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Racial antisemitism is prejudice against Jews based on a belief or assertion that Jews constitute a distinct race that has inherent traits or characteristics that appear in some way abhorrent or inherently inferior or otherwise different from the traits or characteristics of the rest of a society. The abhorrence may find expression in the form of discrimination, stereotypes or caricatures. Racial antisemitism may present Jews, as a group, as a threat in some way to the values or safety of a society. Racial antisemitism can seem deeper-rooted than religious antisemitism, because for religious antisemites conversion of Jews remains an option and once converted the "Jew" is gone. In the context of racial antisemitism Jews cannot get rid of their Jewishness.[1]
The premise of racial antisemitism is that Jews constitute a distinct racial or ethnic group which negatively impacts gentiles. Racial antisemitism differs from religious antisemitism, which involves prejudice against Jews and Judaism on the basis of their religion.[2] According to William Nichols, one can distinguish historical religious antisemitism from "the new secular antisemitism" based on racial or ethnic grounds: "The dividing line was the possibility of effective conversion ... a Jew ceased to be a Jew upon baptism." However, with racial antisemitism:
Now the assimilated Jew was still a Jew, even after baptism ... From the Enlightenment onward, it is no longer possible to draw clear lines of distinction between religious and racial forms of hostility towards Jews... Once Jews have been emancipated and secular thinking makes its appearance, without leaving behind the old Christian hostility towards Jews, the new term antisemitism becomes almost unavoidable, even before explicitly racist doctrines appear.[3]
In the context of the Industrial Revolution, with the emancipation of the Jews (1790s onwards) and the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries), many Jews rapidly urbanized and experienced a period of greater social mobility. With the decreasing role of religion in public life and the simultaneous tempering of religious antisemitism, a combination of growing nationalism, the rise of eugenics, resentment of the perceived socio-economic success of Jews, and the influx of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe to Central Europe, soon led to the newer, and often more virulent, racist antisemitism.[4]
Scientific racism, the ideology that genetics played a role in group behavior and characteristics, was highly respected and accepted as factual between 1870 and 1940. Historian Walter Lacquer lists numerous influential figures such as economist Eugen Duehring, composer Richard Wagner, Biblical scholar Paul de Lagarde, and historian-philosophers like Houston Stewart Chamberlain as important figures in the rise of racial antisemitism.[5] This acceptance of race science made it possible for antisemites to clothe their hatred of Jews in "scientific theory" and propose grand, sweeping political solutions in coming decades, from relocation to Madagascar to compulsory sterilization to mass extermination.[6]
In the Third Reich (1933–1945), Nazis extended the logic of racial antisemitism, enshrining racial antisemitic ideas into laws which assessed the "blood" or ethnicity of people (rather than their current religious affiliations), and prescribing—purely on that basis—the subsequent fate of those so assessed. When added to its views on Jewish racial traits which Nazi pseudoscience devised, the logic of racial antisemitism led to the Holocaust of 1941–1945 as an attempt to eradicate conjured-up "Jewish traits" from the world.
- ^ Brustein, William (2003). Roots of Hate. Cambridge University Press. pp. 173.
- ^ "Anti-Semitism", Jewish Encyclopedia.
- ^ Nichols, William: Christian Antisemitism, A History of Hate (1993) p. 314.
- ^ "Antisemitism in History: Racial Antisemitism, 1875–1945". www.ushmm.org. Retrieved 15 September 2017.
- ^ Laqueur, Walter (2006). The Changing Face of Antisemitism : from Ancient Times to the Present Day. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press. p. 93. ISBN 978-0-19-530429-9.
- ^ Brustein, William (2003). Roots of Hate. Cambridge University Press. pp. 95–96.