Question

Discuss at least three significant causes of Modern Antisemitism in the 19th and 20th Centuries as opposed to earlier periods. Search entries or author UnreadT Subscribe Reply 30

Answer 1

Antisemitism goes back to the Middle Ages and beyond. It is a complex issue but can mostly be attributed to Jews living in a diaspora and the effects of that.

Basically, they are easy targets/scapegoats for any purpose because they are different from the surrounding population (obviously this does not apply to Israel, but for the longest time there was no majority-Jewish place), have distinct networks and are a small enough minority to not be able to fight back. No king in his right mind would blame white Christians for his country's problems, because they would oust him shortly, but he could usually count on Christians' support against Jews.

Ignorance plays a part: Jews were often accused of killing Christian babies in religious ceremonies. Since Christians didn't attend those ceremonies, this outrageous claim persisted as a rumour for a long time.

Envy plays a part: in earlier times, Jews often fared better than their neighbours because
a) Their religion requires them to avoid dirty meat (pork) and to wash regularly at a time when Christians didn't. This meant that when a lot of people got sick, Jews were more likely to stay healthy - and be blamed for the sickness.
b) Various countries had rules forbidding Jews from entering certain professions, or they had rules that only Jews could be money-lenders (because taking interest for a loan is un-Christian). For those reasons, there was a higher concentration of Jews in finance, and they were envied for their wealth - which also gave kings a reason to encourage Antisemitism as a way to be able to seize that wealth.

The church also had a hand in this, breeding the myth that Jews killed Christ and were cursed for it, probably as a way to increase the urgency to convert.

In the time of Social Darwinism ("survival of the fittest race"), people assumed that "their people" included only Christian whites - not unlike certain   ultra-right-wing Americans doubting any non-white or non-Christians' claim to the title "American". If white Christians were one race, Jews must be another, obviously inferior one, and some (e.g. Hitler) even went as far as believing that Jews and white Christians were in a Darwinian fight from which only the strongest race would emerge. This caused Antisemitism in some, but it in itself wouldn't have been possible without the existence of other reasons: if people hadn't already been used to perceiving Jews as a foreign group, nobody would have tried to find genetic differences between them and white Christians.

Fwiw, none of the Allied entered WWII because of a desire to help the Jews. Many influential people in Allied countries were Antisemites themselves. It's only after discovering the magnitude of the crimes committed against the Jewish people that Antisemitism became much less acceptable.