Anti-Semitism Although the Term Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism Although the term anti-Semitism is reasonably new -- dating back to the latter half of the nineteenth century -- prejudice and persecution of Europe's Jewish community began as long ago as the rise of Hellenistic culture in Greece. Essentially, the Jewish faith has been the most significant minority religion in Western history; however, unlike most surviving religions today, it has never been the official state faith of a powerful militaristic empire -- at least in Europe.

This point is significant for a number of reasons; foremost of which is the obvious consequence that Judaism has become the object of state-sanctioned persecution. A secondary consequence of this is that from early Roman times into the twentieth century, Jews occupied exclusive residences and communities within nations dominated by competing religions. This, in turn, generated additional hostilities among those who believed that the Jews had been afforded some exceptional status.

Yet, things became even more critical with the emergence of Christianity, its adoption by Constantine, and the formation of the Holy Roman Empire. The late Romans took a relatively obscure religion -- Christianity -- and molded it into what would become the dominant social force of the medieval period: Roman Catholicism. After seeing the holy cross on the battlefield and seizing control, Constantine signed the Edict of Milan, which ended Christian persecution.

He also organized the Council of Nicaea, which created a Christian orthodoxy and establishes an organized Church backed by the state. As a result Christianity flourished during his reign, and the seeds of monastic orders and faiths were sown. Meanwhile, Judaism came under more severe attack than before: "The Justinian Code a century later stripped Jews of many of their rights, and Church councils throughout the sixth and seventh century, including the Council of Orleans, further enforced anti-Jewish provisions." (Wikipedia 2005).

Largely, it can be assumed that much of the persecution of Jews that came after the establishment of the Catholic Church came as a result of interpretations of the New Testament. Numerous passages seem to implicate Jews as the killers of Jesus, and identify them as being associated with the devil for their inability to see that converting to Christianity is the only "true" path. When Stephen speaks to a synagogue council he declares: "You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit.

As your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did not your fathers persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered, you who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it." (Acts 7:51-53, RSV). Such a point-of-view, to many Christians, has justified any act of revenge for centuries.

However, anti-Semitism is a very particular perspective regarding Jews as a whole; to some, not only can they be blamed for the death of Jesus, but they are uniformly seen as a blemish upon European society. Accordingly, many scholars have differentiated between the historical acts of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism (Wikipedia 2005).

The distinction lies in the fact that most ancient acts of persecution perpetrated against Jews were done so on the basis of their faith; if they were willing to convert, accept Jesus, and assimilate into mainstream society, then there was little cause to hate them. Although terrible in its own right, anti-Judaism was not chiefly targeted against Jews as an innate ethnic group, but rather, on the basis of their beliefs and social status.

Yet with the emergence of anti-Semitism, many people began to accept the notion that people of Jewish heritage -- regardless of their individual beliefs or customs -- were inherently inferior to those of Christian heritage. This made anti-Semitism a far more troubling idea, because it seemed to rationally validate acts of injustice or violence simply on the grounds of ethnic identity.

For most Jews in Europe this change of perspective by, largely, the upper-classes of Christian society was made all the more unfortunate because the European period of enlightenment had gradually brought about better conditions for non-Christians during the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth century. Gradually, "With the rise of liberalism in the [eighteen] thirties.. The status of the Jews improved rapidly." (Katz, 13).

All over Europe Jewish people were being granted full citizenship and equal rights; these advances rode on the shoulders of the notion that modern governments should not possess religious biases. After emancipation, by the 1860s it could have been "concluded that European Jewry was becoming completely integrated." (Katz, 14). Yet, these political advances, it would seem, masked an underlying social force: the demand to find new grounds upon which to single the Jewish people out.

Ultimately, this is the only reasonable cause for the dramatic turn of events that, once again, identified Jews as a troubling sect within European society: "Writers, politicians, and scholars in the 1870s, again attacked Jews and found their onslaught so well received by the general public that an entire movement sprang up, one openly proclaiming its opposition to Jews." (Katz, 14).

This, however, was a new form of anti-Jewish literature; no-longer were Jews merely hated on the basis of their role in the death of Christ, or their peculiar social station, but also upon racial and wholly secular grounds. Of course, this was during a time when extreme views like eugenics began to be perpetuated by leading thinkers and governments. Many people firmly believed criminal behavior, laziness, stupidity, and allegiances to political parties were heritable traits passed on from generation to generation.

This sort of mentality facilitated numerous anti-Jewish policies because people felt that specific ethnic groups were inherently anarchists and desired nothing less than to destroy the foundation of European or American infrastructure and economic systems. In some portions of the country people attempted to enact policies that would prevent those individuals deemed inferior from reproducing -- it was a time when many people were very concerned about keeping the national stock pure, and pointing human evolution in the direction they desired.

Doubtlessly, this way of looking at evolution was grievously flawed, but it does help to explain why large segments of the population were utterly opposed to certain types of individuals. Consequently, the emerging acceptance of eugenics and anti-Semitism within Europe and the Americas has caused many scholars to contend that anti-Semitism in particular was the root cause of the Jewish Holocaust during the Second World War. A rather unique and controversial case has been put forward by Daniel Goldhagen in his book Hitler's Willing Executioners.

Within the book he claims that the Nazis who helped to carry out the Holocaust were cruel and brutal because they willfully wanted to be. Essentially, their prevalent hatred for Jews and other non-conformists drove them to commit murder and torture.

Goldhagen states, maintain that any explanation that fails to acknowledge the actors' capacity to know and to judge, namely to understand and to have views about the significance and the morality of their actions, that fails to hold the actors' beliefs and values central, that fails to emphasize the autonomous motivating force of Nazi ideology, particularly its central component of anti-Semitism, cannot possibly succeed in telling us much about why the perpetrators acted as they did." (Goldhagen, 13).

Accordingly, the central feature of this argument is that anti-Semitism was a powerful force in Germany; and if not strongly embraced, was passively accepted by the public. This is certainly a compelling line of reasoning, although perhaps lacking in empirical evidence. In fact, a scientific study conducted by Columbia University professor Theodore Abel in 1934 found: "Ranked by the chief objects of.