Racial antisemitism

Limpieza of blood 

A first appearance of racial antisemitism can be found in the Middle Ages alongside religious antisemitism. Though the limpieza de sangre and ( “purity of blood”) laws of medieval Spain and New SpainIt was not a question of Christians in society, it had a significant impact on the subject, and it was possible for them to be stigmatized for their “inferior” blood. The laws were converted to Catholicism, which were denied equal rights and status by Christians, and their descendants, whose sincerity to their new faith was always in question before the Inquisition , and always had to be able to prove their blood line.

Racial anti-Semitism has been added to the anti-Semitism since the Middle Ages , if not earlier. In Spain Even before the Edict of Expulsion of 1492, Spanish Jews Who converted to Catholicism ( conversos in Spanish), and Their descendants Were called Expired New Christians . They were frequently accused of lapsing to their formation religious practices (” Crypto-Jews “). To isolate conversos , the Spanish nobility developed an ideology of ” cleanliness of blood “. The conversoswere called “New Christians” to indicate their inferior status in society. That ideology was a form of racism, as in the past there were no grades of Christianity and a convert had equal standing. Cleanliness of blood was an issue of ancestry, not of personal religion. The first statute of purity of blood appeared in Toledo in 1449, ^[6] where an anti- converso riot lead to conversos being banned from most official positions. Initially these statutes were condemned by the monarchy and the Church. However, the New Christians came to be hounded and persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition after 1478, the Portuguese Inquisition after 1536, the Peruvian Inquisitionafter 1570 and the Mexican Inquisition after 1571, and the Inquisition in Colombia after 1610.

In Portugal, the legal distinction between “New” and “Old” Christians continued until the issue of a legal decree by the Marquis of Pombal in 1772.

Nationalism and anti-Semitism

Racial antisemitism was preceded, especially in Germany, by antisemitism arising from Romantic nationalism . As racial theories developed, especially from the mid-nineteenth-century onwards, these nationalist ideas were subsumed within them. But their origins were quite distinct from racialism. Johann Gottfried Herder’s ‘Volk’ ideas . This led to antisemitic writing and journalism in the second quarter of the 19th century qui of Richard Wagner ‘s Das Judentum in der Musik ( Jewry in Music ) is Perhaps The Most notorious example. On the other hand, Radical socialists such as Karl Marx(himself of Jewish descent) identified Jews as being white Both victims and enforced Perpetrators of the Capitalist system – eg In His Article On the Jewish Question . From sources such as these, antisemitism entered the vocabularies and policies of both the right and the left in political thought.

Germany experienced strong industrial growth following its unification in 1871. Romantic nostalgia coalesced with the rising industrial middle class to the Völkisch movement . Proponents became concerned with race: pre-Christian German pagan traditions and customs. Terms such as “teutonic” and “aryan” entered the vocabulary. Industrialist Theodor Fritsch financed publication of texts such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Henry Ford’s Reprints of ” The International Jew .” The Germanenorden of 1912 was one such party to emerge from this movement.

Concept of a “semitic race”

In Medieval Europe, all Asian peoples were thought of as descendants of Shem. By the 19th century, the term Semitic was confined to the ethnic groups who had historically spoken in the Fertile Crescent, as the Jews in Europe did. These peoples were often considered a separate race . However, some antisemitic racial theorists of the time argue that the Semitic peoples arose from the blurring of distinctions between previously separate races. This supposed process was referred to as semiticization by the race-theorist Arthur de Gobineau .

Gobineau himself did not consider the Semites (Decedents of Shem) to be of a lesser race. He broke people up into three races: white, black, and yellow. The Semites, like the Aryans (and Hamites) came from Asia and were white. Over time each of the groups had mixed with black blood. The Aryans had stayed pure and long ago. It was this mixing of races that would lead to man’s downfall. ^[7] This idea of ​​racial “confusion” was taken up by the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg . ^[8] It was used by the Nazis to perpetuate the idea that the Jews were going to destroy Germany. ^{[7] [ citation needed ]}The term semiticization was first used by Gobineau to label the blurring of racial distinctions that, in his view, had occurred in the Middle East . Gobineau had an essentialist model of race based on the distinct racial groups, though he had no clear account of this division. When these races mixed this caused ” degeneration “. Since the beginning of the Middle East, the Gobineau argued that the process of mixing and diluting breeds of breeders, and that Semitic peoples embodied this “confused” racial identity.

This concept suited the interests of antisemites , since it provided a theoretical model to rationalize racialised antisemitism . Variations of the theory are to be found in the writings of many anti-Semites in the late 19th century. The Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg has developed a variant of the theory in his writings, arguing that Jewish people were not a “real” race. According to Rosenberg, their evolution is about the mixing of pre-existing breeds rather than natural selection . The theory of semiticization is typically associated with misunderstanding and misrepresentation , manifested in negative images of mulattos and other mixed groups.

Rise

Modern European antisemitism has its origins in 19th century theories-now generally considered as pseudo-scientific , but then accepted as credible-that said the Semitic peoples, including the Jews, are entirely different from the Aryan , or Indo-European , populations, and that they would not be able to assimilate. In this view, they are not allowed to rely on their religion , but on account of their hypothetical hereditary or genetic racial characteristics : greed, a special aptitude for money-making, aversion to hard work, clannishness and obtrusiveness, lack of social tact, low cunning, and especially lack of patriotism . Later, Nazi propagandaAlso, the shape of the ” Jewish nose “. ^{[9] [10] [11] [12]}

While enlightened, they have a declension and a sign of ignorance, because of this ‘scientific’ connection to genetics . In order to differentiate between the two practices, the term “antisemitism” was developed to be “acceptable” bias against Jews as a nationality, as distinct from the “undesirable” prejudice against Judaism as a religion. Concurrently with this usage, some authors ^[ who? ] in Germany began to use the term ‘Palestinians’when referring to Jews as a people, rather than as a religious group. Similar custom is still displayed in the academic circles of the term “Hebrew” in preference to the term “Jewish”.

Actually, it is questionable whether Jews Looked Significantly different from the general population in qui They Lived. Reviews This was Especially true in like seats Germany , France and Austria Where the Jewish population tended to be more secular (or at least less Orthodox) Than That of Eastern Europe, and Did not wear clothing (Such As a yarmulke ) That Would PARTICULARLY Distinguish Their appearance from the non-Jewish population. Many anthropologists of the time Such As Franz Boas tried to use complex physical measurements like the cephalic indexand visual surveys of hair / eye color non-Jewish European populations to prove that the notion of separate “Jewish” and “Aryan” races was a myth. The 19th and early 20th century view of race should be distinguished from the efforts of modern population genetics to trace the ancestry of various Jewish groups, see Y-chromosomal Aaron .

The advent of racial antisemitism was also linked to the growing sense of nationalism in many countries. The nationalist context of the Jews is a separate and often “alien” nation within the countries in which Jews resided, a prejudice exploited by the elites of many governments. ^{[ quote needed ]}

Racial antisemitic legislation

In Nazi Germany, the Nürnberg Race Laws of 1935 and sexual intercourse Aryan and Jew (such relations under the Nazi ideology as a crime punishable as Rassenschandeor “racial pollution”), and made it that all Jews, even quarter- and half-Jews, were no longer citizens of their country (their official title became “subject of the state”). This meant that they had no basic citizens’ rights, eg, to vote. In 1936, Jews were banned from all professional jobs, effectively preventing them from any influence in politics, higher education and industry. On November 15, 1938, Jewish children were banned from going to normal schools. By April 1939, nearly all Jewish companies had either collapsed under financial pressure or declining profits, or had been persuaded to sell to the Nazi government. This further reduced their rights as human beings; they were in many ways officially separated from the German populace. Similar laws existed in Bulgaria (The Law for Protection of the Nation ), Hungary , Romania , and Austria .

See also

Notes

References

• Jewish encyclopedia, Anti-Semitism http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=1603&letter=A&search=Anti-semitism
• Bodansky, Yosef. Islamic Anti-Semitism as a Political Instrument . Freeman Center For Strategic Studies, 1999.
• Carr, Steven Alan. Hollywood and anti-Semitism: A cultural history up to World War II . Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Chanes, Jerome A. Antisemitism: A Reference Handbook . ABC-CLIO, 2004.
• Cohn, Norman. Warrant for Genocide . Eyre & Spottiswoode 1967; Serif, 1996.
• Ehrenreich, Eric. The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution . Indiana University Press, 2007.
• Freudmann, Lillian C. Antisemitism in the New Testament . University Press of America, 1994.
• Hilberg, Raul . The Destruction of the European Jews . Holmes & Meier, 1985. 3 volumes.
• Lipstadt, Deborah . Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory . Penguin, 1994.
• McKain, Mark. Anti-Semitism: At Issue . Greenhaven Press, 2005.
• Prager, Dennis, Telushkin, Joseph. Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism . Touchstone (reprint), 1985.
• Selzer, Michael (ed). “Kike!”: A Documentary History of Anti-Semitism in America . New York, 1972.
• Steinweis, Alan E. Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany . Harvard University Press, 2006. ISBN  0-674-02205-X .