ANTI-SEMITISM
By: Rob Prince
CCMEP's "The Scoop" Newsletter
May, 2002
(note- Anthropologists use the term Semitic to refer to a wide range of people, including Jews and Arabs, but since WWII it is more commonly used to refer to Jewish people- which is how it is used here.)
Anti-Semitism, discrimination against Jews, is by any standard including that of the United Nations 1950 Statement on Race, a form of racism. This form of racism has been around for centuries with varying degrees of intensity and relief.
The phenomenon is largely European in its historical development, having its roots in Christianity - the idea that Jews are `Christ killers’. Jews’ legal and property rights were restricted, periods of calm were interspaced by sporadic, intense waves of violence and ethnic scapegoating. Anti-Semitic waves were often associated with periods of Christian zeal, the Crusades, the Protestant Reformation under Martin Luther, and the Catholic Inquisition, most especially as it developed in Spain after 1492, produced episodes of anti-Jewish violence - pogroms - and forced conversions.
While anti-Jewish outbursts also occurred in Islamic countries during the medieval period, incidents were far fewer, Jews especially in Moslem Spain and then under the Turkish Ottoman rule were generally respected and protected, although their activities in civil society somewhat limited. Jewish culture under the Moors of Spain reached heights not achieved in Christian-dominated areas of Europe even today.
While the Christian origins of anti-Semitism reach far back into European history, more virulent form emerged with the advent of modern nationalism, especially those in 19th century Germany and Russia in which citizenship was less defined by residency than by ethnicity. Ethnic states or states in which ethnicity played a decisive role in national politics and in which ethnic groups were granted certain rights were actually quite common. The emergence of modern nations such as Germany, Russia, Greece, Turkey, Poland, the Balkans, were all countries and regions in which ethnicity and nationalism were intertwined.
Jews caught as ethnic groups within these larger emerging national frameworks found themselves in a historic vice.
Ø In Russia, Jews, the `non-Russians’ were systematically herded into special territories - the Pale - and isolated. The emerging Russian nationalism scapegoated Jews for the problems of the declining Czarist Empire. Again, property rights, residency and travel were restricted as were educational and job opportunities. A tract fabricated by the Russian secret police and then widely circulated, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purported a Jewish plot to take over the world, and was used to inflame anti-Semitic hatreds to new levels. Tens of thousands of Jews perished in government initiated, sponsored and planned waves of violence
Ø In Germany (and Austria) the question of national identity fluctuated between narrow ethnic definitions and broader more inclusive approaches. Jewish contributions to German culture in the 19th century are extensive and varied. If anything the main trend appeared to be towards general assimilation. But an alternative trend, which placed German ethnicity at the center of German nationalism and condemned Jews to the role of eternal outsiders, also existed. Among its most powerful advocates the composer Wagner whose utopian vision was of a Germany for ethnic Germans only, one in which outsiders, especially Jews were seen as weakening if not poisoning the national unity. While this narrow racist strain had some support before 1900, it blossomed into a full-fledged and broadly based anti-Semitic movement quite quickly after World War One, a complex and difficult period of German - and world - history. Hitler and the Nazis would take this movement and make it the centerpiece of German fascism with the horrific and tragic results for Judaism and the world.
Ø Anti-Semitism in the United States has similar roots, but a somewhat different trajectory. US anti-Semitism is rooted in Protestant prejudice as it evolved by the Puritan Pilgrims. This prejudice was somewhat softened by the nations ever-expanding labor needs throughout the colonial and post colonial period. Jewish population in the United States is quite limited in scope until the 1880s when Jews, along with that great flood of Eastern and Southern European immigrants to work the countries growing mines and factories. The earlier wave of Jewish immigration came from Germany, the latter (post 1880) came from `the Pale’ - that region of Eastern Poland, Russia and the Ukraine where Jews had suffered so under the Czars. There is no question that along with Italians, Irish and other Eastern and Southern Europeans, that Jews faced many kinds of discrimination in the United States in employment, education, social advancement. For all that, very few Eastern European Jews returned to Europe for whatever privations they faced here, their situation in the USA was still greatly improved, and their opportunity for advancement far better this side of the Atlantic.
Ø Through their social struggles, American Jews, along with these other European communities, greatly improved their situation in this country. Some of the more blatant forms of anti-Semitism receded (ie. Jewish `physical types’, `cultural stereotypes’), but other forms have remained alive, lurking in some corners of American society including the Christian Right, and elsewhere. Here in Colorado some years ago, a Jewish talk show host, Alan Berg, was cut down by members of `The Order,’ a right wing racist paramilitary group that also has Blacks, Mexicans and Asian-Americans, gays, and people of liberal and left persuasion within its sights.
Like all forms of discrimination, anti-Semitism needs to be exposed, condemned and eradicated.