The Holocaust did not emerge from nowhere. It was the culmination of nearly two thousand years of European antisemitism: a tradition of hatred, discrimination, and periodic violence against Jews embedded in Christian theology, European culture, and economic resentment. Understanding this history is not to excuse or explain the Holocaust, still less to make it inevitable. It is to understand the cultural environment in which Nazi racial antisemitism could find purchase and widespread acceptance.
Christian antisemitism
The earliest roots lie in the first centuries of Christianity. The charge of deicide, that Jews bore collective responsibility for the death of Christ, was embedded in Christian teaching from the patristic period and was not formally repudiated by the Catholic Church until the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate declaration of 1965. The Gospel of John’s use of “the Jews” as the generic enemy of Jesus provided a textual basis for collective hostility that was exploited by preachers and theologians for centuries. The early Church Fathers wrote sermons against Jews that set a template for Christian antisemitism: John Chrysostom’s homilies against Jews, delivered in Antioch in 386 to 387 CE, described synagogues as brothels and Jews as animals.
The medieval period intensified and systematised this tradition. Jews were expelled from England in 1290, from France repeatedly between 1182 and 1394, and from Spain in 1492. The blood libel, the accusation that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals, appeared in Norwich in 1144 and spread across Europe, producing massacres from England to Poland. The accusation was completely fabricated; it was condemned as false by Pope Innocent IV in 1247 and by successive popes thereafter. This had no effect on its circulation. At each major plague outbreak Jews were accused of poisoning wells and killed in significant numbers. The Black Death of 1347 to 1351 produced some of the worst anti-Jewish pogroms in European history.
Secular and racial antisemitism
The Enlightenment produced Jewish emancipation in Western Europe across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, removing legal restrictions and granting Jews full citizenship rights in France, then gradually across the German states, the Habsburg Empire, and Britain. This partial integration produced a backlash. Secular antisemitism, shorn of its religious framework, emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century as a pseudo-scientific doctrine of racial hierarchy. Wilhelm Marr coined the term “antisemitism” in 1879, presenting hostility to Jews as a racial rather than religious matter and founding the League of Antisemites in Germany. Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) provided an elaborate pseudo-intellectual framework for Aryan racial superiority.
Alongside racial theory, economic antisemitism intensified. The Rothschild family became a focus for fantasies about Jewish financial power. The Dreyfus Affair in France between 1894 and 1906, in which a Jewish army officer was falsely convicted of treason on the basis of forged documents and popular antisemitism, demonstrated how deeply embedded hostility to Jews remained even in the country that had first emancipated them. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, fabricated by the Russian secret police around 1903, presented Jewish world domination as a current conspiracy and was read by millions across Europe and America.
The Nazi inheritance
The Nazi movement did not invent European antisemitism. It inherited and radicalised a tradition that had been developing for nearly two millennia. Hitler absorbed his antisemitism from the political culture of Vienna in the years before the First World War, a city already saturated with racial antisemitic politics through the careers of Georg von Schönerer and Karl Lueger. What the Nazis added was the combination of a racial pseudo-science, a totalitarian state apparatus, a modern bureaucratic system, and the political will to carry ideology to its logical conclusion. The Holocaust was not the inevitable product of European antisemitism: plenty of countries with deep antisemitic traditions did not produce genocides. But it was not possible without that tradition as its foundation.
See also
Sources
- Gavin Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, University of California Press, 1990
- Robert Wistrich, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred, Pantheon, 1991
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, HarperCollins, 1997
- Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, Harper and Row, 1967
- Jules Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt: Christian Roots of Anti-Semitism, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964