The word antisemitism is relatively new. It was coined in 1879 by journalist Wilhelm Marr and was adopted as the official ideology first of the German Christian Social Workers Party and then of the Anti-Semitic League. Use of the word soon spread to Austria, Hungary, France and Russia. It later came into general use as a term referring to most forms of anti-Jewish hostility throughout history. That history is a long one. Pagan antisemitism in the Greek and Roman world objected to Jewish exclusiveness.

The rise of Christianity added a dangerous new accusation: that collectively, the Jews were responsibile for crucifying Jesus. The early Christian Church developed the notion that the Jews were therefore a people rejected by God; children of the devil. (See John 8:44.) With the political victory of Christianity in the Roman Empire, these theological views were translated into social reality. With few rights and without honour, the Jews were to be preserved as a people to witness the triumph and ‘truth’ of the Church.

Demonization of Jews by the Church and their resulting inferior social and political status were carried over into medieval Europe. The conspicuous success of Jews as money-lenders (a profession forbidden to Christians) became a further factor in the growth of popular antisemitism. During the Crusades this antisemitism broke out into mob violence (‘pogroms’), which entailed the massacre of Jews and looting of their property. New anti-Jewish myths were developed: the ritual slaughter of Christian children, the desecration of the sacred Host and the poisoning of wells. These were slanders which persisted powerfully, especially in Eastern Europe, until this century.

Jews were forbidden to enter trades or professions or own land. Frequently they had to wear a badge or a distinguishing garment such as a distinctive hat. They had to live in ghettos, which were sections of a town or city where Jews were segregated from the general population, and which they were forbidden to leave on pain of death. They were subjected to inordinate taxation, denigrating legislation, inquisition, censorship, forced baptism, compulsory attendance at church, frequent property confiscation and even expulsion. “Attacks and explusions of Jews were a staple of medieval history, so extensive that by the mid-1500s Christians had forcibly emptied most of western Europe of Jews.” (Goldhagen, 1996)

The French Revolution and the emancipation of French Jews in 1791 seemed to promise a fresh beginning. But the liberalism of capitalist society in the nineteenth century prompted a backlash against the Jews. Conservatives denounced them as the “grave diggers of Christian society”; peasants and artisans, threatened by the growth of industry, feared them as “capitalist exploiters and rapacious financiers”. The new, pseudo-scientific doctrine of racial antisemitism drew on all these stereotypes and formulated a view of history as the struggle for racial supremacy between Jews and Aryans.

From here it was a short step to the paranoid belief in a Jewish world conspiracy which aimed to undermine societies, overthrow governments and seize power throughout the world. This was the claim of a document forged by a Russian secret policeman at the end of the 19th century and published between 1903 and 1905 as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Hitler found the Protocols “enormously instructive”. They served both as a primer for Nazi politics and as (false) documentary ‘proof’ of a Jewish world conspiracy. Two years after the Nazis came to power the Protocols became required reading in German schools.

As historian Raul Hilberg explains, “From the earliest days, from the fourth century, the sixth century, the missionaries of Christianity had said in effect to the Jews: ‘You may not live among us as Jews.’ The secular rulers who followed them from the late Middle Ages then decided: ‘You may not live among us,’ and the Nazis finally decreed: ‘You may not live.’”