After the First World War, Germany was in chaos. Once the German emperor had gone, rebellions erupted everywhere. Left-wing groups tried to seize power in many places.
In Munich, for instance, a 'People's Republic' of Bavaria was proclaimed during a brief revolution. It provoked a right-wing reaction, which in turn resulted in bloodshed.
Hitler was very much impressed by these events. At that point, he was still in the army, and that was where he discovered his oratory talents. Before long, the army had him give training courses, intended to warn soldiers of the communist danger and to stir up feelings of nationalism. It was the start of his political career.
Against the backdrop of revolution and violence, Hitler's antisemitism was becoming increasingly radical. It is noteworthy that he said he did not support uncontrolled 'emotional' pogroms outbursts of anti-Jewish violence.
As early as August , Hitler compared the Jews to germs. He stated that diseases cannot be controlled unless you destroy their causes. The influence of the Jews would never disappear without removing its cause, the Jew, from our midst, he said.
These radical ideas paved the way for the mass murder of the Jews in the s. Hitler blamed the Jews for everything that was wrong with the world. Germany was weak and in decline due to the 'Jewish influence'. According to Hitler, the Jews were after world dominance. And they would not hesitate to use all possible means, including capitalism. In this way, Hitler took advantage of the existing prejudice that linked the Jews to monetary power and financial gain.
Hitler was not bothered by the apparent contradictions in his thinking. He held that communism was a Jewish conspiracy, too, as the larger part of the communist leaders were Jewish. Nevertheless, only a small proportion of the Jews were communists. This idea of 'Jewish communism' was to have awful repercussions in the war with the Soviet Union that started in The population and prisoners-of-war were treated brutally by the Germans.
Hitler viewed the world as an arena for the permanent struggle between peoples. He divided the world population into high and low races. The Germans belonged to the high peoples and the Jews to the low ones. He also had specific notions about other peoples. So modern antisemitism cannot be easily separated from its pre-modern antecedents. As the Catholic theologian Rosemary Ruether observed:. The mythical Jew, who is the eternal conspiratorial enemy of Christian faith, spirituality and redemption, was … shaped to serve as the scapegoat for [the ills of] secular industrial society.
Some scholars would look to the pre-Christian world and see in the attitudes of ancient Greeks and Romans the origins of an enduring hostility. Finding examples of hostility towards Jews in classical sources is not difficult.
The Roman historian Tacitus , c. The Roman poet and satirist Juvenal , c. These few examples may point towards the existence of antisemitism in antiquity.
Juvenal was every bit as rude about Greeks and other foreigners in Rome as he was about Jews. And yet what part of the dregs comes from Greece?
It is in the theology of early Christians that we find the clearest foundations of antisemitism. In his most celebrated work, Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, Justin strove to answer Trypho when he pointed to the contradictory position of Christians who claimed to accept Jewish scripture but refused to follow Torah the Jewish law.
Justin responded that the demands of Jewish law were meant only for Jews as a punishment from God. It was with his fellow Christians. At a time when the distinction between Judaism and Christianity was still blurred and rival sects competed for adherents, he was striving to prevent gentile converts to Christianity from observing the Torah, lest they go over wholly to Judaism.
It was an ugly charge, soon levelled again in the works of other Church Fathers, such as Tertullian c. The objective of using such invective was to settle internal debates within Christian congregations. The allegations did not reflect the actual behaviour or beliefs of Jews.
When Tertullian attempted to refute the dualist teachings of the Christian heretic Marcion c. He achieved this by presenting the Jews as especially wicked and especially deserving of righteous anger; it was thus, Tertullian argued, that Jewish behaviours and Jewish sins explained the contrast between the Old and the New Testament.
However, the pillage and slaughter committed by Christian mobs against Jews on the way linger long in Jewish memory.
The Jews of Germany were subjected to many indignities after the crusades, including accusations of poisoning of the wells and ritual murder. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, these slanderous charges often led to massacres. Several Polish noblemen of the Middle Ages showed special favor to Jews who immigrated because of persecution in Germany, coupled with a Polish desire for Jewish expertise in commerce. Autonomous systems of Jewish community government the kahal flourished in Poland, while the lower or grade school heder and Talmudic academy yeshiva were found everywhere.
A deterioration of Jewish life set in during the long reign of Sigismund III at the turn of the seventeenth century , partly as a result of measures taken in the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The previous centuries were certainly the high point of Jewish intellectual life in Europe, a fact that made more recent Polish anti-Judaism the more tragic. The long reign of German-born empress Catherine the Great d.
She settled them on land, however, as a device to keep them out of economic occupations and the professions. The Orthodox Church subjected them to conversionary sermons, leading to riots and slaughter later in the century.
Many an older U. Returning to Germany, we find Martin Luther in his early days naively imagining that the Jews, to whom he was attracted by his studies, would flock to the Church in his reformed version. When nothing of the sort happened, he denounced them in a set of pamphlets written in vituperative fury. He had produced the early, favorable "That Christ Was Born a Jew" in , but after he turned on this so-called "damned, rejected race," he wrote Against the Sabbatarians and On the Jews and Their Lies The antipathies of Poles, Germans, Russians and others against Jews are often explained as if they were religiously based in the patristic and medieval manner.
From the early 19th century on, however, anti-Jewish sentiment of Catholic and Protestant Europe, itself increasingly secularized, had other roots no less mythical. The proper term for it is anti-Semitism. Its target was Jewish ethnicity. It was primarily politically and economically motivated. Demagogues, however, were only too happy to put the ancient Christian rhetoric of anti-Judaism in its service.
Germany was populated with more Jews than any country in Western Europe when Hitler came to power. It also had the same ugly heritage of anti-Jewish sentiment as all Christian Europe. The short-lived Weimar Republic could not deliver Germany from the severe economic hardships it experienced after World War I.
Some leading capitalist families, gentile and Jewish, managed to escape these problems, but the eyes of the angry populace were trained on the Jews rather than the gentiles. Was there a direct line from the anti-Jewish passages in the New Testament to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, as some have alleged? Probably not.
The line was indirect, beginning around with gentile misreadings of the bitter intra-Jewish polemic contained in those writings. The theological anti-Judaism of the Church fathers, repeated endlessly in medieval and Renaissance-Reformation preaching, was the far greater culprit. It was the continuing rationale for the indefensible Christian conduct of the Middle Ages onward that was xenophobic and angry at Jewish resistance to absorption into the cultural mainstream.
Can the mischief of eighteen and one half centuries be reversed? Catholics point to statements like section 4 of the Vatican II statement on non-Christian religions Nostra Aetate, October, which exculpated the Jews of all time of the charge of deicide "killing God" , and warned Catholics against thinking that anything in their scriptures taught that Jews were a people accursed or rejected.
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