Jews. The event, which was followed by the promulgation of dozens of anti-Jewish laws, is considered a turning point in the persecution of German Jewry.
JTA ARCHIVE: 25,000 Jews Under Arrest in Wake of Worst Pogrom in Modern German History, 4 Dead

DECEMBER 2, 1938: Kindertransports Begin

The first Kindertransport, a program for bringing child refugees out of Nazi Germany, arrives in Great Britain, bringing some 200 Jewish children from a Berlin orphanage destroyed on Kristallnacht. Thousands of refugee children would be brought to England aboard such transports between 1938 and 1940.
JTA ARCHIVE (1999): Former Kindertransport Refugees Gather for a Last Full-Scale Reunion

MAY 13, 1939: Departure of the St. Louis

The ocean liner St. Louis departs Hamburg, Germany and heads toward Cuba carrying 900 passengers, nearly all of them Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. The boat is denied entry to Cuba and later the United States, forcing it to return to Europe. Some were taken in by the United Kingdom, while the others were allowed into Western European countries that would later be occupied by the Nazis. Two hundred and fifty-four of the passengers would eventually be murdered in the Holocaust.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939: Germany Invades Poland

Germany invades Poland, setting off World War II. Britain and France responded with a declaration of war two days later.

May 1940: Germany Invades France

Germany begins its invasion of France, the Netherlands and Belgium. The Netherlands and Belgium surrender in May, and Paris is occupied on June 14.  In a June 22 armistice agreement, Germany is given control of northern France, while the collaborationist French Vichy government controls the south.
JTA ARCHIVE (1940): Jews Fleeing France as Hitler Dictates Armistice Terms

MAY 20, 1940: Auschwitz Established

Germany establishes the Auschwitz concentration camp, the largest facility of its kind built by the Nazis, about 43 miles west of Krakow, Poland.

NOVEMBER 15, 1940: Warsaw Jews Confined to Ghetto

German authorities order the Warsaw ghetto sealed. It is the largest ghetto in both area and population, confining more than 350,000 Jews (about 30 percent of the city’s population) in an area of about 1.3 square miles.

JUNE 22, 1941: Germany Invades the USSR

Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union in “Operation Barbarossa.” German mobile units of Security Police and SD (Nazi intelligence) officials, called Einsatzgruppen, identify, round up and murder Jews, carrying out mass shootings during the last week of June 1941.

JTA ARCHIVE (1941): 500,000 Jews in Path of Nazi Forces Invading Russia
JTA ARCHIVE (1941): Nazis Launch Radio Drive, Urge Russian Troops to Turn Bayonets on Jews

SEPTEMBER 1, 1941: Jews Forced to Wear Yellow Stars of David

All Jews over the age of six residing in territories under German control are required to wear a yellow Star of David with the word Jew inscribed within it on their outer clothing.

JTA ARCHIVE (1941): Jews in Reich Start New Year by Wearing Yellow Stars

DECE 7, 1941: Pearl Harbor Attacked, US Enters World War II

Japan launches a surprise attack on the United States Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to enter World War II.

JTA ARCHIVE (1941): Hebrew U President Judah L. Magnes Cables FDR Day After Pearl Harbor to Offer Service

JAN. 20, 1942: “Final Solution” Planned at Wannsee

The Wannsee Conference convenes in a villa outside Berlin. Plans to coordinate a “final solution” to the Jewish question are presented to leading German and Nazi officials.

July 23, 1942: Nazis Begin Gassing Operations at Treblinka

Some 925,000 Jews and an unknown number of Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners would be murdered there.
JTA ARCHIVE (1943): Nazis Suffocate Jews in Groups of 500 in Special Steam Chambers

APRIL 19, 1943: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Begins

For nearly a month, small groups of Jews fought the larger and better armed German forces before finally being defeated.
JTA ARCHIVE (April 30, 1943): Jews in Warsaw Ghetto Ask for Food and Arms to Continue Resistance
JTA ARCHIVE (May 16, 1943): Nazis Burn Down 200 Houses in Warsaw Ghetto, Execute Jewish Hostages

September 20, 1943: Thousands of Danish Jews Begin Escape to Sweden

With help from resistance fighters and ordinary citizens, some 7,200 Danish Jews began their escape to neutral Sweden.
JTA ARCHIVE (1943): Fishermen Establish Regular Ferry Service for Refugees Between Denmark and Sweden

MARCH 19, 1944: Germany Occupies Hungary

Germany occupies Hungary. Less than two months later, the deportation of 440,000 Hungarian Jews, mostly to Auschwitz, begins.
JTA ARCHIVE (1944): Jewish Shops in Budapest Looted, Jews Flee Homes, Seek Escape from Hungary

OCTOBER 7, 1944: Prisoners at Auschwitz Rebel

Jews arriving at Auschwitz in 1944. (German National Archive/Wikimedia Commons)Prisoners at Auschwitz rebel and the Germans crush the uprising, killing nearly 250 prisoners during the fighting.

January 27, 1945: Soviets Liberate Auschwitz

With Soviet forces advancing, Germany begins, on Jan. 17, the final evacuation of Auschwitz, marching nearly 60,000 west toward Germany in what became known as “death marches.” Anyone who fell behind or could not continue was shot. Ten days later, Soviet forces entered the camp and liberated the remaining 7,000 prisoners.

APRIL 30, 1945: Hitler Commits Suicide

With Soviet forces nearing his command bunker in central Berlin, Adolf Hitler commits suicide.
JTA ARCHIVE (1945): Moscow Jews Rejoice at News of Hitler’s Death

MAY 7, 1945: Germany Surrenders

Germany surrenders unconditionally to the Allies.  armed forces surrender unconditionally in the west. Victory in Europe, V-E Day, is proclaimed the next day.
JTA ARCHIVE (1945): German Refugee Captain Acts as Interpreter as Nazis in Italy Surrender

NOVEMBER 20, 1945: Nazi Leaders Charged with Crimes Against Humanity

An international tribunal in Nuremberg charges 21 Nazi leaders with crimes against humanity. Twelve Nazis would eventually be sentenced to death.

JTA ARCHIVE: Leaders Nervous as Allied Prosecutors at Nuremberg Trial List Crimes Against Jews

JULY 4, 1946: At Least 42 Jews Murdered in Pogrom in Poland

A mob of Polish soldiers, police officers and civilians murder at least 42 Jews and injure over 40 in the Polish town of Kielce, an event that convinces many Holocaust survivors that they have no future in Poland and must emigrate to Palestine or elsewhere.

DECEMBER 15, 1961: Israeli Court Convicts Nazi War Criminal Adolf Eichmann

An Israeli court convicts Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, following a highly publicized trial. Eichmann is executed on June 15, 1962.

JTA ARCHIVE (1961): Eichmann Found Guilty, Reading of Judgment to Conclude Tomorrow

Adapted with permission from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The post A Timeline of the Holocaust appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

READ: How Do You Define Anti-Semitism? It’s Complicated.

In contemporary times, overt expressions of antisemitism are not widely tolerated in Western countries. However, classical antisemitic stereotypes about Jews persist and occasionally find expression in public discourse. Anti-Jewish violence and acts of vandalism and intimidation remain a global problem, with the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents in the United States and Europe spiking in recent years, according to a number of studies.

Anti-Jewish violence also tends to increase during times of unrest in the Middle East, leading some to believe the nature of antisemitism is morphing into hatred of Israel, a development that has been called the “new antisemitism.” In this view, excessive criticism of Israel or challenging its right to exist crosses the line from legitimate criticism into anti-Jewish bigotry. However, others say that opposing Israeli policies or even challenging Israel’s right to exist are legitimate viewpoints and do not necessarily imply hatred of Jews.

European Anti-Semitism Before the Holocaust

Antisemitism is sometimes called the world’s oldest hatred. The term itself is commonly attributed to Wilhelm Marr, a 19th-century German journalist who believed that Jews were racially distinct from Germans and could never be assimilated into German culture. Hatred of Jews, however, is much older, dating by some accounts to the early Christian era and the belief that Jews were collectively guilty of killing Jesus — a view that remained Catholic doctrine until 1965. For centuries, anti-Jewish ideas found their way into the writings of some of history’s most prominent and oft-quoted Christian thinkers, among them Saint Augustine, Martin Luther and Thomas Aquinas.

In Europe during the Middle Ages, edicts barred Jews from citizenship, owning land, marrying Christians, serving in government and joining various professional guilds. A number of stereotypes about Jews emerged in this period, including the myth that Jews have horns and that they are greedy and money-grubbing, a belief given expression by Shakespeare in the character of Shylock from “The Merchant of Venice.” The myth that Jews engage in ritual murder led to blood libel, the claim that Jews use the blood of Christian children for the making of Passover matzah.

Anti-Jewish stereotypes were often used a pretext for collective punishment of Jews. During the Crusader period, Christian armies en route to liberate the Holy Land from Muslim control swept through Jewish communities, raping and massacring along the way. Beginning in the 13th century European Jews were forced to convert to Christianity or were expelled from a number of countries, most famously Spain in 1492, uprooting a long established and highly accomplished Jewish community. The belief that Jews were responsible for the Black Death in the 14th century led to the violent annihilation of countless Jewish communities throughout Europe. Jews were also commonly scapegoated for problems as varied as pandemics and crop failures. Anti-Jewish pogroms, or riots, occurred periodically in Europe throughout the late Middle Ages and into the modern period.

Even after the emancipation of Europe’s Jews beginning in the late 18th century, when Jews were no longer restricted to ghettos and were allowed full citizenship rights in many countries, antisemitism persisted in Europe. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a forgery that purported to be minutes of the secret meetings of Jewish leaders bent on world domination, was first published in Russia in 1903 and later translated and disseminated widely. Eastern European pogroms factored into the decisions of millions of Jews to emigrate to the United States beginning in 1880. (The desire for better economic opportunities was also a critical factor.) The prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish army officer falsely convicted of treason in 1894, came to be seen as a symbol of the enduring perniciousness of European anti-Semitism.

The Holocaust and its Aftermath

In the 20th century, antisemitism took on a distinctly racial quality. Nazi-era propaganda portrayed Jews as biologically distinct from white Europeans and possessing telltale physical characteristics, including large hooked noses and thick curly hair. Adolf Hitler’s belief that Jews were racially inferior and posed a threat to the pure blood of Aryans inspired the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which prohibited sex and marriage between Jews and Germans and barred Jews from German citizenship. Eventually it would lead to Germany’s attempt to exterminate the Jewish people.

After the Holocaust, overt expressions of anti-Semitism ceased to be widely tolerated in Western Europe, and in some countries, Holocaust denial and the display of Nazi symbols were criminalized. In 1965, the Catholic Church adopted Nostra Aetate, which declared that modern Jews could not be held collectively responsible for the killing of Jesus, removing the theological justification for centuries of European anti-Semitism. This doctrinal shift has ushered in an era of unprecedented Jewish-Catholic reconciliation, though small pockets of traditionalist resistance to the change persist within the church.

As the memory of the Holocaust has receded in the postwar period, some of the taboo against explicit antisemitism has weakened and some right-wing European parties have openly embraced Nazi-era symbols and rhetoric. However, several countries have prosecuted individuals for Holocaust denial.

Antisemitism in the United States

American Jews have never suffered the systematic denial of rights comparable to what their coreligionists endured in Europe. The U.S. Constitution, with its explicit guarantee of freedom of religion, prevented adoption of the explicitly anti-Jewish laws prevalent in Europe over the centuries. But with the arrival of large numbers of Jews in the late 19th century, and their rapid socio-economic advancement in the early 20th, Jews came to face exclusion from various clubs and organizations, tightened admissions quotas at institutions of higher learning, and restrictions from certain resorts and residential areas.

One notable antisemitic incident in American history, which some compared to France’s Dreyfus Affair, was the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, whose death sentence for murder had earlier been commuted by the governor of Georgia due to questions about his guilt. The case drew national attention and led to the establishment of the Anti-Defamation League.

Explicit public antisemitism was rare but not unheard of in modern America. In the 1930s, Charles Coughlin, a Michigan priest, began using his radio program to advocate anti-Semitic ideas and marshal support for Adolf Hitler. Henry Ford, the famed American car manufacturer, published the four-volume “The International Jew” in the 1920s, which was later translated into German and embraced by the Nazis. Aviator Charles Lindbergh, a member of the America First Committee that opposed intervention in World War II, claimed Jews wielded too much influence over American politics and were eager to drag the country toward war.

In the 1960s, antisemitism was embraced in certain quarters of the growing black nationalist movement. In 1970, black activist Stokely Carmichael famously called Hitler the greatest white man in history. And Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan has long railed against Jews and their supposed control of the American government. Similar ideas have also found support among American white nationalists, most prominent among them David Duke, a former KKK leader and former member of the Louisiana state legislature.

Antisemitism in the Muslim World

On the whole, Jews have historically fared far better under Muslim rule than in Christian Europe. Though anti-Jewish stereotypes do exist in Islamic sources, there is nothing to rival the extent of anti-Jewish sentiment that exists in Christian sources, nor is there a history of violence and persecution equal to what Jews faced in Europe. Jews living in Muslim lands were accorded a second-class citizenship that afforded certain protections while reinforcing subordination to full Muslim citizens, forcing Jews to pay higher taxes and wear distinctive badges or clothing. According to the historian Bernard Lewis, the latter requirement was enforced erratically, and was one of the few instances of Christian Europe adopting a tactic of Jewish segregation from the Muslim world.

For the most part, antisemitic ideas that took root in the Muslim world were European imports, a trend Lewis dates to the 19th century. By the 20th century, some Arab leaders were openly embracing the Nazis, most famously Haj Amin al-Husseini, a hardline Palestinian nationalist who met with Hitler in 1941. Following the establishment of Israel, antisemitism increased dramatically in the Middle East.

Today, signs of European antisemitism are rife across the Arab world. As of 1986, there were at least nine Arabic translations of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Arab media routinely use antisemitic imagery and promote conspiracy theories reminiscent of Nazi-era propaganda. Tel Aviv University researcher Esther Webman has documented how leaders of the militant Lebanese group Hezbollah routinely conflate Zionism and Judaism, and Israelis and Jews, implying that resistance to Israel is part of the long history of opposing the Jewish quest for world domination. According to the ADL, the Middle East scores highest in global surveys of antisemitic sentiment, with an estimated 200 million people there harboring antisemitic attitudes.

Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism

As explicit antisemitism faded in Europe in the years immediately after the Holocaust, and as the State of Israel, established in 1948, demonstrated its military strength and began drawing criticism for its occupation of lands with Arab populations, some Jews began to argue that opposition to Zionism was a new form of antisemitism. This concept gained wider currency in the late 20th and early 21st century, as criticism of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians intensified, prompting international campaigns to isolate Israel politically and boycott it economically. Proponents of this view argue that while criticism of Israeli policies is valid, certain extreme forms of criticism — such as the rejection of Israel’s right to exist or singling out Israel for severe reprobation while ignoring the human rights abuses of its neighbors — can be antisemitic.

The U.S. State Department in 2007 determined that demonizing Israel, comparing its actions to the Nazis, denying its legitimacy, and singling it out for excessive criticism are all contemporary manifestations of antisemitism. Critics of this definition have accused the Jewish community of using that charge to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel.

Some Arabs have also contested the use of the term antisemitism to refer solely to Jews, arguing that as speakers of a semitic language, they are “semites” as well.

Antisemitism Today

In the 21st century, there is ample evidence that antisemitism is again on the rise. Acts of violence against Jews and Jewish institutions, the persistence of antisemitic beliefs about Jewish power and the rise of political parties that traffic in explicitly antisemitic rhetoric and ideas, particularly in Europe, are all indications of persistent antisemitism.

Mostly consigned to the political fringes since the Holocaust, far-right European political parties have made significant electoral gains in recent years. In Hungary, the Jobbik party, whose leader in 2012 said Jews were national security risks who should be registered, is currently the country’s third largest party. Greece’s Golden Dawn party, whose leader uses the Nazi salute and has called the Greek government a “pawn of International Zionism,” is currently the country’s third largest. The National Front party in France, long stigmatized as harboring Holocaust deniers and antisemites, is polling stronger than ever in the run-up to the 2017 presidential election. Even in Germany, which has been especially vigilant about right-wing politics since Nazism’s defeat, the Alternative for Germany party only narrowly missed winning seats in parliament in 2013 and has since surged in national polling.

Moreover, surveys show that classically antisemitic views remain common. According to the Anti-Defamation League, a majority of adults in Greece, and more than one-third in France, harbor antisemitic beliefs, including that Jews have too much power in business and too much influence over American politics. Over 30 percent of Americans believe Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their home country. In the Middle East, the numbers are dramatically higher, with more than 80 percent of the population of some countries harboring antisemitic attitudes, according to the ADL.

Jews continue to be the targets of violence, sometimes by Muslim extremists in retaliation for Israeli military actions. In 2012, A French Muslim shot and killed four people, including three children, at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France. In 2014, four people died when a French Algerian man opened fire at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels. In 2015, two days after the killing of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in Paris, an allegiant of the Islamic State killed four people at a kosher supermarket in the French capital.

Far-right ideologies have also motivated antisemitic attacks in Europe. During Yom Kippur services in 2019, an armed neo-Nazi livestreamed himself as he attempted to enter a synagogue in Halle, Germany. After failing to enter the synagogue, he killed two people nearby.

Meanwhile, antisemitic incidents have been on the rise in the United States. In 2014, a former white nationalist leader killed three people in a pair of shootings at a Jewish community center and retirement community in Kansas. In 2016, Jonathan Greenblatt, the leader of the Anti-Defamation League, said American Jews have not seen as much antisemitism in public discourse since the 1930s.

The deadliest attack on the American Jewish community occurred on October 27, 2018, when a gunman entered the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh during Shabbat services and opened fire, killing 11 people dead and wounding seven more. In 2019, Jews were also killed at a Chabad synagogue in Poway, California, and a kosher supermarket in New Jersey.

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BDS has come to be seen as a growing challenge to Israel internationally. In the United States, its impact has largely been felt on university campuses. Israeli leaders and American Jewish groups have pushed back forcefully against BDS, seeing it as at best counterproductive to peace and at worst blatantly anti-Semitic. They have won significant support in this effort from American political leaders. In 2016, President Barack Obama signed a trade law that barred cooperation with entities that engage in BDS, though Obama indicated he would not apply that requirement to boycotts of West Bank settlements. A number of American states have also adopted anti-BDS laws.

What does the BDS movement do?

BDS supporters seek to pressure Israel in three principal ways: boycotting Israeli goods, universities and cultural institutions; divesting from companies that provide vital equipment to the Israeli military; and urging countries to slap sanctions on Israel. BDS has inspired a number of divestment campaigns aimed at university endowments. public pension funds and companies it has identified as supporting or profiting from the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank. The movement has also inspired demonstrations at Israeli cultural events abroad.

Does BDS support boycott of everything Israeli or just products from West Bank settlements?

According to its website, BDS supports boycotting “Israel’s entire regime of oppression.” In practice, this is so widely defined that virtually every Israeli product is potentially subject to boycott. BDS targets the entire Israeli agricultural sector, alleging that all Israeli farm businesses are involved in human rights abuses. It has also targeted Hewlett-Packard, because the company allegedly makes a technology used by the Israeli military against Palestinians, and Sabra hummus, because it “provides financial support” to the Israeli military.

READ: Detroit’s Jews Ask, Are Targeted Israel Boycotts the Same as BDS?

Some, including some Jews, have proposed narrower boycotts aimed specifically at products produced in the Israeli settlements. Both the liberal “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby J Street, and the writer Peter Beinart, support a boycott of Israeli settlement products, because they believe the settlements are obstacles to a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Groups of Israeli academics, artists and students have also announced that they will not participate in activities at West Bank institutions.

Is the BDS movement pro-peace?

It certainly claims to be. Proponents of BDS consider its tactics inherently peaceful and cite previous examples of successful boycott campaigns — most commonly, the fight against apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s — as models of non-violent resistance to oppressive regimes. The movement does not, however, explicitly endorse the two-state solution, the framework most of the world considers the only realistic means of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rather, BDS is officially agnostic on that question, claiming its concerns are the basic rights of Palestinians, not the particular parameters of a peace settlement. In the eyes of many critics, because the movement offers unconditional support to the Palestinians and rarely, if ever, condemns terrorism, BDS contributes to violence and unrest, effectively incentivizing the Palestinians to oppose Israel rather than negotiate with it.

Is the BDS movement anti-Semitic?

Proponents of the anti-Semitism charge typically make two arguments. First, by focusing solely on Israel’s alleged abuses, BDS ignores countless other worse human rights abusers around the world, effectively singling out the Jewish state and holding it to a unique standard. Second, by including in its stated goals protecting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to homes they lived in prior to Israel’s establishment — something Israel considers an existential threat to its Jewish character — the movement is effectively calling for the end of the Jewish state.

“The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement aims to demonize, delegitimize, and destroy the Jewish nature of Israel, with the result of denying to Jews their right of national self-determination,” says the AMCHA Initiative, which fights anti-Semitism at American colleges and universities.

BDS defenders vigorously dispute this charge, arguing that theirs is a peaceful movement to force Israel to comply with international law. They assert that they target Israel because of its actions, not its identity, and point to the movement’s Jewish supporters as proof that it is not driven by anti-Jewish animus.

When did the BDS movement begin?

The BDS effort officially traces its origins to a 2005 call by a coalition of 170 Palestinian organizations, though some observers see its roots in the Arab League boycott of Israel launched in the 1940s. The contemporary BDS movement began to take shape during the Second Intifada, which began in 2000. Escalating violence and various major Israeli military operations in the West Bank led to a number of boycott calls beginning in 2002. The construction of Israel’s West Bank barrier, which the Palestinians largely opposed, alleging that it was a land grab rather than an effort to reduce terrorism, gave further momentum to these efforts. The 2005 BDS declaration opens by noting that Israel’s construction of the barrier was continuing despite an International Court of Justice ruling a year earlier that it was illegal.

Has BDS been successful?

The BDS website notes a number of successes, among them a 2014 UN report claiming that boycotts partially accounted for a significant drop in foreign investment in Israel that year. It also cites a small number of foreign multinationals that have pulled out of Israel under pressure and Israeli corporations whose businesses have been harmed. Several well-known artists, such as Roger Waters and Elvis Costello, have also declined to perform in Israel, citing its treatment of the Palestinians.

On the whole, the movement has been less successful in the United States than in Europe, where a number of pension funds and private banks have divested from targeted companies. In the United States, several university student bodies have called on their schools to divest. Though to date none have done so, the movement has made Israel a polarizing issue on U.S. campuses. The divestment question has also been raised in a number of liberal American Christian denominations. Despite all this, Israel has faced nowhere near the level of global isolation faced by apartheid South Africa, and its GDP continues to grow.

What are anti-BDS laws?

A number of U.S. states and the federal government have adopted laws aimed at countering the BDS movement. While the specifics differ, in general they bar the authority in question from doing business with any entity that engages in boycotts against the Jewish state. Critics charge that is a violation of free speech rights, claiming that the government should not be permitted to deny state contacts to companies simply because they disagree with their position on BDS.

Do any Jewish organizations support BDS?

Very few, and none of the major ones. The best-known is Jewish Voice for Peace, a San Francisco-based group that does not endorse a two-state solution or the principles of Zionism and which the Anti-Defamation League lists among the top anti-Israel groups in the United States. Among mainstream Jewish organizations, there is wall-to-wall rejection of BDS. The Jewish campus group Hillel officially bars pro-BDS groups from speaking under its auspices, though this policy has been challenged at a number of schools. J Street, the liberal lobbying group, rejects BDS because the BDS movement does not support a two-state solution or recognize the Jewish right to a state. J Street does support boycotts that are targeted at Jewish settlements in Israeli-occupied territory, however.

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While the notion that Jews control the world economy or banking system is an obvious canard, it is true that Jews have long been well-represented in the fields of finance and business. This is commonly attributed to the fact that for centuries, Jews were excluded from professional guilds and denied the right to own land, forcing them to work as merchants and financiers. However some academics contend that the historical evidence does not support this thesis and that Jewish financial success is instead due to the community’s high literacy rates.

Whatever its causes, Jewish business and financial success has more often than not been a major driver of anti-Semitism. Shakespeare’s Shylock character, a money lender who extracts a pound of flesh from a debtor who defaulted, is among history’s best-known caricatures of the Jewish businessman. That caricature lent a sinister undertone of greed and exploitation to Jewish financial dealings that would be invoked to justify anti-Jewish measures for centuries to come. Supposed Jewish control of the global financial system — a feature of what some call economic anti-Semitism — was a major theme in Hitler’s war against European Jews, Father Coughlin’s anti-Semitic rants in the United States, and the czarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  Related slurs include claims that Jews are wealthy, greedy and stingy, obsessed with material goods and profit, and that they exploit their economic advantages to help their own people, to the detriment of the public good.

Origins of the Jews and Money Stereotype

Jews have been associated with moneylending for at least a millennia. The most common explanation for this has been the exclusion of European Jews in the Middle Ages from various guilds, their confinement to ghettos and restrictions preventing them from owning land. Additionally, medieval Christian theology held that charging interest (known as usury) was sinful, which kept many Christians from becoming financiers. The field thus came to be dominated by Jews. The historian Howard Sachar has estimated that in the 18th century, “perhaps as many as three-fourths of the Jews in Central and Western Europe were limited to the precarious occupations of retail peddling, hawking, and ‘street banking,’ that is, moneylending.” The fact that Christians regarded such occupations as incompatible with their religious principles fed the notion that Jews were morally deficient, willing to engage in unethical business practices that decent people had rejected.

An alternative explanation holds that the Jewish penchant for finance is a result not of professional exclusion, but the Jewish emphasis on learning and literacy. A number of scholars have posited versions of this thesis. In their 2012 book The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492, economists Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein contended that, with the destruction of the ancient temples in Jerusalem and the beginning of the Jewish Diaspora, Jewish continuity suddenly became dependent on widespread religious literacy. Those who educated themselves remained Jews, whereas those who did not assimilated or converted to other faiths. Over time, the Jewish community evolved into a uniquely educated population, which in turn incentivized Jews to abandon farming in favor of better-paying professions and businesses.

Evolution of a Stereotype

From the fact of Jewish overrepresentation in occupations that Christians largely regarded as degenerate emerged a stereotype of the Jew as the embodiment of commercial greed, exploiter of the poor and the source of economic pain and misery for the masses. Perhaps nothing did more to solidify this image in the European imagination than The Merchant of Venice. In this play, written in the late 16th century, Shylock is a Jewish moneylender who extends a loan guaranteed by a pound of flesh from the Christian merchant Antonio. When Antonio’s ships are lost at sea and he cannot repay the loan, Shylock summons him to court where, despite being offered twice the original loan as repayment, he insists on exacting his pound of flesh, which he plans to obtain by lopping it off Antonio’s body with a knife.

Though scholars disagree whether Shakespeare was reflecting the ingrained anti-Semitism of his day or offering a subtle critique of it, Shylock has become synonymous not merely with Jewish greed but with anti-Semitism generally, a perception deepened by early onstage portrayals of the character as a vengeful villain. Shylock had a lasting influence on the depiction of Jews in English literature and was used as a propaganda device by the Nazis. Dozens of productions of The Merchant of Venice were mounted in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Jews did hold prominent financial positions in Europe, which made them ready scapegoats in times of economic crisis. For centuries, so-called court Jews acted as the principal financiers for the European aristocracy’s projects. In the 1760s, one of those court Jews, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, established a banking business in Germany that would eventually grow into a vast international conglomerate and yield one of the largest family fortunes in world history. The Rothschild name became synonymous with Jewish financial power, invoked as shorthand for the secretive and outsized power Jews were alleged to wield over the economic fate of the world. Despite his own Jewish ancestry (his parents converted the family to Protestantism when he was a child) Karl Marx, the philosopher who first popularized the idea that capitalism is inherently exploitative, singled out Jews in particular for their role in promoting it.

As moneylending evolved into institutionalized banking, Jews continued to occupy major positions in the financial world. Across Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, Jews built a number of influential banks, further feeding anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. With mass Jewish immigration to the United States beginning in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jews assumed prominent positions in the growing financial center of New York, establishing Salomon Brothers, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and others. They also figured prominently in government financial positions. Between 1987 and 2014, the U.S. Federal Reserve was chaired by a succession of three Jews. Four of the eight men who served as U.S. Treasury secretary between 1995 and 2020 were Jewish. Three of the 12 presidents of the World Bank between its founding in 1946 and 2020 have been Jewish. Jews are also significantly overrepresented among the wealthiest Americans. Half of the 10 richest Americans in 2016 were Jewish, according to Forbes, despite Jews making up less than 2 percent of the U.S. population.

As a result, talk of “international bankers” is still widely regarded as a veiled form of anti-Semitism. When Donald J. Trump, campaigning for the presidency in 2016, charged that his rival, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers,” some saw an evocation of anti-Semitic stereotyping. Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, urged Trump in a Twitter post to “avoid rhetoric and tropes that historically have been used against Jews and still spur #antisemitism.”

Contemporary Manifestations

Not all invocations of Jewish financial prowess are malicious, and some are deeply admiring. In China, eagerness to mimic Jewish business success has driven a recent publishing trend purporting to reveal the secrets to wealth contained in ancient Jewish texts. Crack the Talmud: 101 Jewish Business Rules, 16 Reasons for Jews Getting Wealthy, The Secret of Talmud: The Jewish Code of Wealth and Secret of Jewish Success: Ten Commandments of Jewish Success have all been published in China in recent years.

In the West, however, talk of Jewish prominence in finance is more frequently pernicious. David Duke, the former KKK grand wizard, has repeatedly inveighed against Jewish “domination” of media and banking (along with the pornography industry and efforts to “de-Christianize” America). Eustace Mullins, a Holocaust denier who died in 2010, argued in several published works that the Federal Reserve was created by three Jewish “enemy aliens” to take over the American monetary system. The anti-Semitic website Jew Watch includes a page listing “International Banks & Jews Who Founded Them.” Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam has long claimed that Jews control the international financial system.

Such ideas have also been internalized by the general public. According to studies conducted by the ADL, substantial percentages of respondents in virtually every country surveyed believe Jews have too much power in business and international financial markets. Roughly half of respondents in France agreed with that idea, as did one-third of Germans and nearly three-quarters of Egyptians. Even in the United States, where anti-Semitism is fairly low by global standards, some 18 percent of respondents said Jews have too much power in the business world.

Given that Jews are well represented in banking, how does one recognize the line between acknowledging this fact and dealing in pernicious anti-Semitic canards? Writing after actor Seth MacFarlane drew criticism for joking at the Academy Awards that it’s best to be Jewish if you “want to continue to work in Hollywood,” journalist J.J. Goldberg offered one way to draw that line. As with the Jews and finance stereotype, MacFarlane’s bit was based in inarguable fact — by Goldberg’s count, more than 80 percent of top Hollywood studio chiefs are Jews. According to Goldberg, such talk veers into anti-Semitism when one speaks of “the Jews” controlling movies — the implication being that a corporate entity known as “the Jews,” acting as an organized group, is conspiring to exert its authority. It’s undeniable that Jews are disproportionately among the wealthiest Americans and overrepresented in top positions in the financial world, but it’s anti-Semitic, according to Goldberg, to say that “the Jews” are.

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To read contemporary news accounts of the Holocaust and other Jewish events from 1917 on, search the JTA Archive. 

Dismantling Germany’s Democracy

Once in power, Hitler moved quickly to end German democracy. He convinced his cabinet to invoke emergency clauses of the constitution that permitted the suspension of individual freedoms of press, speech, and assembly. Special security forces — the Gestapo, the Storm Troopers (SA), and the SS — murdered or arrested leaders of opposition political parties (Communists, socialists, and liberals). The Enabling Act of March 23, 1933 — forced through the Reichstag already purged of many political opponents –gave dictatorial powers to Hitler.

READ: Jewish Reactions to the Enabling Act (March 24, 1933)

Also in 1933, the Nazis began to put into practice their racial ideology. The Nazis believed that the Germans were “racially superior” and that there was a struggle for survival between them and inferior races. They saw Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and the handicapped as a serious biological threat to the purity of the “German (Aryan) Race,” what they called the master race.

Jews, who numbered about 525,000 in Germany (less than one percent of the total population in 1933) were the principal target of Nazi hatred. The Nazis identified Jews as a race and defined this race as “inferior.” They also spewed hate-mongering propaganda that unfairly blamed Jews for Germany’s economic depression and the country’s defeat in World War I (1914-1918).

Nuremberg Laws, Property Seizures and Kristallnacht

In 1933, new German laws forced Jews out of their civil service jobs, university and law court positions, and other areas of public life. In April 1933, laws proclaimed at Nuremberg made Jews second-class citizens. These Nuremberg Laws defined Jews, not by their religion or by how they wanted to identify themselves, but by the religious affiliation of their grandparents. Between 1937 and 1939, new anti-Jewish regulations segregated Jews further and made daily life very difficult for them. Jews could not attend public schools; go to theaters, cinema, or vacation resorts; or reside or even walk in certain sections of German cities.

Also between 1937 and 1939, Jews increasingly were forced from Germany’s economic life. The Nazis either seized Jewish businesses and properties outright or forced Jews to sell them at bargain prices. In November 1938, the Nazis organized a riot (pogrom), known as Kristallnacht (the “Night of Broken Glass”). This attack against German and Austrian Jews included the physical destruction of synagogues and Jewish-owned stores, the arrest of Jewish men, the vandalization of homes, and the murder of individuals.

Non-Jewish Targets of Persecution

Although Jews were the main target of Nazi hatred, the Nazis persecuted other groups they viewed as racially or genetically “inferior.” Nazi racial ideology was buttressed by scientists who advocated “selective breeding” (eugenics) to “improve” the human race. Laws passed between 1933 and 1935 aimed to reduce the future number of genetic “inferiors” through involuntary sterilization programs: 320,000 to 350,000 individuals judged physically or mentally handicapped were subjected to surgical or radiation procedures so they could not have children. Supporters of sterilization also argued that the handicapped burdened the community with the costs of their care. Many of Germany’s 30,000 Roma (Gypsies) were also eventually sterilized and prohibited, along with Blacks, from intermarrying with Germans. About 500 children of mixed African-German backgrounds were also sterilized. New laws combined traditional prejudices with the racism of the Nazis, which defined Roma by “race” and as “criminal and asocial.”

Another consequence of Hitler’s ruthless dictatorship in the 1930s was the arrest of political opponents and trade unionists and others whom the Nazis labeled “undesirables” and “enemies of the state.” Some 5,000 to 15,000 homosexuals were imprisoned in concentration camps; under the 1935 Nazi-revised criminal code, the mere denunciation of a man as “homosexual” could result in arrest, trial, and conviction. Jehovah’s Witnesses, who numbered at least 25,000 in Germany, were banned as an organization as early as April 1933, because the beliefs of this religious group prohibited them from swearing any oath to the state or serving in the German military. Their literature was confiscated, and they lost their jobs, unemployment benefits, pensions, and all social welfare benefits. Many Witnesses were sent to prisons and concentration camps in Nazi Germany, and their children were sent to juvenile detention homes and orphanages.

Refugees With No Place to Go

Between 1933 and 1936, thousand of people, mostly political prisoners, were imprisoned in concentrations camps, while several thousand German Roma were confined in special municipal camps. The first systematic round-up of German and Austrian Jews occurred after Kristallnacht, when approximately 30,000 Jewish men were deported to Dachau and other concentration camps, and several hundred Jewish women were sent to local jails. The wave of arrests in 1938 also included several thousand German and Austrian Roma.

Between 1933 and 1939, about half of the German-Jewish population and more than two-thirds of Austrian Jews (1938-1939) fled Nazi persecution. They emigrated mainly to the United States, Palestine, elsewhere in Europe (where many would be later trapped by Nazi conquests during the war), Latin America, and Japanese-occupied Shanghai (which required no visas for entry). Jews who remained under Nazi rule were either unwilling to uproot themselves or unable to obtain visas, sponsors in host countries, or funds for emigration. Most foreign countries, including the United States, Canada, Britain, and France, were unwilling to admit very large numbers of refugees.

Reprinted courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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But anti-Semitism in America is fundamentally different from its Europe precursor. For one thing, African Americans, Catholics, and Mormons experienced the brunt of American religious violence during the nation’s first century. Antagonism toward Jews has always had to compete with other forms of animus. Never was Judaism the nation’s least favored religion. Whatever prejudice Jews experienced, others suffered far worse.

For another, American ideals have been uniquely inhospitable to anti-Jewish prejudice. Freedom of speech and religion is baked into America’s founding documents, and the United States never had a single established church from which Jews stood apart. Having never received their emancipation as an “award,” as was the case with the Jews of Europe, American Jews never feared losing it. They could use their freedoms to fight back vigorously against prejudice — and they did.

Moreover, in a two-party system where close elections are the rule, neither party could long afford to alienate any major bloc of voters. State-sponsored anti-Semitism, so common in Europe, has never factored in American politics for long.

Still, anti-Semitism has been a feature of American life since the earliest years of the republic. Despite the guarantees of freedom of religion enshrined in America’s founding documents, it required a hard-fought bill to win Jews the right to hold public office in Maryland in 1826, and another 51 years before Jews achieved full legal equality in New Hampshire. In 1820, a newspaper in New York observed that “prejudices against the Jews exist here and subject them to inconveniences from which other citizens of the United States are exempt.”

The Civil War era resulted in an unprecedented surge in anti-Semitism. Part of it was the prominence of several Jews in the ranks of the Confederacy, which heightened prejudice. And some blamed Jews for many of the evils associated with war, which helps explain why General Ulysses S. Grant, in 1862, expelled Jews from an area stretching from Mississippi to Illinois and from the Mississippi River to the Tennessee River. Abraham Lincoln reversed Grant’s order as soon as he heard of it.

Anti-Semitism crested in the United States between 1877 and World War II, an era of massive social and economic change. As America’s Jewish population surged from less than 250,000 to well over 4 million, some persuaded themselves that behind all the changes roiling American life lay a clandestine Jewish conspiracy.

Anti-Semitism escalated further in the 20th century. Jews faced physical attacks, many forms of discrimination, as well as intense vilification in print, on the airwaves, in movies and on stage. Immigration restrictions, without explicitly saying so, looked to limit the number of Jews entering the country. Educational quotas, restrictive covenants, occupational discrimination, and physical attacks against Jews limited the civil rights of those who had settled there already.

In 1913, a particularly infamous incident took place in Atlanta when a 29-year-old Jewish factory superintendent named Leo Frank was convicted of murdering one of his employees, 13-year-old Mary Phagan. Crowds around the courthouse chanted “Hang the Jew!” When Georgia governor John Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence in 1915, a mob broke into the jail and lynched him.

Following World War I, manifestations of anti-Semitism rose further. Beginning in 1920, automaker Henry Ford’s weekly newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, purported to describe an international Jewish conspiracy based upon the notorious anti-Semitic forgery known as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Only in 1927, under intense economic and legal pressure, did Ford publicly apologize “for resurrecting exploded fictions.”

While Ford attacked Jews in public, numerous American universities worked privately to limit the number of Jewish students they admitted. Even harsher restrictions faced Jews in fraternities, clubs, hotels, resorts, and elite neighborhoods. So-called restrictive covenants excluded Jews from some of the most desirable neighborhoods in major cities and newly emerging suburbs.Physical violence against Jews likewise became common during this period, particularly in cities where German Americans sympathetic to Adolf Hitler took to the streets, and where Catholic supporters of the increasingly pro-Nazi radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin, beat Jews mercilessly.

Yet for all that, anti-Semitism never went unopposed. Liberal newspapers and organizations like the Anti-Defamation League openly fought it. A growing interfaith movement headed by liberal-minded clergy worked to counter it. And Jews themselves often found ways to circumvent it.

Following World War II, organized anti-Semitism in America declined dramatically, as did discrimination against Jews in employment, housing and daily life. By the early 1960s, almost all resorts and housing developments had dropped their restrictive clauses, anti-Semitic college quotas had mostly ended, and professional fields proved more receptive to Jews than at any previous time in the 20th century.

The South served as the major exception, where Jewish support for the civil rights movement had undermined the region’s longstanding philo-Semitism. In the 1950s, a spate of bombings targeted black and Jewish institutions alike. In just one 12-month period in the late 1950s, explosives were planted at Jewish institutions in Miami, Jacksonville, Charlotte, Nashville, Birmingham and Gastonia, North Carolina. On October 12, 1958, a bomb tore apart the Temple, the oldest Reform congregation in Atlanta. A widely-distributed paperback with the explosive title “165 Temples Desecrated,” published in 1971, chronicled antisemitic acts that took place just between 1965 and 1970.

In the North, the special relationship between blacks and Jews, born in part of their partnership in the civil rights struggle, began to fray. Merit-based educational programs aided Jews far more than blacks, anti-Semitism declined faster than racism, and Jews moved out to sparkling suburbs while blacks languished in dangerous inner cities. Subsequently, some radical African-American activists came to view Jews more as obstacles than as allies. Some spread the canard that Jews bore central responsibility for slavery. Others embraced the Palestinian cause and railed against the State of Israel. In 1991, a riot — local Jews dubbed it a pogrom – convulsed the heavily Jewish Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.

As the 20th century drew to a close, scholars began to express hope that anti-Semitism had become a thing of the past. Leonard Dinnerstein, author of the first scholarly history of anti-Semitism in America, published in 1994, concluded that anti-Semitism “has declined in potency and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.” But anti-Semitism nevertheless endured.

On the extreme political right, Holocaust deniers, conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists continued to spout hatred against Jews. On the extreme political left, black nationalists, anti-Israel activists, and neo-Communists spouted anti-Jewish hatred too. Much like the anti-Semites of the 19th century, these groups had different complaints and little outwardly in common, but they shared the belief that Jews lay at the root of their problems.

From the margins, anti-Semitism moved back in the mainstream in the 21st century. A rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, witnessed chants of “Jews will not replace us.” A year after that, on October 27, 2018, a mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue left 11 people dead and seven wounded, the deadliest attack ever on the American Jewish community. Subsequent attacks on the Chabad of Poway Synagogue in California and on a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 2019, coupled with hundreds of reports of vandalism and harassment, made clear that anti-Semitism was back.

Still, anti-Semitism in America remains distinct, and the factors that make it so — the guaranteed freedom to resist it; the greater prevalence of other types of animus; the incompatibility of fundamental American ideals with anti-Jewish prejudice; and the general inhospitality of American politics to appeals to bigotry — are as vital to recall as those elements that are common to anti-Semitism elsewhere in the world. Today, as in the past, anti-Semitism reveals as much, or more, about America as it does about Jews.

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Around the World

After Germany annexed Austria in March 1938 and particularly after the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 9–10, 1938, nations in western Europe and the Americas feared an influx of refugees. About 85,000 Jewish refugees (out of 120,000 Jewish emigrants) reached the United States between March 1938 and September 1939, but this level of immigration was far below the number seeking refuge.

In late 1938, 125,000 applicants lined up outside US consulates hoping to obtain 27,000 visas under the existing immigration quota. By June 1939, the number of applicants had increased to over 300,000. Most visa applicants were unsuccessful. At the Evian Conference in July 1938, only the Dominican Republic stated that it was prepared to admit significant numbers of refugees, although Bolivia would admit around 30,000 Jewish immigrants between 1938 and 1941.

In a highly publicized event in May–June 1939, the United States refused to admit over 900 Jewish refugees who had sailed from Hamburg, Germany, on the St. Louis. The St. Louis appeared off the coast of Florida shortly after Cuban authorities cancelled the refugees’ transit visas and denied entry to most of the passengers, who were still waiting to receive visas to enter the United States. Denied permission to land in the United States, the ship was forced to return to Europe. The governments of Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium each agreed to accept some of the passengers as refugees. Of the 908 St. Louis passengers who returned to Europe, 254 (nearly 28 percent) are known to have died in the Holocaust. 288 passengers found refuge in Britain. Of the 620 who returned to the continent, 366 (just over 59 percent) are known to have survived the war.

British Mandate Palestine (Pre-State Israel)

Over 60,000 German Jews immigrated to Palestine during the 1930s, most under the terms of the Haavara (Transfer) Agreement. This agreement between Germany and the Jewish authorities in Palestine facilitated Jewish emigration to Palestine. The main obstacle to emigration of Jews from Germany was German legislation banning the export of foreign currency. According to the agreement, Jewish assets in Germany would be disposed of in an orderly manner and the resulting capital transferred to Palestine through the export of German products.

The British White Paper in May 1939, a policy statement approved by the British Parliament, contained measures that severely limited Jewish entry into Palestine. As the number of hospitable destinations dwindled, tens of thousands of German, Austrian, and Polish Jews emigrated to Shanghai, one destination that did not require a visa. Shanghai’s International Settlements quarter, effectively under Japanese control, admitted 17,000 Jews.

Stricter Limits, Despite Reports of Mass Murder

During the second half of 1941, even as unconfirmed reports of the mass murder perpetrated by the Nazis filtered to the West, the US Department of State placed even stricter limits on immigration based on national security concerns. Despite British restrictions, limited numbers of Jews entered Palestine during the war through “illegal” immigration (Aliyah Bet). Great Britain itself limited its own intake of immigrants in 1938–1939, though the British government did permit the entry of some 10,000 Jewish children in a special Kindertransport (Children’s Transport) program. At the Bermuda Conference in April 1943, the Allies offered no concrete proposals for rescue.

Switzerland took in approximately 30,000 Jews, but turned back about the same number at the border. About 100,000 Jews reached the Iberian Peninsula. Spain took in a limited number of refugees and then speedily sent them on to the Portuguese port of Lisbon. From there, thousands managed to sail to the United States in 1940–1941, although thousands more were unable to obtain US entry visas.

Displaced Persons After the War

After the war, hundreds of thousands of survivors found shelter as displaced persons in camps administered by the western Allies in Germany, Austria, and Italy. In the US, immigration restrictions were still in effect, although the Truman Directive of 1945, which authorized priority to be given within the quota system to displaced persons, permitted 16,000 Jewish DPs to enter the US

Immigration to Palestine (aliyah) remained severely limited until the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948. Thousands of Jewish displaced persons sought to enter Palestine illegally: between 1945 and 1948, the British authorities interned many of these would-be immigrants to Palestine in detention camps on Cyprus.

With the establishment of Israel in May 1948, Jewish refugees began streaming into that new sovereign state. Some 140,000 Holocaust survivors entered Israel during the next few years. The United States admitted 400,000 displaced persons between 1945 and 1952. Approximately 96,000 (roughly 24 percent) of them were Jews who had survived the Holocaust.

The search for refuge frames both the years before the Holocaust and its aftermath.

Reprinted with permission from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia.

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The term, derived from the Italian gettare, which refers to the casting of metal, was first used in Venice in 1516, when authorities required Jews to move to the island of Carregio (the Ghetto Nuovo, new ghetto), across from an area where an old copper foundry was located (the Ghetto Vecchio, old ghetto).

The ghetto in Venice was enclosed by a wall and gates that were locked at night. Jews had to observe a curfew, and were required to wear yellow hats and badges to distinguish themselves, a practice that the Nazis would later adapt in the 20th century. The ghetto in Venice was crowded, and therefore it was necessary to add new floors onto existing buildings, leading to the first so-called skyscrapers. While the 1516 law creating the ghetto limited Jews’ freedom of mobility, to some degree it was less severe than policies elsewhere in Europe, where Jews were often forced to leave altogether. Inside the confines of the ghetto, Jews had the autonomy to govern themselves and to sustain their own social, religious and educational institutions.

Though the term “ghetto” was first used in Venice, this was not the first instance of Jews being forced into segregated quarters. Compulsory segregation of Jews was common in medieval Europe, and these Jewish areas were later referred to as ghettos. The Lateran Councils of 1179 and 1215 advocated for the segregation of Jews. A ghetto-like community existed in 1262 in Prague, and by the 1400s became more common in other European cities. In 1460 the Judengasse (“Jews’ Alley”) in Frankfurt was established.

In 1555, Pope Paul IV issued the “Cum nimis absurdum” proclamation, which required the Jews of Rome to live in separate quarters and also severely restricted their rights, including what businesses they could engage in. The purpose of this edict was to encourage conversion to Catholicism, an act that would serve as a ticket out of the ghetto. The ghetto made a clear distinction to the wider society between those who were accepted” and those who were not. Though anti-Semitism was alive and well in the centuries that preceded this papal order, until 1555 the Jews of Rome had enjoyed freedom of movement. Under the papal order, they were relocated to a crowded and unsanitary area that regularly was flooded by the Tiber River. While the ghetto was a place of squalor, the rest of the city was being built up with magnificent churches. This contrast allowed the authorities to highlight the differences between Jews and Christians, making it seem as though the destitute living conditions of the ghetto were the natural consequences of denying the divinity of Christ. Though the ghetto was designed to segregate Jews, who were seen as a threat to Catholicism, it did not stop Jews and Christians from maintaining social and economic interactions; indeed Christians were allowed to enter the Roman ghetto during the day.

READ: The Church and the Jews

In the 18th century, as part of a broader effort to spread liberty and equality, Napoleon sought to liberate the Jews from the ghettos of Italy. In one instance, in Padua, the French emperor even declared that the street where the Jews lived be renamed in order to remove the word “ghetto.” Nevertheless, the Jewish ghetto in Rome was hard to eliminate. Even though the gates were taken down in 1848 (due to protests by Roman citizens allied with Jews), the ghetto did not officially cease to exist until 1870, when Italy was unified and became a modern nation state. This period of Jewish emancipation (beginning in the late 18th century, continuing through the early 20th century) led to the dismantling of ghettos across Europe.

Though by the 20th century Jews were no longer forced to live in ghettos, many continued to live in segregated quarters, in cities throughout Europe and the United States, including Warsaw, Prague, Frankfurt, the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the West Side of Chicago. Writers in the 20th century described many of these neighborhoods as slums, filled with poverty, violence, and iniquity.

In the 1930s, Nazi Germany reintroduced ghettos in the areas under its control, adding the notorious laws that would restrict Jews’ basic human rights and laying the groundwork for future deportations and the horrors of the Holocaust.

The term “ghetto” eventually was reappropriated to refer to poor, urban African-American neighborhoods, but was later deemed offensive, now often euphemized by the term “inner city.”

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Following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Hitler established a Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda headed by Joseph Goebbels. The Ministry’s aim was to ensure that the Nazi message was successfully communicated through art, music, theater, films, books, radio, educational materials and the press.

There were several audiences for Nazi propaganda. Germans were reminded of the struggle against foreign enemies and Jewish subversion. During periods preceding legislation or executive measures against Jews, propaganda campaigns created an atmosphere tolerant of violence against Jews, particularly in 1935 (before the Nuremberg Race Laws of September) and in 1938 (prior to the barrage of antisemitic economic legislation following Kristallnacht). Propaganda also encouraged passivity and acceptance of the impending measures against Jews, as these appeared to depict the Nazi government as stepping in and “restoring order.”

Real and perceived discrimination against ethnic Germans in east European nations which had gained territory at Germany’s expense following World War I, such as Czechoslovakia and Poland, was the subject of Nazi propaganda. This propaganda sought to elicit political loyalty and so-called race consciousness among the ethnic German populations. It also sought to mislead foreign governments — including the European Great Powers — that Nazi Germany was making understandable and fair demands for concessions and annexations.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Nazi propaganda stressed to both civilians at home and to soldiers, police officers, and non-German auxiliaries serving in occupied territory themes linking Soviet Communism to European Jewry, presenting Germany as the defender of “Western” culture against the “Judeo-Bolshevik” threat and painting an apocalyptic picture of what would happen if the Soviets won the war. This was particularly the case after the catastrophic German defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943. These themes may have been instrumental in inducing Nazi and non-Nazi Germans as well as local collaborators to fight on until the very end.

Films in particular played an important role in disseminating racial antisemitism, the superiority of German military power, and the intrinsic evil of the enemies as defined by Nazi ideology. Nazi films portrayed Jews as “subhuman” creatures infiltrating Aryan society. For example, The Eternal Jew (1940), directed by Fritz Hippler, portrayed Jews as wandering cultural parasites, consumed by sex and money. Some films, such as The Triumph of the Will (1935) by Leni Riefenstahl, glorified Hitler and the National Socialist movement. Two other Riefenstahl works, Festival of the Nations and Festival of Beauty (1938), depicted the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games and promoted national pride in the successes of the Nazi regime at the Olympics.

Newspapers in Germany, above all Der Stürmer (The Attacker), printed cartoons that used antisemitic caricatures to depict Jews. After the Germans began World War II with the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Nazi regime employed propaganda to impress upon German civilians and soldiers that the Jews were not only subhuman, but also dangerous enemies of the German Reich. The regime aimed to elicit support, or at least acquiescence, for policies aimed at removing Jews permanently from areas of German settlement

During the implementation of the so-called Final Solution, the mass murder of European Jews, SS officials at killing centers compelled the victims of the Holocaust to maintain the deception necessary to deport the Jews from Germany and occupied Europe as smoothly as possible. Concentration camp and killing center officials compelled prisoners, many of whom would soon die in the gas chambers, to send postcards home stating that they were being treated well and living in good conditions. Here, the camp authorities used propaganda to cover up atrocities and mass murder.

In June 1944, the German Security Police permitted an International Red Cross team to inspect the Theresienstadt (Terezin) camp-ghetto, located in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now in the Czech Republic). The SS and police had established Theresienstadt in November 1941 as an instrument of propaganda for domestic consumption in the German Reich. The camp-ghetto was used as an explanation for Germans who were puzzled by the deportation of German and Austrian Jews who were elderly, disabled war veterans, or locally known artists and musicians “to the East” for “labor.” In preparation for the 1944 visit, the ghetto underwent a “beautification” program. In the wake of the inspection, SS officials in the Protectorate produced a film using ghetto residents as a demonstration of the benevolent treatment the Jewish “residents” of Theresienstadt supposedly enjoyed. When the film was completed, SS officials deported most of the “cast” to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center.

The Nazi regime used propaganda effectively to mobilize the German population to support its wars of conquest until the very end of the regime. Nazi propaganda was likewise essential to motivating those who implemented the mass murder of the European Jews and of other victims of the Nazi regime. It also served to secure the acquiescence of millions of others — as bystanders — to racially targeted persecution and mass murder.

Reprinted with permission from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia.

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Find the full text of the Nuremberg Laws (in English translation) here.

Adolf Hitler announced the Nuremberg Laws on Sept. 15, 1935. Germany’s parliament (the Reichstag), then made up entirely of Nazi representatives, passed the laws. Anti-Semitism was of central importance to the Nazi Party, so Hitler had called parliament into a special session at the annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Germany.

Reich Citizenship Law

The Nazis had long sought a legal definition that identified Jews not by religious affiliation but according to racial anti-Semitism. Jews in Germany were not easy to identify by sight. Many had given up traditional practices and appearances and had integrated into the mainstream of society. Some no longer practiced Judaism and had even begun celebrating Christian holidays, especially Christmas, with their non-Jewish neighbors. Many more had married Christians or converted to Christianity.

According to the Reich Citizenship Law and many clarifying decrees on its implementation, only people of “German or kindred blood” could be citizens of Germany. The law defined who was and was not a German, and who was and was not a Jew. The Nazis rejected the traditional view of Jews as members of a religious or cultural community. They claimed instead that Jews were a race defined by birth and by blood.

Despite the persistent claims of Nazi ideology, there was no scientifically valid basis to define Jews as a race. Nazi legislators looked therefore to family genealogy to define race. People with three or more grandparents born into the Jewish religious community were Jews by law. Grandparents born into a Jewish religious community were considered “racially” Jewish. Their “racial” status passed to their children and grandchildren. Under the law, Jews in Germany were not citizens but “subjects of the state.”

This legal definition of a Jew in Germany covered tens of thousands of people who did not think of themselves as Jews or who had neither religious nor cultural ties to the Jewish community. For example, it defined people who had converted to Christianity from Judaism as Jews. It also defined as Jews people born to parents or grandparents who had converted to Christianity. The law stripped them all of their German citizenship and deprived them of basic rights.

To further complicate the definitions, there were also people living in Germany who were defined under the Nuremberg Laws as neither German nor Jew, that is, people having only one or two grandparents born into the Jewish religious community. These “mixed-raced” individuals were known as Mischlinge. They enjoyed the same rights as “racial” Germans, but these rights were continuously curtailed through subsequent legislation.

Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor

The second Nuremberg Law, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, banned marriage between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. It also criminalized sexual relations between them. These relationships were labeled as “race defilement” (Rassenschande).

The law also forbade Jews to employ female German maids under the age of 45, assuming that Jewish men would force such maids into committing race defilement. Thousands of people were convicted or simply disappeared into concentration camps for race defilement.

Significance of the Nuremberg Laws

The Nuremberg Laws reversed the process of emancipation, whereby Jews in Germany were included as full members of society and equal citizens of the country. More significantly they laid the foundation for future anti-Semitic measures by legally distinguishing between German and Jew. For the first time in history, Jews faced persecution not for what they believed, but for who they — or their parents — were by birth. In Nazi Germany, no profession of belief and no act or statement could convert a Jew into a German. Many Germans who had never practiced Judaism or who had not done so for years found themselves caught in the grip of Nazi terror.

While the Nuremberg Laws specifically mentioned only Jews, the laws also applied to blacks and Roma (Gypsies) living in Germany. The definition of Jews, blacks, and Roma as racial aliens facilitated their persecution in Germany.

During World War II, many countries allied to or dependent on Germany enacted their own versions of the Nuremberg Laws. By 1941, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Vichy France, and Croatia had all enacted anti-Jewish legislation similar to the Nuremberg Laws in Germany.

Reprinted with permission from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum‘s Holocaust Encyclopedia.

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To find news accounts of the Holocaust and other Jewish events from 1923 on, search the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Archive.

Immigration in the 1930s and 1940s

The U.S. Congress passed new, restrictive quota laws in 1924 that limited the number of immigrants who could enter the U.S. from Europe each year. During the Nazi period, these quotas often were not filled, even though thousands of Jewish refugees sought admittance to the U.S. from Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied territories.

Once the Great Depression began in 1929, President Herbert Hoover instructed the State Department to enforce the quota laws very strictly, which made it very difficult for refugees in the 1930s to obtain immigrant visas. Immigrants needed to prove they were not “likely to become a public charge” and had the financial resources to support themselves indefinitely in the United States. Despite the ongoing persecution of Jews in Germany, public and government attitudes related to immigration were influenced by the economic hardships of the Great Depression, which intensified anti-Semitism, isolationism, and xenophobia. After World War II began in 1939, American consuls abroad also screened refugees on national security grounds, making an already difficult immigration process even harder.

READ: What Americans Had to Say About Jewish War Refugees

Nevertheless, in 1939 and 1940 more than half of all immigrants to the United States were Jewish, most of them refugees from Europe. During those same years, a majority of all immigration to the United States came from Nazi-occupied or collaborationist countries. In 1940, for instance, 82 percent of immigrants to America came from these countries, most of them refugees seeking asylum. But by the time the United States entered the war in December 1941, American consulates had already closed in most of Europe and it became nearly impossible for refugees to escape the continent. Despite many obstacles, however, more than 200,000 Jews found refuge in the United States from 1933 to 1945, most of them arriving before the end of 1941.

U.S. State Department and the “Final Solution”

In August 1942, the State Department received a report sent by Gerhart Riegner, the Geneva-based representative of the World Jewish Congress (WJC). The report revealed that the Germans were planning to physically annihilate the Jews of Europe. Believing the news to be a rumor  — and feeling that any rescue action was impossible even if the report was true — State Department officials did not forward the report to its intended recipient, Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was president of the World Jewish Congress.

Despite the State Department’s obstruction, Wise soon received the report via British channels, and asked the State Department to investigate the information. Three months later, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles confirmed Riegner’s information for Rabbi Wise. On Nov. 24, 1942, Wise held a press conference to announce that Nazi Germany was implementing a policy to annihilate the European Jews. A few weeks later, on Dec. 17, the United States, Great Britain, and 10 other Allied governments issued a declaration denouncing Nazi Germany’s atrocities and warning that perpetrators of such crimes would be held responsible for their actions.

U.S. Press Coverage of the “Final Solution”

During World War II, the American press did not always publicize reports of Nazi atrocities in full or give them prominent placement in the papers. Newspapers had reported on Nazi violence against Jews in Germany as early as 1933, as well as the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and the expanded German anti-Semitic legislation in 1938 and 1939. The nationwide state-sponsored terror against Jews of Nov. 9-10, 1938 — known as Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) — made front-page news across the U.S. as did Hitler’s infamous prediction, expressed to the Reichstag (German parliament) on Jan. 30, 1939, that a new world war would mean the extermination of the Jewish “race.”

As the magnitude of anti-Jewish violence increased in 1939-1941, many American newspapers ran descriptions of German shooting operations by the Einsatzgruppen, first in Poland and later after the invasion of the Soviet Union. The ethnic identity of the victims was not always made clear to American readers. Some reports described German mass murder operations with the word “extermination.” As early as July 2, 1942, the New York Times reported on the operations of killing center in Chelmno based on sources from the Polish underground. In part because of the inability to verify the information, the first article, on Chelmno, appeared on page six of the newspaper. Newspapers’ coverage of the December 1942 Allied statement condemning the mass murder of European Jews generally did appear on the front page.

Very few reports of what we now understand as the Holocaust included photographs. Visual evidence of Nazi atrocities became more common in American newspapers and magazines after May 1945, in the final days of the war and the immediate aftermath of Allied victory.

Reprinted with permission from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum‘s Holocaust Encyclopedia.

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Nevertheless, many Jews were disappointed. They had hoped that the Church might say that the Jews had in fact played no role in Jesus’ death.

Jews Lacked A Motive for Killing Jesus

Indeed, according to most historians, it would be more logical to blame the Romans for Jesus’ death. Crucifixion was a customary punishment among Romans, not Jews. At the time of Jesus’ death, the Romans were imposing a harsh and brutal occupation on the Land of Israel, and the Jews were occasionally unruly. The Romans would have had reason to want to silence Jesus, who had been called by some of his followers “King of the Jews,” and was known as a Jewish upstart miracle worker.

Jews, on the other hand, lacked a motive for killing Jesus. The different factions of the Jewish community at the time — Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and others — had many disagreements with one another, but that did not lead any of the groups to arrange the execution of the other allegedly heretical groups’ leaders. It is therefore unlikely they would have targeted Jesus.

READ: The Land of Israel Under Roman Rule

But the belief that Jews killed Jesus has been found in Christian foundational literature from the earliest days of the Jesus movement, and would not be easily abandoned just because of historians’ arguments.

The New Testament Account

In the letters of Paul, which are regarded by historians to be the oldest works of the New Testament (written 10 to 20 years after Jesus’ death), Paul mentions, almost in passing, “the Jews who killed the Lord, Jesus” (I Thessalonians 2:14-15). While probably not central to Paul’s understanding of Jesus’ life and death, the idea that the Jews bear primary responsibility for the death of Jesus figures more prominently in the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which have slightly different accounts of Jesus’ life.

Matthew, the best-known gospel, describes the unfair trial of Jesus arranged and presided over by the Jewish high priest who scours the land to find anybody who would testify against Jesus. Eventually, the high priest concludes that Jesus is guilty of blasphemy and asks the Jewish council what the penalty should be. “They answered, ‘He deserves death.’ Then they spat in his face and struck him” (Matthew 26:57-68). Matthew’s description of Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross (referred to by Christians as Jesus’ “passion”) has becomes the basis for many books, plays, and musical compositions over the years, and is prominent in Christian liturgy, particularly for Easter.

All four gospels suggest either implicitly or explicitly that because the Jews were not allowed to punish other Jews who were guilty of blasphemy, they had to prevail on the reluctant Romans to kill Jesus. Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, is described as basically sympathetic to Jesus but unable to withstand the pressure from the Jews who demanded Jesus’ execution. This idea is expressed most clearly in the gospel of John: “Pilate said, ‘Take him yourselves and judge him according to your own law.’ The Jews replied, ‘We are not permitted to put anyone to death'” (18:31).

In the most controversial verse in all the passion narratives, the assembled members of the Jewish community tell Pilate, “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matthew 27:25). This is the source for the Christian belief that later generations of Jews are also guilty of deicide, the crime of killing God.

Church Fathers and Thereafter

In the writings of the Church Fathers, the authoritative Christian theologians after the New Testament period, this accusation appears with even more clarity and force. One of the Church Fathers, Justin Martyr (middle of the second century), explains to his Jewish interlocutor why the Jews have suffered exile and the destruction of their Temple: these “tribulations were justly imposed on you since you have murdered the Just One” (Dialogue with Trypho, chapter 16).

READ: Jewish-Christian Relations in the Early Centuries

Throughout classical and medieval times this theme is found in Christian literature and drama. For example, in a 12th-century religious drama, entitled “The Mystery of Adam,” the biblical King Solomon addresses the Jews, prophesying that they will eventually kill the son of God. Here is a rhyming English translation from the original Norman French and Latin:

This saying shall be verified
When God’s own Son for us hath died
The masters of the law [i.e. the Pharisees or rabbis] ’twill be
That slay him most unlawfully;
Against all justice, all belief,
They’ll crucify Him, like a thief.
But they will lose their lordly seat,
Who envy him, and all entreat.
Low down they’ll come from a great height,
Well may they mourn their mournful plight.
(Translation from Frank Talmage’s Disputation and Dialogue)

Even into modern times, passion plays — large outdoor theatrical productions that portray the end of Jesus’ life, often with a cast of hundreds — have continued to perpetuate this idea.

In the Talmud

Interestingly, the idea that the Jews killed Jesus is also found in Jewish religious literature. In tractate Sanhedrin of the Babylonian Talmud, on folio 43a, a beraita (a teaching from before the year 200 C.E.) asserts that Jesus was put to death by a Jewish court for the crimes of sorcery and sedition. (In standard texts of the Talmud from Eastern Europe — or in American texts that simply copied from them — there is a blank space towards the bottom of that folio, because the potentially offensive text was removed. The censorship may have been internal — for self-protection — or it may have been imposed on the Jews by the Christian authorities. In many new editions of the Talmud this passage has been restored.) The Talmud’s claim there that the event took place on the eve of Passover is consistent with the chronology in the gospel of John. In the talmudic account, the Romans played no role in his death.

In Jewish folk literature, such as the popular scurrilous Jewish biography of Jesus, Toledot Yeshu (which may be as old as the fourth century), responsibility for the death of Jesus is also assigned to the Jews. It is likely that until at least the 19th century, Jews in Christian Europe believed that their ancestors had killed Jesus.

From the first to the 19th centuries, the level of tension between Jews and Christians was such that both groups found the claim that the Jews killed Jesus to be believable. Thankfully, in our world it is heard less frequently. But we should not be surprised if it persists among people who take the stories of the New Testament (or of the Talmud) as reliable historical sources.

To read this article, “Who Killed Jesus?” in Spanish (leer en español), click here.

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Having rejected a proposed boycott of the 1936 Olympics, the United States and other Western democracies missed the opportunity to take a stand that — some observers at the time claimed — might have given Hitler pause and bolstered international resistance to Nazi tyranny. With the conclusion of the Games, Germany’s expansionist policies and the persecution of Jews and other “enemies of the state” accelerated, culminating in World War II and the Holocaust.

In 1931, the International Olympic Committee awarded the 1936 Summer Olympics to Berlin. The choice signaled Germany’s return to the world community after its isolation in the aftermath of defeat in World War I.

Two years later, Nazi party leader Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany and quickly turned the nation’s fragile democracy into a one-party dictatorship that persecuted Jews, Roma (Gypsies), all political opponents, and others.

The Nazi claim to control all aspects of German life also extended to sports. German sports imagery of the 1930s served to promote the myth of “Aryan” racial superiority and physical prowess. In sculpture and in other forms, German artists idealized athletes’ well-developed muscle tone and heroic strength and accentuated ostensibly Aryan facial features. Such imagery also reflected the importance the Nazi regime placed on physical fitness, a prerequisite for military service.

Racism in Sports

In April 1933, an “Aryans only” policy was instituted in all German athletic organizations. “Non-Aryans”–Jewish or part-Jewish and Romani (Gypsy) athletes–were systematically excluded from German sports facilities and associations.

READ: Hitler’s Other Olympics

The German Boxing Association expelled amateur champion Erich Seelig in April 1933 because he was Jewish. (Seelig later resumed his boxing career in the United States.) Another Jewish athlete, Daniel Prenn — Germany’s top-ranked tennis player — was removed from Germany’s Davis Cup Team. Gretel Bergmann, a world-class high jumper, was expelled from her German club in 1933 and from the German Olympic team in 1936.

Jewish athletes barred from German sports clubs flocked to separate Jewish associations, including the Maccabee and Shield groups, and to improvised segregated facilities. But these Jewish sports facilities were not comparable to well-funded German groups. Roma (Gypsies), including the Sinti boxer Johann Rukelie Trollmann, also were excluded from German sports.

As a token gesture to placate international opinion, German authorities allowed the part-Jewish fencer Helene Mayer to represent Germany at the Olympic Games in Berlin. She won a silver medal in women’s individual fencing and, like all other medalists for Germany, gave the Nazi salute on the podium. After the Olympics, Mayer returned to the United States.

No other Jewish athlete competed for Germany. Still, nine Jewish athletes won medals in the Nazi Olympics, including Mayer and five Hungarians. Seven Jewish male athletes from the United States went to Berlin. Like some of the European Jewish competitors at the Olympics, many of these young men were pressured by Jewish organizations to boycott the Games. As most did not fully grasp at the time the extent and purpose of Nazi persecution of Jews and other groups, these athletes chose to compete.

Overcoming Boycott Threats, Scoring Propaganda Points

In August 1936, the Nazi regime tried to camouflage its violent racist policies while it hosted the Summer Olympics. Most anti-Jewish signs were temporarily removed, and newspapers toned down their harsh rhetoric. Thus, the regime exploited the Olympic Games to present foreign spectators and journalists with a false image of a peaceful, tolerant Germany.

Movements to boycott the 1936 Berlin Olympics surfaced in the United States, Great Britain, France, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and the Netherlands. Debate over participation in the 1936 Olympics was most intense in the United States, which traditionally sent one of the largest teams to the Games. Some boycott proponents supported counter-Olympics. One of the largest was the “People’s Olympiad” planned for the summer of 1936 in Barcelona, Spain. It was canceled after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, just as thousands of athletes had begun to arrive.

Individual Jewish athletes from a number of countries also chose to boycott the Berlin Olympics. In the United States, some Jewish athletes and Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Congress and the Jewish Labor Committee supported a boycott. However, once the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States voted for participation in December 1935, other countries fell in line and the boycott movement failed.

READ: European Maccabi Games to Play at Olympic Venues Built By Nazis (2015)

The Nazis made elaborate preparations for the August 1-16 Summer Games. A huge sports complex was constructed and Olympic flags and swastikas bedecked the monuments and houses of a festive, crowded Berlin. Most tourists were unaware that the Nazi regime had temporarily removed anti-Jewish signs, nor would they have known of a police roundup of Roma in Berlin, ordered by the German Ministry of the Interior. On July 16, 1936, some 800 Roma residing in Berlin and its environs were arrested and interned under police guard in a special camp in the Berlin suburb of Marzahn. Nazi officials also ordered that foreign visitors should not be subjected to the criminal penalties of German anti-homosexuality laws.

Nazis Link Ancient Greece to Aryan Racial Mythology

Forty-nine athletic teams from around the world competed in the Berlin Olympics, more than in any previous Olympics. Germany fielded the largest team with 348 athletes. The U.S. team was the second largest, with 312 members, including 18 African Americans. American Olympic Committee President Avery Brundage led the delegation. The Soviet Union did not participate in the Berlin Games.

Germany skillfully promoted the Olympics with colorful posters and magazine spreads. Athletic imagery drew a link between Nazi Germany and ancient Greece, symbolizing the Nazi racial myth that a superior German civilization was the rightful heir of an “Aryan” culture of classical antiquity. This vision of classical antiquity emphasized ideal “Aryan” racial types: heroic, blue-eyed blonds with finely chiseled features.

READ: Jewish Woman, 98, Recalls Being Pulled from 1936 Berlin Olympics

Concerted propaganda efforts continued well after the Olympics with the international release in 1938 of “Olympiad,” the controversial documentary directed by German filmmaker and Nazi sympathizer Leni Riefenstahl. She was commissioned by the Nazi regime to produce this film about the 1936 Summer Games.

Germany emerged victorious from the XIth Olympiad. German athletes captured the most medals, and German hospitality and organization won the praises of visitors. Most newspaper accounts echoed the New York Times report that the Games put Germans “back in the fold of nations,” and even made them “more human again.”

Some even found reason to hope that this peaceable interlude would endure. Only a few reporters, such as William Shirer, understood that the Berlin glitter was merely a facade hiding a racist and oppressively violent regime.

After the Games

As post-Games reports were filed, Hitler pressed on with grandiose plans for German expansion. Persecution of Jews resumed. Two days after the Olympics, Captain Wolfgang Fuerstner, head of the Olympic village, killed himself when he was dismissed from military service because of his Jewish ancestry.

Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Within just three years of the Olympiad, the “hospitable” and “peaceable” sponsor of the Games unleashed World War II, a conflict that resulted in untold destruction. With the conclusion of the Games, Germany’s expansionist policies and the persecution of Jews and other “enemies of the state” accelerated, culminating in the Holocaust.

Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC.

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In its early days, the internet and related technologies enhanced the ability of anti-Semites to communicate with one another on forums and listservs and to create online libraries of hateful content. Some of the earliest anti-Semitic websites were created by neo-Nazis and white supremacists — including groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations and the National Alliance, and individuals like Don Black (creator of Stormfront) and David Duke. The 1990s saw the rise of several important sites devoted to Holocaust denial, including the site of the Institute for Historical Review, the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, and the Zundelsite (named after Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel). Collectively, these tools made hardcore anti-Semitism accessible to a larger number of people than ever before.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the reach of anti-Semitic websites was often limited by their page ranking in search engines. In 2004, an anti-Semitic site called Jew Watch, which was created by a white supremacist, attained notoriety after Google’s algorithm elevated it to the first hit when searching for the term “Jew.” Despite a public outcry, Google refused to artificially demote Jew Watch in its search results, but it did include a note expressing its condemnation of the site.

The advent of social media sites in the early 2000s, and especially of streaming audio and video, increased the amount of anti-Semitic content and its accessibility to regular people by an order of magnitude. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, which may have first been articulated on an explicitly anti-Semitic website, could spread and metastasize on mainstream platforms like Facebook and Twitter with frightening speed. In 2008, as the financial crisis cast millions of Americans from their jobs and wiped out many people’s savings, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories swept across mainstream platforms, especially in discussion boards related to finance that were hosted by Yahoo! In some cases, specific anti-Semitic allegations could be traced back to an article that had originally appeared on the website of the anti-Semitic publication American Free Press, which had then been shared widely on mainstream platforms. Anti-Semitic videos blaming Jews for the financial crisis also appeared on YouTube and other social media platforms.

Further evidence of social media’s potential to rapidly spread and entrench anti-Semitic ideas could be found in 2010, when a false claim that Israeli humanitarian relief workers dispatched to Haiti in the wake of an earthquake were harvesting the organs of victims. The allegation originally surfaced on a YouTube video posted by an anti-Semitic and anti-Israel activist in Seattle, but quickly spread to the conspiracy-oriented website of Alex Jones and to a variety of platforms around the world.

Islamist extremists also used social media to disseminate anti-Semitic messages. In 2014, the Anti-Defamation League documented how the ISIS terrorist group and its supporters used Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram platforms to spread propaganda. For example, a recruitment video released by ISIS on Twitter railed against Jews and called for their humiliation and defeat. Twitter began aggressively removing Islamist accounts in 2015, and reported in 2016 that it had suspended over 360,000 handles.

In recent years, mainstream social media companies have had mixed records on enforcing their terms of service, many of which prohibit hateful content. Watchdog groups have criticized them for a lack of transparency about their moderation practices, and reports that companies employ low-paid, poorly-trained moderators have raised questions about their commitment to keeping their services free of hate and anti-Semitism. To date, no tech company has released any data on the levels of anti-Semitism on any of their platforms, thus making it impossible to gauge whether efforts to address anti-Semitism have been at all effective. In some cases, companies have pushed back against excluding certain types of anti-Semitism. Facebook, for example, explicitly refused to prohibit Holocaust denial on its platform until 2020—possibly in response to a pressure campaign conducted by civil rights groups.

Despite the lack of consistent enforcement on mainstream platforms, enough pressure has been put on anti-Semites that an alternative ecosystem of websites has emerged where anti-Semitism is able to thrive with few impediments. Of particular note is Gab, a Facebook alternative whose founder, Andrew Torba, has stated that he believes that hate speech “does not exist” and is “not a real thing.” Right-wing extremists and white supremacists have flocked to Gab. White supremacist Robert Bowers, who murdered eleven people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, used Gab to announce his murderous plan with the chilling message, “Screw your optics, I’m going in.” Bitchute has emerged as a cesspool of hateful and anti-Semitic video to replace YouTube. 4chan and 8kun have similarly achieved notoriety as hotbeds of radical anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories.

Deplatforming extremists and anti-Semites from mainstream platforms is thus a double-edged sword; ordinary users may be moderately less likely to encounter hardcore anti-Semitism on major platforms, but the fringe sites that allow hateful content develop into echo chambers where some studies suggest users may be even more radicalized.

Anti-Semites, who are quick to take advantage of new technologies, began using crowdfunding websites like GoFundMe, Patreon, FundRazr, Indiegogo and Kickstarter to further their cause. Cases of white supremacists using Indiegogo were documented as early as 2014. These projects often run afoul of the terms of service of these platforms, and in response to numerous cases where the platforms have suspended their projects, extremists and anti-Semites have set up several alternative crowdfunding websites, such as GoyFundMe, Hatreon, and WeSearchr. Cryptocurrencies are also an increasingly important part of white supremacist and anti-Semitic fundraising efforts. Jihadi groups that also incorporate anti-Semitism into their ideology have also been known to fund their activities with cryptocurrencies. Anti-Semites have also used “super chat” functions on YouTube to raise funds.

As anti-Semites have adopted various online technologies to promote their ideas, watchdog groups, legislators, public policy experts and other interested parties have stepped up their efforts to confront the spread of hatred. Individual users also have an important role to play in flagging problematic content and utilizing the power of pressure campaigns to push for better policing by internet and technology companies. There is no end in sight to the challenge, but the fight against it must continue if we want our public online spaces to remain free of anti-Semitism and hatred.

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Jews historically have defined themselves as a people, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Converts are also considered descendants of these patriarchal ancestors. Colloquially, Jews also sometimes describe themselves as a tribe. 

Why Racial Classification Doesn’t Work

The idea of race — whether applied to Jews or another group — is itself a problem. Generally used today to denote categories of people based on certain shared characteristics, typically physical appearance, this method of categorization was once prevalent in the scientific community. But many scientists now believe that differentiating human populations on the basis of shared physical traits is obsolete and that racial categories are primarily social constructs with little correlation to anything scientists can measure. 

Even if that were not the case, on the basis of the definition above, Jews would not qualify as a race. Though many modern Jews may trace their genetics to a particular ancient Jewish community, and some common genetic features are still detectable among diverse Jewish populations, centuries of dispersion among other racial and ethic groups have broadened the Jewish gene pool to an extent that it’s impossible to identify a common set of genetic markers that biologically distinguish Jews from others. Even as far back as biblical times, Jews have possessed, and passed on, genetic markers that came from outside the community. 

Moreover, Jews have no shared physical characteristics. This is readily apparent from even a cursory survey of the modern Jewish community. Jews who trace their recent ancestry to particular places around the world look more like the peoples of those lands than they do Jews whose families came from elsewhere. Ashkenazi Jews from northern Europe, for example, look more like northern Europeans than Jews from Iran. And while Ashkenazi Jews may look white, and some think of themselves as white, the Nazis did not agree — and they weren’t alone.

Finally, there’s the issue of conversion. Since biblical times, non-Jews have elected to join the Jewish community and they and their descendants have generally been viewed as no different from born Jews. There’s no mechanism to opt in to being caucasian.  

The Antisemitic Assumption that Jews Are a Race

Early forms of anti-Jewish animus tended to root themselves in opposition to Jews as a religion, seeing Jews as killers of Christ and deniers of the Christian claim to be God’s new chosen people. The liberation of Jerusalem during the Crusades and the forced conversions of the Inquisition were driven by this kind of thinking. Jews who accepted Christ and stopped practicing Judaism could be spared the sword. 

But in modern times, antisemites have more commonly viewed Jews as a distinct (and inferior) race, a designation from which there is no escape by conversion. Most nefariously, this idea was used by Hitler to justify the extermination of millions of Jews during the Holocaust, deeming them racially inferior to pure Aryan stock. Modern antisemitism continues to root itself in the claim that Jews are racially distinct. 

How Jews Classify Themselves

Jews disagree about many things, and how to designate the Jews as a whole is one of them. 

Are Jews united by a shared religion? Yes, the Jewish community shares certain religious inclinations, including belief in one God, shared holidays (like Shabbat, Passover and Yom Kippur), and upholding the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud as central religious texts. But in practice, many Jews are secular, atheist and/or non-practicing and yet still identify as Jews and are accepted by the community as Jewish.

Are Jews a culture? Yes, broadly speaking, except that Jews whose families hail from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, the Iberian peninsula and elsewhere often share little in the way of traditional foods, music, language and more.

Are Jews a nation? Yes, except that it has been several millennia since all Jews lived in a single country, if indeed they ever did. Even today, when there is a Jewish state, most Jews do not live there and many identify primarily with the nation in which they live. 

Some Jews prefer to use terms like “people” or “tribe” —  terms that encompass more of the diversity noted above, but also have less precise definitions. Such terms are generally more inclusive of the diversity inherent in the Jewish community, allowing for the possibility that one can become Jewish by either birth or conversion, that one can stop practicing Jewish religious rituals or disavow Jewish beliefs and still identify as Jewish, and that one can identify primarily as Indian or American and still be recognized as Jewish. 

In Hebrew, the Jews refer to themselves as Am Yisrael, a term that is itself ambiguous. It can mean either “nation of Israel” or “people of Israel.”

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Yet even in periods when anti-Semitism was low, its persistence in Jewish memory and imagination continued to exert a formative influence on Jewish identity. For American Jews who came of age during such periods, stories of persecution or anti-Semitism abroad exerted a gravitational pull on their sense of Jewishness. Indeed, a 2013 Pew Survey of American Jews revealed that Holocaust remembrance was the most oft-cited element of what it means to be Jewish, even higher than leading an ethical life.

To some extent, a lack of proud Jewish identity seemed only natural in the dark days of the 1930s. When Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of the Reconstructionist movement, put forth his “conception of Judaism for our day” in his 1934 work Judaism as a Civilization, he wrote that “the number of Jews who regret they are not Gentiles is legion.” Kaplan described a “sense of inferiority and self-contempt which is eating like a canker into the Jewish soul.” For many Jews, Kaplan believed, Judaism is seen as a burden. “Since their Jewish origin stands in the way of their happiness and ambition,” he wrote, “how can they help deploring it?”

Kaplan’s response was to try to create meaningful Judaism, but this was not the only route toward proud Jewish identity in the coming decades. Indeed, anti-Semitism led many secular Jews to stand firm as Jews even in the absence of Jewish education and religious practice. Countless mid-century American Jews articulated a link between Jewish persecution and their own emergent sense of identity.

“Adolf Hitler has done more to strengthen, to unite, to solidify and to spiritualize the Jews of the world than any other man since Moses,” the bestselling Jewish novelist Edna Ferber wrote in her 1939 autobiography. In the same vein, Ben Hecht, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter, declared in characteristically bold fashion that he “became a Jew in 1939,” as his biographer Adina Hoffman writes. Figures like Anne Frank and Rabbi Leo Baeck, who had emerged from the Holocaust with heroic images, further inspired pride among American Jews. The memory of anti-Semitism constituted the ground floor in the building of many a Jewish identity.

Though overt anti-Semitism waned in the period after World War II, it continued to inform the construction of Jewish identity. For playwright and screenwriter Arthur Laurents (of West Side Story and The Way We Were fame), figuring out how to portray the connection between anti-Semitism and Jewish identity became a recurring theme of his work. Laurents’ first play, Home of the Brave, which premiered in 1949, was criticized by the Anti-Defamation League because the Jewish protagonist seemed overly neurotic in the face of anti-Semitism. “I thought the hero behaved as he did because that was how Jews behaved in the face of the prejudice the ADL itself was always battling,” Laurents responded.

Jewish identity was not so secure at the time that it could handle less than flattering portrayals. But toward the end of his career, in the 1990s, Laurents felt he had finally learned to express the unique dynamic between Jewish identity and anti-Semitism. In My Good Name, one of his last plays, the Jewish character explains, “I’m Pavlov’s Jewish dog. When the bell rings, I come out fighting. I think that’s what any Jew worth being a Jew does.” For the secular Laurents, as for so many others, Jewish identity was forged through experiences with anti-Semitism.

Like Kaplan, postwar Jewish leaders were motivated by this seemingly negative inspiration for Jewish identity to promote more positive foundations for Jewish identity, particularly those rooted in serious understandings of Judaism. In the years after World War II, a genre of introduction to Judaism books emerged that sought to shift the focus of conversations about Jewishness from anti-Semitism to the riches of Judaism and Jewish heritage. In so doing, they helped transform the postwar understanding of Jews from members of a persecuted race to members of America’s “third faith.” What had been seen as a burden was coming to be seen as a privilege.

Another attempt to reframe Judaism in more affirmative terms was reflected in the movement for Soviet Jewry, which began in the mid-1960s. The writer Yossi Klein Halevi, a young activist in the movement, has observed that those behind the struggle for Soviet Jews were not just inspired by the persecution of their coreligionists abroad, but also by the shame of earlier generations’ passivity in the face of the Holocaust. The movement, Halevi writes, fostered “a beautiful symbiotic relationship … between the freest Jews in the Diaspora and the most oppressed.”

This changed climate, in terms of both diminished anti-Semitism and more affirmative expressions of Jewish identity, was apparent on a range of cultural fronts—including sports. Hank Greenberg’s refusal to play baseball on Yom Kippur in 1934, a period when anti-Semitism was raging in both Europe and the United States, barely registered on the cultural radar. When Sandy Koufax did the same thing 30 years later, it became a point of Jewish pride — and continued to be so even decades later.

In the last decades of the 20th century, increasing American interest in the specifically Jewish experience of the Holocaust — as evidenced by a television miniseries on the subject, the national prominence of Elie Wiesel, the 1993 opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the popularity of the film Schindler’s List — all served to legitimize American Jews’ desire for proud identity in the face of anti-Semitism. Still, with anti-Semitism at a low ebb, the sense that American Jews stood strong in the face of anti-Semitism was more theoretical than practical.

That would change in the early 21st century as anti-Semitism rose again, most dramatically with the killing of 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, the most deadly anti-Semitic attack in American history. In the wake of the shooting, many expressions of support were forthcoming from the wider community, including a now iconic printing of the Hebrew words of the Mourner’s Kaddish on the front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — as sure a sign of any that the attack would be met with pride and defiant assertions of Jewish identity. In a far cry from the Jewish self-contempt that Kaplan once lamented, the paper’s Jewish executive editor unapologetically defended the choice to print the prayer in a secular publication as an expression of the city’s collective grief over the deaths.

How American Jewish identity will be shaped by the resurgence of hate in recent years remains to be seen. But if the Pittsburgh paper’s response is any indication, it will not be marked by a return to the sense of inferiority and shame that inspired such concern by Jewish leaders a century ago.

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The symbol experienced a resurgence in the late 19th century, following extensive archeological work such as that of the famous archeologist Heinrich Schliemann. Schliemann discovered the hooked cross on the site of ancient Troy. He connected it with similar shapes found on pottery in Germany and speculated that it was a “significant religious symbol of our remote ancestors.”

In the beginning of the 20th century the swastika was widely used in Europe. It had numerous meanings, the most common being a symbol of good luck and auspiciousness. However, the work of Schliemann soon was taken up by völkisch movements, for whom the swastika was a symbol of “Aryan identity” and German nationalist pride

This conjecture of Aryan cultural descent of the German people is likely one of the main reasons why the Nazi party formally adopted the swastika as its symbol in 1920.

The Nazi party, however, was not the only party to use the swastika in Germany. After World War I, a number of far-right nationalist movements adopted the swastika. As a symbol, it became associated with the idea of a racially “pure” state. By the time the Nazis gained control of Germany, the connotations of the swastika had forever changed.

In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler wrote: “I myself, meanwhile, after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form; a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a black swastika in the middle. After long trials I also found a definite proportion between the size of the flag and the size of the white disk, as well as the shape and thickness of the swastika.”

The swastika would become the most recognizable icon of Nazi propaganda, appearing on the flag referred to by Hitler in Mein Kampf as well as on election posters, arm bands, medallions, and badges for military and other organizations. A potent symbol intended to elicit pride among Aryans, the swastika also struck terror into Jews and others deemed enemies of Nazi Germany.

Despite its origins, the swastika has become so widely associated with Nazi Germany that contemporary uses frequently incite controversy.

Reprinted  from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia.

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Conspiracy Theory Basics

Conspiracy theories have been developed throughout history by individuals, religious communities, and political entities to explain negative events, find scapegoats, or fulfill paranoid fears and fantasies.

According to conspiracy theories, the world is divided into two camps: the manipulators and the manipulated, those who know (a secret minority) and those who do not (the vast majority). Conspiracy theories have a reassuring way of explaining world events in a simplistic fashion; they serve as a comfortable shortcut to justify the complexities of society. For many people who have suffered from recurrent crises–financial losses, lethal diseases, natural disasters–it is difficult not to understand the origins of such evil. The most terrifying explanation is preferable to uncertainty and mystery.

Conspiracy theories are dangerous because their simplicity resists all forms of dismantlement. Worse, those who dare question the seriousness of such theories are accused of being agents in the service of plotters. Conspiracists take on the heroic duty of infiltrating the “enemy” in order to interpret esoteric clues, unmask plotters, and denounce schemes.

Blood Libel, Protocols and More

Accusing Jews of being master conspirators is not new. Since early Christianity, Jews have been associated with plots to control the world and instate a Jewish tyranny. In the Middle Ages, whenever a Christian child disappeared or was found dead, Jews were held responsible. They were accused of using the blood of these children for their Passover matzah.

Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories took a modern turn in the 19th century, with the publication of German author Hermann Goedsche’s 1868 novel Biarritz, which describes the Devil appearing before a mysterious rabbinical cabal to plan a “Jewish conspiracy.” In the chapter called “In the Jewish Cemetery of Prague,” Goedsche describes a midnight meeting of the “representatives of the twelve tribes of Israel” to discuss the takeover of the world. Biarritz was a commercial success and probably inspired the author of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion a few years later.

The Protocols is, of course, the famous anti-Semitic pamphlet published in Russia at the end of the 19th century. It purports to be the minutes of meetings held secretly by Jewish wise men plotting to control the world. Exposed many times as a forgery, the Protocols has nevertheless continued to be translated, published, and distributed across the globe. In 2003, Egyptian television aired a kind of soap opera based on the Protocols called Knight Without a Horse, a series depicting secret meetings of Jewish elders and Jews murdering Christian children to get their blood for Passover.

Anti-Israel Conspiracy Theories

New spins on the blood libel are alive today in other parts of the Middle East as well. In March 1997, Nabil Ramlawi, the PLO representative to the United Nations in Geneva accused Israel of a sinister plot to kill Palestinian children. “The Israeli authorities infected by injection 300 Palestinian children with the HIV virus during the years of the intifada.” Israelis have been similarly accused of spreading mad cow disease to Palestinians through British-made milk chocolates, killing Arab children to get their organs, and sending AIDS-infected Israeli prostitutes to contaminate the West Bank. In December 2004, Iran’s Sahar 1 TV aired a weekly series called Zahra’s Blue Eyes or For You Palestine. The show featured fictional Israeli doctors taking hearts from healthy Palestinian children for transplants, as well as graphic scenes of Palestinian children whose eyes have been surgically removed and stolen by Israel.

Many of the problems associated with other recent tragedies have been blamed on the Jews. Ali Abdullah, a conservative Bahraini religious scholar accused the Israelis of masterminding the Chechen school attack in Beslan in 2004. “I have no doubt in my mind that this is the work of the Israelis who want to tarnish the image of Muslims and are working alongside Russians who have their own agenda against the Muslims in Chechnya.”

On Jan. 20, 2005, in a TV interview, Yemeni Professor Ahmad Muhammad Al-‘Ajal claimed that Zionists were responsible for kidnappings that supposedly occurred in the wake of the Southeast Asian tsunami. “As for the issue of child abduction in places hit by the earthquake and tsunami in Southeast Asia this is what the organizations of global Zionism are accustomed to, and this is what they do. But it is done in secret. They commit a crime and then place the blame on the Arab and Islamic nation…Many studies have proven that a large percent of the slave market belongs to the forces of global Zionism, whose octopus tentacles spread evil throughout the world.”

Illuminati, Rothschilds, Lyndon LaRouche

But Hizbullah’s Al-Manar TV, Iran’s National News Agency, and the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram are not the sole provider of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Amazingly, America has been a fertile ground for such claims, as well.

In 1991, televangelist Pat Robertson published The New World Order, which was influenced by a number of conspiracy theories, including the anti-Semitic books of Nesta Webster (1876-1960). Robertson traces the genealogy of a world conspiracy back to a small Freemason lodge founded in 1776 in Bavaria by the German Adam Weishaupt and called the Illuminati.

Supposedly, the Illuminati were later infiltrated and taken over by Jewish bankers, as Robertson writes, “That same year, 1782, the headquarters of Illuminated Freemasonry moved to Frankfurt, a center controlled by the Rothschild family. It is reported that in Frankfurt, Jews for the first time were admitted to the order of Freemasons. If indeed members of the Rothschild family or their close associates were polluted by the occultism of Weishaupt’s Illuminated Freemasonry, we may have discovered the link between the occult and the world of finance. Remember, the Rothschilds financed Cecil Rhodes in Africa; Lord Rothschild was a member of the inner circle of Rhodes’s English Round Tables; and Paul Warburg, architect of the Federal Reserve System, was a Rothschild agent.”

The picture of American conspiracists would not be complete without Lyndon LaRouche, a perennial candidate for President of the United States. In the September 5, 1978 issue of Larouche’s New Solidarity, the editorial argued that the “entire Zionist apparatus in the United States exists as an unchecked threat to national security” with “illegal and subversive primary links” to various elements in an international conspiracy, including the Israeli and British secret services. According to the editorial, there is only one possible counterattack against this alleged enemy:

The Zionist octopus must be eliminated. Leaders of the ‘Jewish Lobby’ must be investigated and their various organizations dismantled or registered as foreign agents.

9/11 Attacks Blamed on the Mossad

The terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 generated scores of conspiracy theories, which claim that Israeli agents carried out the attacks, thus confirming the Jewish master plan to rule the world. Other conspiracists argued that 4,000 Israelis who allegedly worked at the World Trade Center stayed home on Sept. 11, because the Mossad warned them about the destruction of the Twin Towers.

An Egyptian academic, Dr. Gamal Ali Zahran, head of the political science department at Suez Canal University, wrote shortly after 9/11 in the daily Al-Ahram that Jews who were stockholders in the airlines and insurance companies sold their stocks about 10 days before the attacks and then bought them again at the lowest price, thus making huge profits. Finally, the fact that a Jewish businessman owned the World Trade Center supposedly added to the veracity of the plot, since he obtained millions of dollars in insurance money after the destruction. Here the anti-Semitic canard of the Jewish conspiracy meets the anti-Semitic stereotype of the greedy Jew.

Conspiracists in general are reinforced by popular culture, which commonly uses the theme of secret plots, codes, and plans. Books such as Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons, films such as Independence Day, and video games like Lara Croft Tomb Raider build upon traditional conspiracy theories when they add underground networks, secret revolutionary plans, and other esoteric societies.

Conspiracists show no sign of losing their momentum. Within extremist circles, hatred of the Jews remains a unifying power between otherwise opposing groups, from white supremacists to Muslim and Christian fundamentalists to anti-globalization militants and far-right extremists.

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