Many authors see the roots of modern antisemitism in both pagan antiquity and early Christianity. Jerome Chanes identifies six stages in the historical development of antisemitism: • Pre-Christian anti-Judaism in ancient Greece and Rome which was primarily ethnic in nature • Christian antisemitism in antiquity and the Middle Ages which was religious in nature and has extended into modern times • Traditional Muslim antisemitism which was—at least, in its classical form—nuanced in that Jews were a protected class • Political, social and economic antisemitism of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Europe which laid the groundwork for racial antisemitism • Racial antisemitism that arose in the 19th century and culminated in Nazism in the 20th century • Contemporary antisemitism which has been labeled by some as the
New Antisemitism Chanes suggests that these six stages could be merged into three categories: "ancient antisemitism, which was primarily ethnic in nature;
Christian antisemitism, which was religious; and the racial antisemitism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."
Ancient world The first clear examples of anti-Jewish sentiment can be traced to the 3rd century BCE to
Alexandria, the home to the largest Jewish diaspora community in the world at the time and where the
Septuagint, a Greek translation of the
Hebrew Bible, was produced.
Manetho, an Egyptian priest and historian of that era, wrote scathingly of the Jews. His themes are repeated in the works of
Chaeremon,
Lysimachus,
Poseidonius,
Apollonius Molon, and in
Apion and
Tacitus.
Agatharchides of Cnidus ridiculed the practices of the Jews and the "absurdity of
their Law", making a mocking reference to how
Ptolemy Lagus was able to invade
Jerusalem in 320 BCE because its inhabitants were observing the
Shabbat. One of the earliest anti-Jewish
edicts, promulgated by
Antiochus IV Epiphanes in about 170–167 BCE, sparked a revolt of the
Maccabees in
Judea. In view of Manetho's anti-Jewish writings, antisemitism may have originated in Egypt and been spread by "the
Greek retelling of
Ancient Egyptian prejudices". The ancient Jewish philosopher
Philo of Alexandria describes an attack on Jews in Alexandria in 38 CE in which thousands of Jews died. The violence in Alexandria may have been caused by the Jews being portrayed as
misanthropes. Tcherikover argues that the reason for hatred of Jews in the Hellenistic period was their separateness in the Greek cities, the
poleis. Bohak has argued, however, that early animosity against the Jews cannot be regarded as being anti-Judaic or antisemitic unless it arose from attitudes that were held against the Jews alone, and that many Greeks showed animosity toward any group they regarded as barbarians. Statements exhibiting prejudice against Jews and their religion can be found in the works of many
pagan Greek and
Roman writers. Edward Flannery writes that it was the Jews' refusal to accept Greek religious and social standards that marked them out. Hecataetus of Abdera, a Greek historian of the early third century BCE, wrote that Moses "in remembrance of the exile of his people, instituted for them a misanthropic and inhospitable way of life." Manetho wrote that the Jews were expelled Egyptian
lepers who had been taught by
Moses "not to adore the gods." Edward Flannery describes antisemitism in ancient times as essentially "cultural, taking the shape of a national xenophobia played out in political settings." There are examples of
Hellenistic rulers desecrating the
Temple and banning Jewish religious practices, including
Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who in 167 BCE erected an altar to Zeus in the temple directed the sacrifice of pigs to at the altar. He also banned Jewish practices such as circumcision, Shabbat observance, and the study of Torah scrolls, sparking the Maccabean Revolt.
Relationships between the Jewish people and the occupying Roman Empire were at times antagonistic and resulted in
several rebellions, most notably the
First Jewish–Roman War and the
Bar Kokhba revolt. According to
Suetonius, the emperor
Tiberius took measures against Jews in Rome in 19 CE, expelling and relocating some Jewish‑affiliated groups in response to unrest and alleged religious‑moral offenses. The 18th-century English historian
Edward Gibbon identified a more tolerant period in Roman–Jewish relations beginning in about 160 CE. However, with the rise of Christianity as the dominant religion,
increasingly restrictive legislation and rhetoric was directed against Jews.
James Carroll asserted: "Jews accounted for 10% of the total population of the Roman Empire. By that ratio, if other factors such as
pogroms and
conversions had not intervened, there would be 200 million Jews in the world today, instead of something like 13 million."
Persecutions during the Middle Ages , a Jewish tribe in
Medina, 627 In the late 6th century CE, the newly Catholicised Visigothic kingdom in Hispania issued a series of anti-Jewish edicts which forbade Jews from marrying Christians, practicing circumcision, and observing Jewish holy days. Continuing throughout the 7th century, both Visigothic kings and the Church were active in creating social aggression and towards Jews with "civic and ecclesiastic punishments", ranging between forced conversion, slavery, exile and death. From the 9th century, the
medieval Islamic world classified Jews and Christians as
dhimmis and allowed Jews to practice their religion more freely than they could do in
medieval Christian Europe. Under
Islamic rule, there was a
Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain that lasted until at least the 11th century. It ended when several Muslim
pogroms against Jews took place on the
Iberian Peninsula, including those that occurred in
Córdoba in 1011 and in
Granada in 1066. Several decrees ordering the destruction of synagogues were also enacted in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Yemen from the 11th century. In addition, Jews were forced to convert to Islam or face death in some parts of Yemen, Morocco and Baghdad several times between the 12th and 18th centuries. The
Almohads, who had taken control of the
Almoravids'
Maghribi and Andalusian territories by 1147, were far more fundamentalist in outlook compared to their predecessors, and they treated the
dhimmis harshly. Faced with the choice of either death or conversion, many Jews and Christians emigrated. Some, such as the family of
Maimonides, fled east to more tolerant Muslim lands, while some others went northward to settle in the growing Christian kingdoms. in Europe from 1100 to 1600 In
medieval Europe, Jews were persecuted with
blood libels, expulsions,
forced conversions and
massacres. These persecutions were often justified on religious grounds and reached a first peak during the
Crusades. In 1096, hundreds or thousands of
Jews were killed during the
First Crusade. This was the first major outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in Christian Europe outside Spain and was cited by Zionists in the 19th century as indicating the need for a state of Israel. In 1147, there were several massacres of Jews during the
Second Crusade. The
Shepherds' Crusades of 1251 and
1320 both involved attacks, as did the
Rintfleisch massacres in 1298. Expulsions followed, such as the 1290 banishment of Jews from England, the expulsion of 100,000 Jews from France in 1394, and the 1421 expulsion of thousands of Jews from Austria. Many of the expelled Jews fled to Poland. In medieval and Renaissance Europe, a major contributor to the deepening of antisemitic sentiment and legal action among the Christian populations was the popular preaching of the zealous reform religious orders, the Franciscans (especially
Bernardino of Feltre) and Dominicans (especially
Vincent Ferrer), who combed Europe and promoted antisemitism through their often fiery, emotional appeals. As the
Black Death epidemics devastated Europe in the mid-14th century, causing the death of a large part of the population, Jews were used as
scapegoats. Rumors spread that they caused the disease by deliberately poisoning wells. Hundreds of Jewish communities were
destroyed in numerous persecutions. Although
Pope Clement VI tried to protect them by issuing two
papal bulls in 1348, the first on 6 July and an additional one several months later, 900 Jews were
burned alive in Strasbourg, where the plague had not yet affected the city.
Reformation Martin Luther, an
ecclesiastical reformer whose teachings inspired the
Reformation, wrote antagonistically about Jews in his pamphlet
On the Jews and their Lies, written in 1543. He portrays the Jews in extremely harsh terms, excoriates them and provides detailed recommendations for a
pogrom against them, calling for their permanent oppression and expulsion. At one point he writes: "...we are at fault in not slaying them...", a passage that, according to historian
Paul Johnson, "may be termed the first work of modern antisemitism, and a giant step forward on the road to
the Holocaust."
17th century in 1614 During the mid-to-late 17th century the
Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was devastated by several conflicts, in which the Commonwealth lost over a third of its population (over 3 million people), and Jewish losses were counted in the hundreds of thousands. The first of these conflicts was the
Khmelnytsky Uprising, when
Bohdan Khmelnytsky's supporters massacred tens of thousands of
Jews in the eastern and southern areas he controlled (today's
Ukraine). The precise number of dead may never be known, but the decrease of the Jewish population during that period is estimated at 100,000 to 200,000, which also includes emigration, deaths from diseases, and
captivity in the Ottoman Empire, called
jasyr. European immigrants to the United States brought antisemitism to the country as early as the 17th century.
Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch governor of
New Amsterdam, implemented plans to prevent Jews from settling in the city. During the Colonial Era, the American government limited the political and economic rights of Jews. It was not until the
American Revolutionary War that Jews gained legal rights, including the right to vote. However, even at their peak, the restrictions on Jews in the United States were never as stringent as they had been in Europe. In the
Zaydi imamate of
Yemen, Jews were also singled out for discrimination in the 17th century, which culminated in the general expulsion of all Jews from places in Yemen to the arid coastal plain of
Tihamah and which became known as the
Mawza Exile.
Enlightenment In 1744, Archduchess of Austria
Maria Theresa ordered Jews out of
Bohemia but soon reversed her position, on the condition that Jews pay for their readmission every ten years. This
extortion was known among the Jews as ("queen's money" in Yiddish). In 1752, she introduced the law limiting each Jewish family to one son. In 1782,
Joseph II abolished most of these persecution practices in his , on the condition that
Yiddish and
Hebrew were eliminated from public records and that judicial autonomy was annulled.
Moses Mendelssohn wrote that "Such a tolerance... is even more dangerous play in tolerance than open persecution."
Voltaire According to
Arnold Ages,
Voltaire's "Lettres philosophiques, Dictionnaire philosophique, and Candide, to name but a few of his better known works, are saturated with comments on Jews and Judaism and the vast majority are negative". Paul H. Meyer adds: "There is no question but that Voltaire, particularly in his latter years, nursed a violent hatred of the Jews and it is equally certain that his animosity...did have a considerable impact on public opinion in France." Thirty of the 118 articles in Voltaire's
Dictionnaire Philosophique concerned Jews and described them in consistently negative ways.
Louis de Bonald and the Catholic Counter-Revolution The
counter-revolutionary Catholic royalist
Louis de Bonald stands out among the earliest figures to explicitly call for the reversal of Jewish emancipation in the wake of the
French Revolution. Bonald's attacks on the Jews are likely to have influenced
Napoleon's decision to limit the civil rights of Alsatian Jews. Bonald's article (1806) was one of the most venomous screeds of its era and furnished a paradigm which combined anti-liberalism, a defense of a rural society, traditional Christian antisemitism, and the identification of Jews with bankers and finance capital, which would in turn influence many subsequent right-wing reactionaries such as
Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux,
Charles Maurras, and
Édouard Drumont, nationalists such as
Maurice Barrès and
Paolo Orano, and antisemitic socialists such as
Alphonse Toussenel. Bonald furthermore declared that the Jews were an "alien" people, a "state within a state", and should be forced to wear a distinctive mark to more easily identify and discriminate against them. Between 1882 and 1886 alone, French priests published twenty antisemitic books blaming France's ills on the Jews and urging the government to consign them back to the ghettos, expel them, or hang them from the gallows. Gougenot des Mousseaux's (1869) has been called a "Bible of modern antisemitism" and was translated into German by Nazi ideologue
Alfred Rosenberg.
Imperial Russia in
Yekaterinoslav, Russian Empire (modern-day Ukraine) Thousands of Jews were slaughtered by Cossack
Haidamaks in the 1768
massacre of Uman in the
Kingdom of Poland. In 1772, the empress of Russia
Catherine II forced the Jews into the
Pale of Settlement – which was located primarily in present-day Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus – and to stay in their
shtetls and forbade them from returning to the towns that they occupied before the
partition of Poland. From 1804, Jews were banned from their villages and began to stream into the towns. A decree by emperor
Nicholas I of Russia in 1827 conscripted Jews under 18 years of age into the
cantonist schools for a 25-year military service in order to promote baptism. Policy towards Jews was liberalised somewhat under
Czar Alexander II (). However, his assassination in 1881 served as a pretext for further repression such as the
May Laws of 1882.
Konstantin Pobedonostsev, nicknamed the "black czar" and tutor to the
czarevitch, later crowned
Czar Nicholas II, declared that "One-third of the Jews must die, one-third must emigrate, and one third be converted to Christianity".
Islamic antisemitism in the 19th century Historian
Martin Gilbert writes that it was in the 19th century that the position of Jews worsened in
Muslim countries.
Benny Morris writes that one symbol of Jewish degradation was the phenomenon of stone-throwing at Jews by Muslim children. Morris quotes a 19th-century traveler: "I have seen a little fellow of six years old, with a troop of fat toddlers of only three and four, teaching [them] to throw stones at a Jew, and one little urchin would, with the greatest coolness, waddle up to the man and literally spit upon his Jewish
gaberdine. To all this the Jew is obliged to submit; it would be more than his life was worth to offer to strike a Mahommedan." In the middle of the 19th century,
J. J. Benjamin wrote about the life of
Persian Jews, describing conditions and beliefs that went back to the 16th century: "…they are obliged to live in a separate part of town… Under the pretext of their being unclean, they are treated with the greatest severity and should they enter a street, inhabited by Mussulmans, they are pelted by the boys and mobs with stones and dirt…." In Jerusalem at least, conditions for some Jews improved.
Moses Montefiore, on his seventh visit in 1875, noted that fine new buildings had sprung up and, "surely we're approaching the time to witness God's hallowed promise unto Zion." Muslim and Christian Arabs participated in
Purim and
Passover; Arabs called the
Sephardis 'Jews, sons of Arabs'; the
Ulema and the Rabbis offered joint prayers for rain in time of drought. At the time of the Dreyfus trial in France, "Muslim comments usually favoured the persecuted Jew against his Christian persecutors".
Secular or racial antisemitism In 1850, the German composer
Richard Wagner – who has been called "the inventor of modern antisemitism" under a
pseudonym in the
Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. The essay began as an attack on Jewish composers, particularly Wagner's contemporaries, and rivals,
Felix Mendelssohn and
Giacomo Meyerbeer, but expanded to accuse Jews of being a harmful and alien element in
German culture, who corrupted morals and were, in fact, parasites incapable of creating truly "German" art. The crux was the manipulation and control by the Jews of the money economy: It is mainly characterized by Jews being the
villain of a story, such as in "The Good Bargain" ("") and "
The Jew Among Thorns" (""). Even such influential figures as
Walt Whitman tolerated bigotry toward the Jews in America. During his time as editor of the Brooklyn Eagle (1846–1848), the newspaper published historical sketches casting Jews in a bad light. The
Dreyfus Affair was an infamous antisemitic event of the late 19th century and early 20th century.
Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery
captain in the
French Army, was accused in 1894 of passing secrets to the Germans. As a result of these charges, Dreyfus was convicted and sentenced to
life imprisonment on
Devil's Island. The actual spy, Marie Charles Esterhazy, was acquitted. The event caused great uproar among the French, with the public choosing sides on the issue of whether Dreyfus was actually guilty or not.
Émile Zola accused the army of corrupting the French justice system. However, general consensus held that Dreyfus was guilty: 80% of the press in France condemned him. This attitude among the majority of the French population reveals the underlying antisemitism of the time period.
Adolf Stoecker (1835–1909), the
Lutheran court chaplain to
Kaiser Wilhelm I, founded in 1878 an antisemitic,
anti-liberal political party called the
Christian Social Party. This party always remained small, and its support dwindled after Stoecker's death, with most of its members eventually joining larger conservative groups such as the
German National People's Party. Some scholars view
Karl Marx's essay "
On The Jewish Question" as antisemitic, and argue that he often used antisemitic epithets in his published and private writings. These scholars argue that Marx equated Judaism with capitalism in his essay, helping to spread that idea. Some further argue that the essay influenced
National Socialist, as well as Soviet and Arab antisemites. Marx himself had Jewish ancestry, and
Albert Lindemann and
Hyam Maccoby have suggested that he was
embarrassed by it. Others argue that Marx consistently supported Prussian Jewish communities' struggles to achieve equal political rights. These scholars argue that "On the Jewish Question" is a critique of Bruno Bauer's arguments that Jews must convert to Christianity before being emancipated, and is more generally a critique of liberal rights discourses and capitalism. Iain Hampsher-Monk wrote that "This work [On The Jewish Question] has been cited as evidence for Marx's supposed anti-Semitism, but only the most superficial reading of it could sustain such an interpretation." David McLellan and
Francis Wheen argue that readers should interpret
On the Jewish Question in the deeper context of Marx's debates with
Bruno Bauer, author of
The Jewish Question, about
Jewish emancipation in Germany. Wheen says that "Those critics, who see this as a foretaste of 'Mein Kampf', overlook one, essential point: in spite of the clumsy phraseology and crude stereotyping, the essay was actually written as a defense of the Jews. It was a retort to Bruno Bauer, who had argued that Jews should not be granted full civic rights and freedoms unless they were baptised as Christians". According to McLellan, Marx used the word colloquially, as meaning
commerce, arguing that Germans must be emancipated from the
capitalist mode of production not Judaism or Jews in particular. McLellan concludes that readers should interpret the essay's second half as "an extended pun at Bauer's expense".
20th century '',
Worms, Germany, 1935 Between 1900 and 1924, approximately 1.75 million Jews migrated to America, the bulk from Eastern Europe escaping
the pogroms. This increase, combined with the
upward social mobility of some Jews, contributed to a resurgence of antisemitism. In the first half of the 20th century, in the US, Jews were discriminated against in employment, access to residential and resort areas, membership in clubs and organizations, and in tightened quotas on Jewish enrolment and teaching positions in colleges and universities. The lynching of
Leo Frank by a mob of prominent citizens in
Marietta, Georgia, in 1915 turned the spotlight on antisemitism in the United States. The case was also used to build support for the renewal of the
Ku Klux Klan which had been inactive since 1870. At the beginning of the 20th century, the
Beilis Trial in Russia represented modern incidents of
blood-libels in Europe. During the
Russian Civil War, close to 50,000 Jews were
killed in pogroms. Antisemitism in America reached its peak during the
interwar period. The pioneer automobile manufacturer
Henry Ford propagated antisemitic ideas in his newspaper
The Dearborn Independent (published by Ford from 1919 to 1927). The radio speeches of
Father Coughlin in the late 1930s attacked
Franklin D. Roosevelt's
New Deal and promoted the notion of a Jewish financial conspiracy. Some prominent politicians shared such views:
Louis T. McFadden, Chairman of the
United States House Committee on Banking and Currency, blamed Jews for Roosevelt's decision to abandon the
gold standard, and claimed that "in the United States today, the Gentiles have the slips of paper while the Jews have the lawful money". , 1945 In Germany, shortly after
Adolf Hitler and the
Nazi Party came to power in 1933, the government instituted repressive legislation which denied Jews basic civil rights. In September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws prohibited sexual relations and marriages between "Aryans" and Jews as Rassenschande ("race defilement") and stripped all German Jews, including many quarter- and half-Jews (Mischlinge), of full citizenship, reclassifying them as "protected subjects of the state" (Staatsangehörige). These laws culminated in a state-sponsored pogrom on the night of 9–10 November 1938, known as Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass"), during which at least 91 Jews were killed, thousands arrested, over 7,500 Jewish businesses destroyed, and about 1,400 synagogues burned or damaged. Antisemitic legislation, agitation, and propaganda were subsequently extended to German-occupied Europe following the onset of war in 1939, frequently adapting or amplifying local antisemitic traditions (e.g., in Vichy France and occupied Poland). In 1940, the famous aviator
Charles Lindbergh and many prominent Americans led the
America First Committee in opposing any involvement in a European war. Lindbergh alleged that Jews were pushing America to go to war against Germany. Lindbergh adamantly denied being antisemitic, and yet he refers numerous times in his private writings – his letters and diary – to Jewish control of the media being used to pressure the U.S. to get involved in the European war. In one diary entry in November 1938, he responded to by writing "I do not understand these riots on the part of the Germans. ... They have undoubtedly had a difficult Jewish problem, but why is it necessary to handle it so unreasonably?", acknowledgement on Lindbergh's part that he agreed with the Nazis that Germany had a "Jewish problem". An article by Jonathan Marwil in
Antisemitism, A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution claims that "no one who ever knew Lindbergh thought him antisemitic" and that claims of his antisemitism were solely tied to the remarks he made in that one speech. In the east the Third Reich forced Jews into ghettos
in Warsaw,
in Kraków,
in Lvov,
in Lublin and
in Radom. After
the beginning of the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1941, a campaign of mass murder, conducted by the
Einsatzgruppen, culminated from 1942 to 1945 in systematic
genocide:
the Holocaust. Eleven million Jews were targeted for extermination by the Nazis, and some six million were eventually killed.
Soviet antisemitism There have continued to be antisemitic incidents since WWII, some of which had been state-sponsored. In the
Soviet Union, antisemitism was even used as an instrument for settling personal conflicts, starting with the conflict between
Joseph Stalin and
Leon Trotsky and continuing through numerous conspiracy theories spread by official propaganda.
Antisemitism in the USSR reached new heights after 1948 during the campaign against the "
rootless cosmopolitan" (euphemism for "Jew") in which numerous Yiddish-language poets, writers, painters, and sculptors were killed or arrested. This culminated in the antisemitic conspiracy theory of the '
Doctors' Plot' in 1952. In the 20th century,
Soviet and
Russian antisemitism underwent significant transformations, shaped by political, social, and ideological shifts. During the early Soviet period, the
Bolsheviks initially condemned antisemitism, seeing it as incompatible with
Marxist ideology. However, under
Joseph Stalin's regime, antisemitism reemerged, often cloaked in 'anti-Zionist' rhetoric. As early as 1943, Stalin and his propagandists intensified attacks against Jews as "
rootless cosmopolitans". The Party issued confidential directives to fire Jews from positions of power, but state-controlled media did not openly attack Jews until the late 1940s. In the post-Stalin era, state-sanctioned antisemitism persisted and intensified. In February 1953, the Soviet Union severed diplomatic relations with the
State of Israel and "soon the state media was saturated with anti-Zionist propaganda, depicting bloated, hook-nosed Jewish bankers and all-consuming serpents embossed with the Star of David." The 1963 publication of the antisemitic book
Judaism Without Embellishment, written under orders from the central Soviet government, echoed
Nazi propaganda, alleging a global Jewish conspiracy to subvert the Soviet Union. The
Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public shut down and expropriated
synagogues,
yeshivas, and Jewish civil organisations and prohibited the learning of
Hebrew. The still-extant
Novosti Press Agency, a key element in the Soviet propaganda machine, also participated in the spreading of antisemitic anti-Zionism. Its chairman, Ivan Udaltsov, published a memorandum on 27 January 1971, to the
CPSU in which he claimed that "Zionists, by provoking antisemitism, recruit volunteers for the Israeli army", blaming Jews for antisemitism, and falsely alleged that Zionists were responsible for "subversive activities" during the 1968
Prague Spring. ==Contemporary antisemitism==