Anti-Semitism research

The anti-Semitism research examines all causes and forms of anti-Semitism . Its representatives develop, discuss and publish scientific theories on the topics and document anti-Semitic tendencies, methods and practices. The definition and characteristics of the approximately 2500 year old phenomenon, its main types and their relationship to one another are continuously discussed.

overview

Explanations for hostility towards Jews have been sought since the 18th century. Systematic scientific research only developed from this after the Holocaust . Since then, anti-Semitism research in many countries has tried to elucidate its direct and indirect, short and long-term causes.

However, it is not a well-defined subject area, but encompasses a variety of research approaches and participating disciplines, including history, psychology, sociology, theology and literary studies. These approach the phenomenon from different angles and with different questions. They address both the individual epochs as well as overarching connections - for example between Christian anti-Judaism and racism  - both the continuities in all forms of hostility towards Jews and their differences and transformations in the course of the history of Europe .

In addition, anti-Semitism research is devoted to the analysis of current qualitative and quantitative forms of hostility towards Jews. The concept of anti-Semitism, introduced by Wilhelm Marr in 1879, is constantly being discussed anew and controversially, such as its linguistic correctness, applicability to earlier epochs, the breadth of the phenomena to be treated under it and the problem of its delimitation from related terms.

The diverse and multinational research approaches have made it difficult to institutionalize anti-Semitism research for a long time. It was not until 1982 that two university centers were set up independently of one another:

• the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and
• the center for anti-Semitism research at the Technical University of Berlin .

The Jerusalem Institute uses anti-Semitism as a generic term for all forms of hostility towards Jews and examines this worldwide from antiquity to the present. The four-volume series Current Research on Antisemitism , edited by Herbert A. Strauss and Werner Bergmann, offers an overview of his research results, as well as American and German research .

The Berlin Institute, on the other hand, uses the term primarily for the “modern”, ethnic-racist hostility towards Jews that emerged in the 19th century. His focus is on European, especially German, history. There is also the yearbook for anti-Semitism research published . It was headed from 1982 to 1990 by the historian Herbert A. Strauss, who was followed by Wolfgang Benz from 1990 to 2011 . Stefanie Schüler-Springorum succeeded him on June 1, 2011 . She previously headed the Institute for the History of German Jews in Hamburg.

Enlightenment prejudice criticism

The Christian theology of the Middle Ages projected the situation and the suffering of the Jewish minority in Christian-dominated societies often referred to as "punishment" or "curse of God" to those affected back and often acted as extending self-fulfilling prophecy . As “witnesses to the truth of Christianity”, as the papal bull Cum nimis absurdum in 1555, based on Augustine put it, the Jews remained excluded from the Christian status and were mostly only tolerated as “potential Christians”. The discrimination directed against them should compel them to convert to Christianity and thus prove the fulfillment of Christian salvation history .

Enlightenment thinkers began to break through this pattern of interpretation and criticize it as irrational superstition . The special social role of the Jews was no longer viewed as a law of nature , but as the result of prejudices determined by purpose and interests , which had to be overcome through human education and social progress . In doing so, Jews were no longer classified as the counterpoint of salvation history to salvation in Christianity on the other side, but as citizens with equal rights and therefore to be emancipated. Their religious, social and economic peculiarities, some of which many enlightened people rated negatively, were henceforth attributed to centuries of discrimination and persecution.

The enlightened criticism of the medieval hatred of Jews excluded the Jewish religion from the declaration of Christian prejudice structures. It also included Judaism in its rejection of any religion and aimed at its abolition in a humanity determined by a religionless, rationality . Gotthold Ephraim Lessing formulated this secular utopia in his drama Nathan the Wise : He conjured up the tolerance of the three Abrahamic religions and had the main Jewish character (a homage to Lessing's close friend Moses Mendelssohn ) represent them. On the other hand, a few years later, Lessing called for the necessary abolition of the “Jewish belief in children” in The Upbringing of the Human Kind and thus rejected the concrete Judaism of his time.

The ambivalence of the Enlightenment criticism of hostility towards Jews was particularly evident in the plans for the emancipation of the Jews . This was often justified not with philosemitism or human rights , but with political interests in economic development and the homogenization of the modern state. The assimilation of the Jews, i.e. the abandonment of their ethnic and religious peculiarities, was demanded as a consideration or condition for their legal equality. Relevant for this position in the German-speaking area was Christian Wilhelm Dohm's book On the Civil Improvement of the Jews (1781) . In France, the legal equality of Jews was implemented in a legal act in 1791, while in Germany it was extended to small, often revised steps from 1812 to 1871 and again until 1918. The right of Jews to equal rights was made dependent on the progress of their adaptation and was often denied despite their efforts.

This was followed by the hostility towards Jews of this epoch. The shortened elucidation of anti-Jewish prejudices, which in many cases did not tolerate the historical peculiarities of Judaism itself, favored the emergence of ethnocentric and racist theories that tried to underpin modern anti-Semitism pseudo-scientifically. These explained an irrational hatred of Jews in the population as an allegedly inevitable permanent conflict between unchangeable ethnicity and race characteristics. So they asserted an irrevocable opposition between Jews and all other peoples or constructed races that could not be overcome by any intellectual education or social change. This was an essential part of the anti-Semitic propaganda and gave it the appearance of a scientific debate, which anchored the so-called Jewish question deeply in public thinking and feeling. As stated, for example, in 1921, published until 1945 regarded as the standard work and in Hitler's Mein Kampf incorporated floor plan of human heredity and eugenics of Fritz Lenz : "... and it is clear that the Jews you so very favorable performance in the social selection is not their denomination but their race equipment owe. "the" solution "then appeared only by expulsion or extermination of all Jews to imagine how it of Nazism in the wake of this aggressive nationalism and racism aimed.

Marxist ideology criticism

With his essay On the Jewish Question (1843), Karl Marx interpreted anti-Semitism for the first time in the context of a general critique of capitalism . In addition to his general criticism of religion, he also turned against a secular content of Judaism. The emancipation of the Jews must be understood as the emancipation of humanity from Judaism, since secular Judaism represents capitalism :

“The political emancipation of Jews, Christians, and religious people in general, is the emancipation of the state from Judaism, from Christianity, from religion in general. [...] What is the worldly basis of Judaism? The practical need, the selfishness. What is the secular cult of Judaism? The haggler. Who is his worldly god? The money. Well! The emancipation from haggling and money, that is from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time. [...] The emancipation of the Jews in its ultimate meaning is the emancipation of humanity from Judaism. "

- Karl Marx, 1843

This solution to the problem can only be achieved through the class struggle and not through the anti-Semitic race struggle . Anti-Semitism should be understood as a manipulative diversion from real class contradictions, as a substitute ideology for channeling social dissatisfaction. Friedrich Engels distanced himself in 1890 from anti-Semitism as a defensive reaction of pre-capitalist social classes:

“Anti-Semitism is nothing more than a reaction of medieval, declining social classes against modern society, which consists essentially of capitalists and wage workers, and therefore only serves reactionary purposes under an apparently socialist guise; it is a variant of feudal socialism, and we cannot have anything to do with it. "

- Friedrich Engels, 1890

The Marxism therefore ordered the concrete contemporary Judaism - as well as the hatred against it - than to be overcome and concomitant expression of capitalism. Antisemitism was analyzed for the first time as an expression of social interests, but its emergence was almost exclusively explained as an interest-related manipulation of consciousness. At the SPD's congress in Cologne in 1893 , August Bebel coined the social democratic party position that anti-Semitism was an intra-capitalist strategy to combat socialism . Anti-Semitism gives the middle classes threatened by proletarianization the possibility of systemic criticism of capitalism by exposing part of the bourgeoisie, along with the Jews, to the anger of the threatened layers.

This manipulation thesis was consolidated into a static explanatory pattern in Marxist-Leninist historiography after 1945 . For example, the GDR historian Walter Mohrmann wrote in 1972:

“Hatred of Jews and the persecution of Jews were spread and practiced in class society when the ruling exploiting class felt compelled to keep the masses it oppressed from the class struggle through demagogic politics. Anti-Semitism is a specific means of concealing the social causes of the divorce between the haves and the haves, the merciless enslavement of the producers by the owners of the means of production. "

The Marxist interpretations of anti-Semitism saw it as widespread predominantly in reactionary interest groups. Since he had a political function for their rulership interests, he was suitable for instrumentalization. As a criticism of the Marxist analyzes, it was put forward that anti-Semitism was not limited to a “ruling class”, but ran through all strata of the population. It should therefore not be understood as a manipulation strategy of the bourgeoisie . Rather, he also found willing “buyers” and participants in those places where hatred of Jews had no rational interest base, because only a few Jews lived there and thus had little influence on the economic situation of the population.

Outside the Eastern Bloc , Moishe Postone and Detlev Claussen developed a weakened version of the Marxist interpretation of anti-Semitism with their thesis of the “criticism of capitalism halved”. Postone considered the simple explanatory models based on the theses of Marxist classics, especially with regard to National Socialism, to be too one-sided and therefore not very fruitful:

“Both the undogmatic left and the orthodox Marxists tended to treat anti-Semitism as a marginal phenomenon of National Socialism. [...] The result is that the extermination camps either appear as mere examples of imperialist or totalitarian mass murders or remain unexplained. "

Psychoanalysis

Psychological approaches in anti-Semitism research emphasize that hostility towards Jews cannot be explained by social circumstances alone. They take individual or collective psychological dispositions into account. Psychoanalysis has located this in the unconscious since Sigmund Freud . Appropriate approaches were developed in Europe and the USA, particularly between the 1930s and 1950s, under the direct impression of the Nazi tyranny.

The Swedish psychoanalyst Hugo L. Valentin wrote the article Anti-Semitism Historically and Critically examined in 1935, looking back on the Weimar Republic and the Imperial Era . In it he explained the "hatred of Jews" as a variant of general xenophobia that was not specifically German. There is less a “Jewish question” than an “anti-Semite question” worldwide. Jews could neither positively nor negatively influence anti-Semitism through their behavior, since it has almost nothing to do with themselves and more to do with an imaginary idea of ​​the Jew. The question must therefore be what function anti-Semitism has for the anti-Semite or an anti-Semitic group.

In his last work, The Man Moses and the Monotheistic Religion , Freud first tried in 1939 to explain anti-Semitism as an individual and collective psychological pathology from Western cultural history. Freud interpreted the emergence of Judaism and the Christian-European hatred of Jews as an oedipal conflict :

"I venture to claim that the jealousy of the people who claimed to be the firstborn, preferred child of God the Father, has not yet been overcome among the others [...] Judaism was a father religion, Christianity became a religion of sons."

Anti-Semitism is a rebellion against the monotheistic religion that demands the renunciation of instincts:

“Under a thin layer of Christianity they have remained what their ancestors were, who worshiped a barbaric polytheism. They have not overcome their resentment against the new religion that has been forced upon them, but they have shifted it to the source from which Christianity came to them. (...) Your hatred of Jews is basically hatred of Christians. "

In 1933 , Freud, like his pupil Wilhelm Reich , saw circumcision , which was equated by the unconscious with castration , as the “deepest unconscious root of anti-Semitism”.

In 1944, the Psychiatric Symposium on Anti-Semitism in San Francisco supported psychoanalytic explanations. In 1962, on the initiative of Alexander Mitscherlich , these were continued at the 4th Congress of the German Society for Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, Psychosomatics and Depth Psychology (DGPT) in Wiesbaden. Freud's theories were taken up and supplemented by Otto Fenichel , Ernst Simmel , Rudolph Loewenstein , Béla Grunberger , Bernhard Berliner , Mortimer Ostow and many others.

Fenichel interpreted anti-Semitism as a double process of displacement and projection, on the one hand its own unconscious and repressed urges directed primarily towards patricide , sexual motives and anal needs , but on the other hand also as a substitute discharge of aggression against the Jews as “supposed representatives” of social oppression. He found the suitability of the Jews for this projection in the "strangeness of his spiritual culture, his physical (black) and religious (God of the oppressed people) peculiarities and his old customs ...". For the development of anti-Semitic tendencies towards mass phenomena, he considers a great dissatisfaction of the masses with the existing conditions, which require psychological channeling, as well as a Jewish cultural tradition within the host country, without too many connections to it, as necessary. He saw both conditions in tsarist Russia as ideal. Against a monocausal psychoanalytic explanation, he emphasized that the origin of the influences that determine an anti-Semitic personality structure and its functions was still unclear. Like Fenichel, Bernhard Berliner also emphasized the important function of projective defense against one's own negative feelings for a disturbed personality: "People hate nothing in other people more than what they hate in themselves and try to overcome."

According to Ackerman and Jahoda, people with anti-Semitic attitudes show a significant increase in special character and personality structures, but these do not correlate with certain types of disorders. Anxiety disorders are to be found more frequently, which makes the role of defense against fear in anti-Semitic statements interesting.

Loewenstein and Grunberger consider anti-Semitism to be an expression of a disease state that ranges from mild forms to the most severe pathological delusional systems. However, it is not the patient who suffers from this, who even has a secondary gain in illness and neither suffering nor insight into the disease, but the victims of their illness. A regression to the earliest stages of the ego or superego is characteristic here . In a manner typical of psychoses , anti-Semites override the reality test of their madness. At this regressive stage, contradictions could easily coexist, for example by speaking of “ Jewish Bolshevism ” while at the same time “the Jew” could appear as the “greatest capitalist” without this apparent contradiction worrying the patient. Anti-Semitic reactions are always violations of an “ offended narcissism ”.

Ernst Simmel similarly interprets anti-Semitism as irrational impulses for action by individuals and groups to overcome pathological disorders. He sees in it a relapse into infantile stages of development, primarily dominated by the instinct to destroy, while denying external reality. He develops the model of a mass psychosis , which nevertheless enables the individual to compensate for his own psychological deficits and, in contrast to the isolated psychotic person, to remain relatively intact psychologically and socially integrated. This is made possible by the strength of the group to overcome the individual's powerlessness vis-à-vis reality: "This circumstance enables him to return to reality with the help of a mass psychosis from which the individual psychotic has to flee." Simmel sees how as the acute trigger of this mass psychosis with every psychosis a sudden break with reality: "Anti-Semitism always appeared openly when the security of the individual or society was shaken by catastrophic events."

Mortimer Ostow sees in the development of destructive tendencies of individuals and groups, as they are also shown in anti-Semitism especially in imagined threats and doomsday scenarios, the defense against suicidal desires, depression and the feelings of guilt on which it is based. The merging into the group comes in addition to the efforts to regression of the ego function with regard to a limitless tendency towards synthesis and integration and the associated loss of individuality.

Anti-Semitism is also examined in its striking connection to xenophobia . For Arno Gruen the Jew was the "personified inner stranger" and ultimately "the stranger in ourselves". The reason for this is seen in early childhood defense against foreigners, which later ends in Manichaean black-and-white thinking if it is not overcome in the socialization of the individual.

After 1945, Margarete Mitscherlich linked the essay anti-Semitism: a man's disease? to Freud's psychoanalysis, but emphasized the gender-specific differences more strongly: “Projecting father hatred , shifting incest wishes on Jews ('racial disgrace'), rivalry aggressions , etc. - these unconscious psychological motives for the development of anti-Semitism are primarily for the male psyche relevant". Women rarely harbored patricidal desires.

Psychoanalytic explanations for the collective phenomenon of anti-Semitism can neither adequately explain its phase-wise increase and decrease nor the different political consequences of the phenomenon. For this reason, historical and sociological research has so far barely received them. The repertoire of individual psychological methods of psychoanalysis is considered to be of limited use with regard to overall social and political processes.

Critical theory

German translation of the study published in 1949 in 1959

The Frankfurt School brought together psychological and Marxist theory formation in a comprehensive critical theory critical of society and ideology . In the run-up to the National Socialist seizure of power, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research empirically investigated the susceptibility of workers and petty bourgeoisie to anti-Semitism and fascism in order to explain these in social and individual psychological terms. The Studies on Authority and Family by Erich Fromm (1936) were among the first publications on " authoritarian character ".

The book Hitler is no Fool (1939) by the former member of the Frankfurt School Paul Wilhelm Massing was one of the early studies on Hitler and his followers . In 1949 Massing published one of the first historical accounts of German anti-Semitism from 1871 to 1914, which led to National Socialism: Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study Of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany (published in German in 1959 with the misleading subtitle Prehistory of Political Antisemitism ).

Max Horkheimer self-critically stated early on that sociological-historical explanatory models were insufficient to understand anti-Semitism and that there was no study in sociology and philosophy that could be compared to Freud's or Fenichel's psychoanalytic essays. That is why he and Theodor W. Adorno combined these approaches in the “ Dialectic of Enlightenment ” into a comprehensive cultural criticism of the modern age . The final essay "Elements of Anti-Semitism" from 1944 was particularly important. Critical theory sees the industrial annihilation of European Jewry as a historical turning point and starting point for a complete re-establishment of social theory, since it has forced the categorical imperative on people to "arrange their thinking and acting in such a way that Auschwitz does not repeat itself, nothing similar happens." For Horkheimer, capitalist society could only be properly understood today through anti-Semitism. This has primarily social causes, because the society mediated by the principle of rule and exchange of goods is reflected in the psychological constitution of the subject. In the Jews the socially deformed individual finds an object to which he ascribes all the negatively perceived parts of this society, in which he is indissolubly integrated and which he himself carries: People deprived of subjectivity are let go as subjects. [...] The bourgeois anti-Semitism has a specifically economic reason: the disguise of rule in production. "

With the studies in prejudice ("prejudice studies") and the means of the authoritarianism scale, the Frankfurt School also endeavored to secure its theses, mostly qualitative, empirical. Pioneering were Adorno's essays The Authoritarian Personality and Antisemitism and Emotional Disorder from 1950 (both published in 1973 in “Studies on Authoritarian Character” in German). This was not about the emergence of anti-Semitism, but about its "soundboard", the individual susceptibility to this ideology and the character structure of its bearers. Using people with particularly strong anti-Semitic attitudes, Adorno tried to show that there is a potentially fascist character in which submissiveness, aggressiveness, a tendency to projection and manipulation combine to form a structural unit. He noted an "inevitable anti-democratic consequence" of anti-Semitism.

Else Frenkel-Brunswick also attempted to characterize the “anti-Semitic personality” with the question: “What kind of people accept anti-Semitic ideas and become their active carriers? […] What function, if any, does anti-Semitism fulfill in your personality structure? ”She observed a group of 100 students, 76 of whom were female participants in a basic psychology course, with a“ kind of, albeit hardly differentiated, conservative attitude with a tendency to Maintaining the status quo ”with“ tendencies towards individualistic and arbitrary behavior in public affairs, sometimes with a tendency towards violence ”as well as a noticeable tendency towards“ respecting and maintaining one's own ethnic and social group in connection with the rejection of minorities ”, which they call "Pseudo-Conservatism" featured.

So far, it has not been possible to empirically verify these theses. Whether and to what extent their methodology is scientific is controversial. Because authoritarian, violent and sadistic tendencies can be found among men and women alike in association with other anti-democratic ideologies and in other totalitarian systems. Only a few representatives like Moishe Postone and Detlev Claussen try today to update and expand critical theory.

Group sociology

The group sociology sees anti-Semitism as a product of group conflict and as a matter of inclusion in and exclusion from communities. The early German sociologists ( Max Weber , Werner Sombart and Georg Simmel ) limited themselves to constructing their group character from the ethnic, cultural and religious traditions of Jews. This is characterized by a capitalist economic ethos , geographical mobility and parity law . On this basis, anti-Semitism could only be interpreted as a rejection of the supposedly specifically Jewish characteristics. Group sociology has rejected such essentialist interpretations and gradually redirected the focus of research to the function of anti-Semitism for the anti-Semitic group.

Under the influence of Zionism , Peretz Bernstein attempted an explanation of anti-Semitism on the basis of group sociology for the first time : Anti-Semitism serves to create an ingroup's identity and internal homogeneity by distinguishing it from the Jewish outgroup . Because of their minority existence in European societies, the Jews are always available as an outgroup , at whose expense ingroups of the majority society can pursue their self-definition. It has been shown that this exclusion mechanism cannot be circumvented through assimilation.

The basic idea of ​​describing anti-Semitism as insurmountable group hostility has also inspired literary work on this topic, especially by Arnold Zweig and Max Frisch .

In The Sociology of Modern Antisemitism (1942) Talcott Parsons sought reasons for group hostility towards Jews. The dissolution of old community structures in modern societies and the competitive pressure through the capitalist achievement principle produced aggression from “losers of modernization”, which would have to be shifted to groups outside the national collective . Whether, as Parsons thinks, the real group character of the Jews contributes to making them targets of hostility is a matter of dispute in sociological research.

Eva Gabriele Reichmann made a distinction between a “real” and a “fake Jewish question” in The Flight into Hate 1956. The former is based on actual group conflicts, while the latter arises from a need for aggression and self-affirmation in the non-Jewish environment and can therefore be explained more psychologically than sociologically. Based on the political theorist Hannah Arendt (especially 1951) and the historian and anti-Semitism researcher Gavin Langmuir (especially 1990), the view has meanwhile gained acceptance that anti-Semitism, at least in modern times, is not based on real conflicts, but has a chimeric character excels. Hence the construction of the Jew as the "foreign" or the "other" is viewed as a necessary condition of anti-Semitism.

The group-sociological classification of anti-Semitism in general xenophobia towards ethnic minorities in Western societies has only been questioned by recent research on nationalism : following Zygmunt Bauman , for example, Klaus Holz has stated that anti-Semitism cannot be seen as one of many forms of xenophobia, since discourses of national anti-Semitism classify the Jews as an unclassifiable, internationalist group. They thus embodied the negation of the national principle in general.

Crisis Theory of Modernity

This explanatory approach is oriented towards political and social history and looks at anti-Semitism in connection with critical upheavals, far-reaching economic changes in society and political interests that went hand in hand with the emergence of the nation states of Europe.

The "modern", increasingly racist-based anti-Semitism that has been appearing in Germany since 1870 is clearly set apart from earlier and ongoing forms of hostility towards Jews. The emergence of an anti-Semitic movement in the empire is traced back to a network of causes of political, social and economic factors. These include a.

• the industrialization under capitalist conditions early,
• the peculiarities of the legal and political emancipation of Jewish Germans, which dragged on for almost 100 years and contributed to the consolidation of anti-Jewish clichés and a problematic "Jewish question",
• the missed chance of democratization from below due to the failure of the March Revolution of 1848,
• the economic depression after the founder crash of 1873, the subsequent decline of liberalism and Bismarck's "conservative turn" of 1878/79,
• a national and cultural identity crisis ( cultural pessimism ), which had been compensated for since around 1879 by excessive nationalism and anti-Semitism.

In contrast to the premodern hostility towards Jews, modern anti-Semitism is characterized by the following characteristics:

• Secularization of the Christian hatred of Jews
• Race-theoretical foundation
• Connection with modern nationalism
• political organization (parties, clubs, associations)
• Instrumentalization in political disputes
• “Jewish question” as a core or world problem

After 1945 this explanatory model, which also took up impulses from research from the Weimar period and the Frankfurt School, became widely accepted in the Federal Republic. One of his representatives is Hans Rosenberg , who in his study Great Depression and the Bismarckian Period in 1967 was able to empirically prove that there was a close causal relationship between economic dynamism and the growth of anti-Semitism: "Since 1873, anti-Semitism has risen when the share price fell." The cycles of anti-Semitism are inversely proportional to the economic development. At the same time, Rosenberg rejects the real conflict thesis. Not actual, but perceived lines of conflict between Jews and non-Jews would arise in times of crisis. Rosenberg emphasizes that only a few contemporaries saw through the radical structural and economic changes at the time, so that irrational explanations for them were all the easier to gain a foothold. These had a certain semblance of plausibility because traditionally a relatively large number of people of Jewish origin were actually employed in the banking and credit industry. Meanwhile, craftsmen, medium-sized companies, agricultural and industrial workers were looking in precisely those circles for the culprits for sales crises, bankruptcies, inflation and unemployment.

In addition, Reinhard Rürup pointed out political interests in 1975: reactionary feudalist or nationalist politicians had specifically exploited the popular willingness to look for scapegoats in order to integrate the petty bourgeoisie into the anti-liberal camp. Objectively, the function of anti-Semitism was to "[divert] from the actual causes of social conflicts and crises and at the same time [to offer] an outlet for collective dissatisfaction and instincts of aggression".

English, American and Canadian historians such as Geoff Eley ( Reshaping the German Right New Haven 1980), David Blackbourn , Helmut W. Smith and James Retallack, on the other hand, have emphasized the anti-governmental character of anti-Semitism. Modern anti-Semitism was not part of a diversionary strategy of the authoritarian state, but developed as an anti-modern protest ideology out of the middle class. In addition, James F. Harris pointed out that some of the characteristics of modern anti-Semitism already existed in the pre-emancipatory period. This research tradition also confirms the connection between anti-Semitism and social crisis ( Werner Jochmann ).

The crisis theory has found widespread expression, especially in research on parties, clubs, associations and social groups that turned to anti-Semitism. In 1988, for example, Norbert Kampe examined the relationship between students and the 'Jewish question' in the German Empire with the result that the exclusion of Jewish fellow students from most student associations around 1890 was to be seen against the background of deep fears of the existence of the educated bourgeoisie. The academic job market had shrunk so much at that time that isolation from climbers and outsiders, including above all Jews who had just recently entered university, seemed to be an obvious choice. The originally liberal-minded academics guild entered into a mentality alliance with the Wilhelmine elite at the expense of the Jews. Especially in the fraternities , according to Kampe, this alliance of anti-Semitism, nationalism and reactionary loyalty to the emperor then became powerful well into the Weimar Republic.

In the last two decades, against the background of the boom in the “new cultural history ”, criticism has been leveled at the concentration of crisis theory on socio-economic factors and structural-functionalist explanations. Since then, the crisis theory has been expanded by approaches from the history of mentality . Olaf Blaschke and Wolfgang Heinrichs found that the churches reacted to the loss of land in the state and society of the Empire with a reactivation and modernization of traditional Christian hostility towards Jews. Conservative Christians of both denominations interpreted the rise of modern Judaism as a warning to inner unity and to defend against modernity through rechristianization . Therefore, modern anti-Semitism is not identical with racial anti-Semitism, rather a Christian-conservative anti-Semitism existed alongside and in combination with it, which was at least as powerful.

The traditional anti-Judaism, which was by no means overcome in the 19th century, but continues to have a wide variety of effects, still hardly plays a role in the explanation of modern anti-Semitism in socio-historical research. Conversely, studies of church history often overestimate the purely intellectual historical continuity between both forms of hostility towards Jews. The fact that the medieval hatred of Jews often had an economic background and that post-Enlightenment “redemption utopias” inherited and transformed religious enemy motives was underexposed for a long time in both fields of research.

Negative central idea of ​​modernity

The anti-Semitism researcher Samuel Salzborn does not understand anti-Semitism from the crises of modernity, but as its "negative central idea". Accordingly, the Enlightenment not only made the promise that every individual could become a free, equal and self-determining subject , but at the same time tore a narcissistic wound through the disenchantment of the world ( Max Weber ) : With the overcoming of a generally binding belief in God man is confronted directly with his own mortality, over which he can no longer comfort himself by any offer of meaning coming from outside . Nature or science was enthroned as the new god , which made it possible to projectively direct the anger about one's own loss of meaning against those who seemed to benefit most from the promised emancipation: the Jews understood as a community of descent. They would be identified with the entire modern project and at the same time condemned with it. Anti-Semites would therefore always fight against the equality and freedom of all people. The sovereign constitutional state always needs to maintain secrecy - a security apparatus that transparently discloses all its information cannot function. This necessary secret of the modern state is interpreted by the anti-Semites in terms of conspiracy theory as the starting point of supposedly Jewish machinations, which they always suspected behind democracy and its institutional structures. Anti-Semites would refuse or would be unable to think abstractly and feel concretely: They would not look for the causes of injustices and deficits in the unfinished project of modernity in abstract social structures, but in concrete people who would be "behind it" and thus to would fight. They would not locate their own disappointments, their anger and sadness specifically in their incomplete confrontation with the ambivalences of the modern world, but in abstracts such as Judaism, which is to blame for everything.

Religious, ecclesiastical and medieval studies

In the Middle Ages and in the early modern period, anti-Semitism was predominantly religiously legitimized, even when political and economic motives came into play in the practice of persecuting the Jews and anti-racist images of the enemy and legislation (as in Spain after the Reconquista ) were at work. This is why the term anti-Judaism was coined specifically for the Christian anti-Semitism of the premodern, although it has not become generally accepted. With the rise of Christianity in Europe, anti-Jewish stereotypes became an integral part of medieval theology and were not overcome during the Reformation either. The allegations most frequently found in papal bulls and in the Adversus Iudaeos literature (Latin: "against the Jews") , which began with Augustine , relate to:

• Blindness and obduracy towards Jesus Christ as Messiah ,
• Collective guilt for the death of Jesus,
• Descent from the devil (Joh. 8,44),
• Conspiracy to harm Christianity.

The inferior legal status of the Jews and their exclusion from the Christian social order became an obligation since the Constantinian Revolution , for example at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, which included the exclusion of Jews from public office, the wearing of discriminating clothing and cases of usury had established by Christians to boycott the trade with Jews, gradually enforced it and interpreted it as a necessity for salvation history. The misery of the Jews should show the superiority of Christianity and induce the Jews to convert . The eschatological reservation (Rom. 11), which granted the Jews a permanent role in the context of Christian salvation history, became less and less important. Since the 12th century at the latest, accusations of host sacrilege and ritual murder have been added to the theological accusations in the narrower sense . They are more likely to be assigned to popular piety and were often rejected by the secular and spiritual authorities, but at the same time justified or even actively propagated by bishops and the monastic clergy . Violent acts against Jews in the form of pogroms , expulsions and forced baptisms increased in times of crisis and phases of religious awakening , such as the Crusades, the plague and leprosy epidemics in the 14th century, or the time of the Reformation.

On the basis of this knowledge of anti-Judaism, church and theological history studies since 1945 have primarily addressed the question of what part Christianity played in the development of modern anti-Semitism, how anti-Jewish stereotypes of the modern age were passed on and how they were used in folk and racial theories of the 19th and 20th centuries continued to work. The research controversies in this area primarily revolve around the question of continuity and whether and to what extent hostility towards Jews was systematically inscribed in Christian theology.

First of all, those positions that emphasize breaks and transitions: The claim of “anti-Semitism” in the New Testament , which often occurs in popular scientific contexts, has been generally rejected. Anti-Jewish polemics (e.g. Mt. 23, 13–29; Joh. 8:44; 1 Thess. 2:16) are a product of internal Jewish disputes that only began with the separation of the Christian communities from their Jewish environment and the Constantinian community Wende have had anti-Jewish effects.

In anti-Jewish sources, Gavin Langmuir has observed increasing chimeric features in the enemy image constructions since the 12th century and recognized the transition from anti-Judaism to anti-Semitism. As early as the late Middle Ages, anti-Jewish enemy images were no longer based on real theological contrasts between Christians and Jews.

During the Reformation, Heiko A. Oberman identified framework conditions that led to the radicalization and modernization of Christian hostility towards Jews. In view of existential threats from inside (religious split ) and outside ( Turkish wars ), an eschatological fear spread in Europe, which demanded the persecution of the supposed representatives of "the Antichrist" in this world. (In addition to the Jews, this also affected so-called heretics , witches , denominational opponents, rebellious peasants, etc.)

Johannes Heil, on the other hand, assumes a long-term process of secularization from the 13th to the 16th century, in which hostility to Jews broke away from theological, salvation-historical or even religious discourse contexts. The role attributed to Judaism in Christian society changed from “enemy of God” to “enemy of man”.

The conclusion of the lexicon Religion in History and Society , which is representative of Protestant theology , that Christianity is only indirectly to blame for modern anti-Semitism, does not yet form a consensus in theological and church-historical research on anti-Semitism. The development of continuity theses is widespread in this area of ​​research. It can take up approaches from Jewish historiography, which, following Heinrich Graetz and Jules Isaac, assumed a long-term effectiveness of Christian hatred of Jews, including modern anti-Semitism. (In this sense, e.g. Léon Poliakov , Jacob Katz, Robert S. Wistrich , William Nicholls, Albert S. Lindemann )

The starting point for the proponents of continuity theses were statements by Adolf Hitler and Julius Streicher et al. a. leading National Socialists who consciously used Christian vocabulary and sought to get close to Martin Luther's hostility to Jews . In the Protestant area, Luther's later hatred of Jews is therefore often seen as the link between medieval anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism, especially in its specifically German form. A straight line of tradition was drawn from Luther himself via the Lutheran court preacher Adolf Stoecker to the German Christians . In contrast, Achim Detmers and Peter von der Osten-Sacken examined the anti-Jewish writings of individual reformers more closely in the historical context of the history of the Reformation and emphasized their connection to the immediate circumstances of the time and theological systems of thought. Nonetheless, Osten-Sacken Luther also moves closer to modern anti-Semitism.

In fact, Luther's demands on the princes in From the Jews and their Lies (1543) almost seem like instructions for action for the “Reichskristallnacht” of 1938.

“First of all, that their synagogue or school should be set on fire, and that which does not want to be burned should be covered with earth and poured down so that no one could see a stone or slag of it forever. And such things should be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom. "

However, Luther's statements were often removed from the historical context. So it was overlooked that they essentially followed the medieval stereotypes and enemy images and hardly differed from the positions of other reformers (e.g. Martin Bucer ) and Old Believers (e.g. Johannes Eck ).

While Protestantism has traditionally been the focus of anti-Semitism research , a controversy about the development of anti-Semitism in Catholicism has developed in recent decades due to the partial opening of the Vatican archives . Some historians draw a continuity of radical hostility towards Jews in Catholicism up to and including involvement in the Holocaust. Other historians and theologians have asserted Catholic immunity to modern racial anti-Semitism with regard to Germany. Olaf Blaschke attempted a synthesis : Anti-Semitism was deeply anchored in the Catholic milieu, but not as a pure continuation of the medieval pattern. Rather, a specifically Catholic version of modern anti-Semitism had developed that kept a distance from racism and eliminatory solutions, but classified the fight against Jews as political, cultural, economic and religious opponents as legitimate.

Other approaches relate primarily to motivation for religious anti-Semitism. Stefan Lehr specifically dealt with the religious motives that have continued to have an effect in anti-Semitism since 1870. Between 1870 and 1900 alone, he established around 130 ritual murder charges against Jews in numerous European countries, which were almost always justified with the " god murder " charge and often in the Holy week before Easter . This argument was the main factor behind the activation of pogroms and targeted baiting of Jews by mostly church agitators of the 19th century. In this way, Lehr confirmed the assumption that no clear, neither temporal nor substantive delimitation between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism is possible, but rather Christian and racist prejudices permeated and reinforced each other.

He spoke of a “root network” of different, but never isolated, but diverse, influencing religious, social, political and economic motives for the hatred of Jews in modern, especially German and Austrian industrial societies in Central Europe. He was also able to show that it was precisely bourgeois, even theologically educated party politicians who, with campaign-like lecture tours, rekindled the religious hostility to Jews among the rural population, which had already subsided. According to Lehr, these agitators were by no means bizarre outsiders, but had great journalistic influence during the imperial era, even if their direct political successes remained small. Anti-Semitism was therefore not a marginal phenomenon in the empire, but an integral part of the public discourse on the relationship between nation and religion, which in turn was closely linked to the interests of the political elite.

The study by Claus-E. Bärsch 1988 even draws a direct line from apocalyptic , satanology and anti-Judaism in the New Testament , especially in the Revelation of John , to the National Socialist ideology of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels . This thesis met u. a. Christhard Hoffmann rejects it because it oversimplifies the intricate tradition and the change from Christian to anti-Semitic stereotypes and thus encourages the image of an " Eternal Jew " as an object of hate in European history as a whole. The reception of anti-Judaistic motives by the National Socialists was often not a living continuation, but an artificial "invention of a tradition" for propaganda purposes. Anti-Semites had specifically searched for anti-Jewish statements by Luther and placed them in a new, secular-racist context in order to be able to use them politically.

While socio-historical research frequently underestimates religious motives that continue to have an effect, church historians often overly emphasize the continuity and ultimately the identity of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism by applying the latter term to all premodern forms of hostility towards Jews. In contrast, efforts to make the differences between premodern and modern anti-Semitism visible dominate in medieval studies . So, although there are serious differences in the periodization, the view that modern anti-Semitism was preceded by the secularization of anti-Jewish enemy images and their contexts has meanwhile reached a consensus .

Cultural history studies

Research in various disciplines deals with the ideas, pictorial motifs, mentalities and cultural thought patterns that connect anti-Semitism of the 19th century with or differentiate it from earlier forms of hostility towards Jews. However, they tend to emphasize continuity rather than discontinuity. In this context, some historians have tried to synthesize the history of culture, ideas and society. Others represent a radical constructivism that emphasizes the intrinsic logic of anti-Semitic imagery and discourses, i. H. classifies their development as independent of real historical events and structures.

Despite these contrasts, research is increasingly being carried out on an interdisciplinary basis. An example of this is the project by Herbert A. Strauss at the Berlin Center for Research on Antisemitism from 1983 to 1987, in which art historians, religious, social and literary scholars examined images of Jews and Judaism in German popular culture from 1900 to 1950 and thus made a significant contribution to explain the prehistory of racial anti-Semitism. Well-known works by Rainer Erb, Werner Bergmann, Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt and Peter Dittmar emerged from this project.

One result of these studies was that religious motives such as the accusation of the murder of God and the legend of the ritual murder , but also the Ahasver legend and the image of the usury Jew did not disappear after the Enlightenment, but remained deeply anchored in the collective consciousness of the rural population in particular. Michael Schmidt explains this as “learned enmity” in the Middle Ages, which was held on all the more in times of crisis and then activated especially in conflict situations.

Such images also remained effective in secular racial anti-Semitism, so that a strong continuity with anti-Judaism or even with ancient anti-Semitism can be established on the image and motif level. Here Arthur Hertzberg drew a line from the hatred of Jews by ancient educated citizens such as Suetonius and Tacitus , which French enlighteners such as Voltaire invoked, to anti-Semitism. In Germany, Eleonore Sterling sees romanticism , which reacted to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, rather than its roots. As part of the research on the ethnic movement in the Empire and in the Weimar Republic (Uwe Puschner et al.) It has been worked out that religious ideas have not lost their importance in racial anti-Semitism. The religion was interpreted in ethnic circles as a mirror of the racial characteristics of a people. Accordingly, it was believed that the allegedly inferior ethics of the Jewish religious laws ( Talmud , Shulchan Aruch ) could prove the “harmful racial character” of the Jews. (so inter alia Theodor Fritsch ) Theories that unite religion and race achieved dissemination in the conservative bourgeoisie, even beyond sectarian circles, through high-circulation publications and the nationalist society and associations. With her characterization of anti-Semitism in Germany and France before 1918 as a “cultural code”, Shulamit Volkov brought together cultural history and political social history. Anti-Semitism was not aimed at direct action on the “Jewish question”, but was the distinguishing mark of a nationalist and anti-liberal counterculture.

Paul Rose, on the other hand, advocates the thesis of “revolutionary anti-Semitism” in Germany, which has been advocated by democratic scholars who are pushing for change since 1789: Such are the church-critical philosophers of German idealism Immanuel Kant , Johann Gottfried Herder , Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Johann Gottlieb Fichte , the Young Hegelians and Karl Marx , who strived for a democratic and just social order, were often essentially anti-Semitic. The “Jewish question” was not a marginal issue for them, but the downside and precondition for their universalistic redemption utopias. Other contradictions hardly had any effect, so that liberals like Karl Gutzkow and socialists like Marx thought and spoke very similarly with regard to Judaism like the anti-Semites Wilhelm Marr and Richard Wagner ( Das Judenthum in der Musik ).

Why Jews in particular appeared in these secular utopias as enemies of love, freedom, justice and humanity, Rose also explains with continuing religious stereotypes. After the Damascus affair (1840), the legend of the ritual murder was transformed into an accusation of “ human sacrifice ” in the form of exploitation or “bloodsucking” - as a metaphor for capitalism  ; the Ahazvergeende mutated into the eternal characteristic of Judaism of egoism , materialism and low stubbornness.

Michael Ley represents a particularly radical version of the continuity thesis. He interprets anti-Semitism as the product of early Christian religious dogmas, which were carried on through Christianity and later through various secular religions (nationalism, fascism, communism) to Auschwitz. With their secularization, the premodern anti-Jewish stereotypes became even more effective than in the Middle Ages , when Judaism was religiously rejected, but partially tolerated socially. Because the rational declaration of the world no longer left Jews free, but called for a radical solution: This was then only conceivable as total extinction in the form of assimilation or expulsion and - since this remained impracticable - extermination. Therefore, in German liberalism, unlike in England or the Netherlands, there was no pluralistic concept that allowed Jews to have an independent, equal existence in civil society. In view of such theses, the question arises whether one is not bringing ideas of multiculturalism to the past that were not options in the age of nationalism and the classical nation-state . In contrast, Uriel Tal and Uffa Jensen did not associate the limits of liberalism on the “Jewish question” with anti-Semitism, but instead recognized the need to distinguish between Judaism and Protestantism. It was both important to ensure that their ethics and theology, which have meanwhile been closely approximated, can be distinguished.

Other cultural historians have neither participated in the criticism of liberalism, nor have they carried out “deep holes” in the history of motifs and ideas on premodern hostility towards Jews. Rather, they have confirmed the character of anti-Semitism as the anti-modern ideology of modernity. They see the decisive expansions in the language and imagery of anti-Semitism in the 19th and 20th centuries in links with other modern anti-ideologies such as anti- feminism , anti- Slavism and anti-Bolshevism . (Research approaches on this with Christina von Braun and Massimo F. ​​Zumbini) In addition, the traditional description of the “Jewish body” received suggestions from medicine , anthropology and biology . (Sander L. Gilman, Klaus Hödl)

Cultural-historical approaches often overestimate the continuity of anti-Jewish stereotypes and enemy images and do not take sufficient account of the eclectic nature of modern anti-Semitism. Modern anti-Semitism emphasizes propaganda effects, takes up older anti-Semitic traditions and adds them to the propaganda repertoire without there ever having been any actual spiritual historical continuities with the premodern anti-Semitism. This methodological problem occurs above all in works that do not leave the level of the history of the motif and therefore overlook the fact that the same motifs do not have to have the same meaning in different historical and discursive contexts.

Studies in the history of ideas and discourse have again been criticized for being content with political, philosophical and theological “ high-altitude literature ” and not allowing the anti-Semitism of the lower and middle classes to develop independently. Its spread is often interpreted as the spread of anti-Jewish ideologies in the intellectual elites of society, while the reverse route is hardly considered. The transition from anti-Semitic agitation to violence against Jews cannot be explained by cultural-historical approaches, provided they focus exclusively on language and symbols (cf. corresponding reviews by Christhard Hoffmann, Till van Rahden, Ulrich Sieg and Rainer Hering).

Studies on anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism

A central topic of anti-Semitism research is the relationship between medieval anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism.

In 1961, the US historian Raul Hilberg wrote an extensive standard work on the connection between medieval anti-Judaism and National Socialist anti-Semitism, which proves the continuity between the two with numerous individual studies without equating them. He sees logical connections from the compulsory baptisms of the Goths in Spain in the 6th century to the extermination camps of the Nazi era. Looking back, he differentiates between three main periods:

3rd-11th century

Early and High Middle Ages : The church gained the monopoly of religion and ruled over the Jews, who were soon counted among the " heretics ". The "true" religion commanded the mission of violence. Since forced baptisms were rarely successful, the church resorted to "protective" measures by ghettoizing the Jews. - This period followed the motto: You have no right to live among us as Jews !

12-17 century

Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Era : Since the Crusades , Jews were increasingly faced with the choice between conversion or expulsion. Expulsions and pogroms were occasionally, like witch-hunting in Pest - epidemics that rule. Martin Luther interpreted this suffering as “God's punishment” for “unbelief” and “stubbornness”. He thus adopted the image of Jews from the Middle Ages and passed it on to the modern age. - During this period the motto was: You have no right to live among us !

18.-20. century

Modern times : Despite the breaking of the church monopoly of religion, the emancipating bourgeoisie continued to exclude Jews and kept their expulsion as a goal. Romanticism , idealism and nationalism made “anti-Semitism without God” a bourgeois normality. Racist theories, which National Socialism later put into practice, gained ground. Before 1939, the Nazis' main concern was the disenfranchisement and expropriation of the Jews. The plan of extermination only took shape during the war . The “ final solution ” seemed simpler and cheaper than eviction. - This period followed the motto: You have no right to live !

The Shoah is therefore not an absolute novelty for Hilberg, not an “industrial accident” and not an incomprehensible “catastrophe”. The German bureaucracy was only able to carry out the mass murder of the Jews so quickly and thoroughly because they could fall back on centuries of experience in these procedures. The canon law of the Catholic Church from Justinian to Pope Pius VI. have already included all the measures that the National Socialists took over:

• Ghettos (Jewish quarter),
• Boycott of Jewish shops,
• Burn synagogues ,
• Burn fonts ,
• Expropriations ,
• yellow marks on clothing,
• Professional bans , removal from public offices ,
• Apartheid in schools and public institutions,
• Labor camp .

According to Hilberg, the population's long habituation to the isolation, contempt and persecution of the Jews created the conditions for the Holocaust to be carried out with almost no resistance.

For Christhard Hoffmann , historian at the University of Bergen (Norway) a. a., the difference and the simultaneous relationship between medieval-Christian and modern-racist anti-Semitism lies primarily in three factors:

• Jews could become members of Christian society through baptism, and civil society through assimilation. Racism, on the other hand, closed this way out to them. Its ideologues therefore not only vehemently reject legal equality, but also and especially the church mission to the Jews as “intrusion of foreign blood”.
• In both cases it was believed that there was an irreversible opposition between Judaism and the prevailing worldview. But the Middle Ages endured the continued existence of the Jews despite their divine “rejection” because a Christian did not know God's plan of history and therefore rather left the solution of social contradictions to the “afterlife”. In the secular utopias of salvation, however, man makes his own story, so that solutions in this world have to be achieved politically. The dissolution of religious contradictions through civil equality - especially if the social integration of the Jews failed - could more easily turn into the goal of a radical solution through expulsion and extermination.
• In Christianity and the liberal or socialist expectations of the future, Judaism was always considered to be an outdated, old magnitude that had to be overcome in its already dead remains. Jews could only participate in general “progress” as Christians, citizens or socialists. When this did not materialize or its negative consequences got out of hand, the picture of the future of racism became more plausible: Only radical eradication of the “other”, the “ pest of the people ”, could stop the decadence and “decomposition” of one's own culture. The idea of ​​a solution no longer lay in the quasi-automatic progression of history for the better. The so-called "cultural decay" was described as the spawn of "evil forces". The "Jewish race" was arrested as the epitome of this. The “Judaization” served as a simple explanation of inconsistent complex phenomena: The crisis phenomena of democracy, liberalism, socialism, capitalism and communism as theories and z. T. practices was thus assumed to have a single cause. In the process, the Christian dualism of God and Satan, good and bad , was reactivated in a new form - as a world-historical antithesis of " Aryans " and "Semites".

In Medieval Studies , the search for anti-Judaistic elements in modern anti-Semitism has met with fundamental criticism. Combining historical and group sociological approaches, Gavin Langmuir has developed a typology of anti-Jewish attitudes based on medieval sources :

• realistic attitudes: based on actual contrasts between Jews and non-Jews.
• Xenophobic settings: transfer properties of individual group members to the entire group.
• chimerical attitudes: operate with invented attributions that only presuppose the existence of the Jews as a group.

Langmuir understands only the chimerical hostility towards Jews as anti-Semitism, while anti-Judaism was determined by realistic and xenophobic attitudes until around the 12th century. Langmuir's typology has met with approval, but it is doubted whether it is suitable as a foundation for the conceptual separation between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. The three types of anti-Jewish attitudes can be demonstrated in all epochs. Therefore Johannes Heil did not concentrate on the change of the motives, but on their discursive contexts, for which he assumes a long-term process of secularization. The emergence of hostility towards Jews from theological and religious contexts is therefore decisive for the transition to anti-Semitism. This was concluded with racial anti-Semitism in the 19th century, but began in the late Middle Ages, so that this intermediate phase could be characterized as early anti-Semitism.

The transition from anti-Judaism to anti-Semitism is still an open research question . The individual historiographical approaches differ too much in their methodical premises and their concept of periodization for a synthesis to be formed. In research, four ideal-typical explanatory models can be identified:

Radicalization thesis

The transition from anti-Judaism to anti-Semitism takes the form of a gradual change in the content of hostility towards Jews. This is thought of as radicalization, which ultimately leads to the Holocaust. (Hilberg)

Parallel existence thesis

There is content-related overlap between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, but no transition. In modern times, both types of anti-Semitism exist side by side. (see section Religious and Church History)

Borrowing thesis

Modern anti-Semitism makes use of anti-Judaism in the motif repertoire, but secularizes the borrowed elements and classifies them in post-religious contexts. (Hoffmann)

Secularization thesis

Anti-Jewish discourses and their contexts were already subject to a long-term process of secularization in the late Middle Ages. There is no anti-Judaism that continues to exist in modern times. (Langmuir and Heil)

Today's issues

Structural anti-Semitism

Structurally anti-Semitic are ideologies that are not explicitly directed against Jews, but are similar to “classic” anti-Semitism in terms of their terminology and argumentation structure. What is meant, for example , is the distinction between finance capital and productive capital , which originated in early socialism , whereby the former is identified with its representatives. These are held responsible for the poverty and suffering of the "little man". Often there is also the accusation that the “rich fat cats” only live from the work of the honest workers, while they do not work themselves.

Through this personalization and shortening of a Marxist social criticism, ideologies that reject finance capital and its representatives are structurally similar to anti-Semitism and can turn into hatred of Jews or promote it. Since the Middle Ages, professional activities of Jews, who were forbidden to own land and who were excluded from membership in guilds , were limited to money lending, which was frowned upon in Christian circles, so that they were soon ostracized as usurers . Since the French Revolution they have been associated with the "sphere of circulation of capital". Reference was always made to individual wealthy Jewish bankers (e.g. Rothschild ) or “speculators” who were considered typical representatives of all exploiters. This is how Judaism was described as the driving force behind emerging capitalism. The National Socialists also contrasted “working” Germans with “raging” Jews and identified finance capital with Judaism.

A study on anti-Semitism commissioned by the EU in 2002 came to the conclusion that globalization critics would use anti-Semitic stereotypes. The co-author of the study, Werner Bergmann , points out that “among other things, the discussions within Attac Germany [were] that drew our attention to this” because they had led to “some of the rights marching along with clearly anti-Semitic statements “Be. In its self-image, however, Attac distinguishes itself from “racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, chauvinism and related ideologies”.

Ideologies that see a new world order looming, in which certain groups secretly try to usurp world domination (e.g. anti-Americanism ), are interpreted as structural anti-Semitism. It is not possible to make a strict distinction between structural and secondary anti-Semitism.

The anti-Semitism researcher Marcus Funck sees in these descriptions, however, a simplistic corruption of structural anti-Semitism. This does not exist through any number of analogy conclusions at all times and in all places with the same meaning. Qualitative context analyzes are required, "that is, an embedding in very specific time, place and factual circumstances". Gerhard Hanloser sees a reduction in the category as such. The process, which is to be treated critically and socially psychologically and which leads to a false personalization of the capital ratio, is obscured by the jargon of "structural anti-Semitism".

Anti-americanism

After anti-Semitism had already appeared alongside various anti-American currents in the 19th century, it developed into one of the most important companions of anti-Americanism in the 20th century. While it was initially just a discomfort with modernity that brought the United States and Jews together in this way, in the further course they were increasingly viewed as a paradigm of modernity and common clichés such as greed for money, greed for profit and rootlessness were transferred to them, characteristics that the allegedly run counter to European traditions and values. As the political scientist Andrei S. Markovits explains, the fears related less to the reality of the USA or Judaism than to the connection between Americanism and Jewish culture as a social trend and imaginary concept. This connection made ideas of a Jewish Wall Street , a Jewish Hollywood into common places. One of the most common notions of traditional anti-Semitism has always been to think of Jews as powerful. This imaginary power seemed even more dangerous because it was supposedly shaped by secret societies and cliques, conspiracy theoretic approaches that later played an important role in the propaganda of the National Socialists.

Secondary anti-Semitism

Secondary anti-Semitism is a form of subtle anti-Semitism that arose after the Holocaust and in response to it, especially in Germany and Austria. It feeds on feelings of shame and the refusal to admit the crimes committed in the name of one's nation. This is also known as defense against guilt anti-Semitism or defense against memory . In addition, blanket criticism of the State of Israel is often exercised in the form of Nazi comparisons and presented as anti-Zionism . This pattern is to be identified with the saying mostly attributed to the Israeli Zvi Rix on the basis of publications by Henryk M. Broder and Gunnar Heinsohn since 1997 :

"The Germans will never forgive the Jews Auschwitz."

Secondary anti-Semitism is therefore “anti-Semitism not in spite of, but because of Auschwitz”.

The secondary antisemitism dispensed directly anti-Jewish utterances and denies any antisemitic motivation. Instead, he makes use of strategies of argumentation that convey reservations and hostility towards Jews by shifting the victim-perpetrator coordinate system. This makes it more difficult for research to define and establish it, especially since the utterances to be examined are often not directly  punishable - for example as a Holocaust denial - and their motives cannot be precisely distinguished from older stereotypes.

The following discourses are associated with secondary anti-Semitism:

• Attacks on alleged taboos of criticism of Israel and criticism of other, non-German genocides in politics, media and historiography
• Relativization of the Holocaust through its comparison with other genocides and its causal connection with the Bolshevik "class murder": so above all by Ernst Nolte since 1986 (see Historikerstreit ), in the affair about statements of the politician Martin Hohmann etc.
• Allegations that Jews exploit a victim role in order to gain political and economic advantages all over the world: for example in the controversy over the "Holocaust industry" triggered by Norman Finkelstein .

The sociologist and political scientist Samuel Salzborn describes secondary anti-Semitism, especially in Germany and Austria, as "an element of the politics of remembrance that holds the Jews responsible for the consequences of the Shoah and defines the Holocaust as a negative disruption of national memory skills". According to this point of view, the “responsibility for finding an identity disrupted by the Holocaust memory” lies “with the Nazi victims who do not come to terms with their - so understood - fate”. Since anti-Semitism "got into a certain pressure to justify itself because of the German mass murder of European Jews", "the Jews are needed for social self-relief in the role of the perpetrator and not that of the victim". According to Salzborn, this secondary form of articulation usually does not have the intention of annihilation in common with anti-Semitism of National Socialist character, but it does have "the volkisch segregation desires as well as the projective delusion".

Ilka Quindeau emphasizes that the acknowledgment of guilt often demands discharge and old strategies of defending against guilt are replaced by new strategies of debt relief. Accordingly, she emphasizes "that this secondary anti-Semitism is not - as it was 20 years ago - based on the defense against guilt, but rather on its recognition, which seeks relief".

Since 2001, anti-Semitism has been increasing in Islamic countries, which also uses argumentation patterns of secondary anti-Semitism. Some researchers already see the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 in the USA as a form of global new anti-Semitism . The German historian Dan Diner u. a. also to characterize “left” and “right” political currents, which, with anti-American arguments, assume a plot by Israeli Zionism with supposedly ruling Jewish circles in the USA to conquer the world.

The sociologist Armin Pfahl-Traughber criticized the inadequate delimitation of the distinction from non-anti-Semitic criticism of Israel, especially when using the term new or secondary anti-Semitism in the discourse. Nevertheless, it is "often very clear that behind certain statements on Israeli politics neither criticism of human rights violations or solidarity with Palestinians can be seen as a central motive." Rather, this serves "only as a projection surface that is supposed to cover up the actual anti-Semitic attitudes [e]".

Israel-related anti-Semitism

Israel-related anti-Semitism is a special form in which a collectivization between Judaism and the State of Israel is carried out. It is directly related to the establishment of Israel . Anti-Semitic stereotypes are related to the politics of Israel.

The most common model for detecting Israel-related anti-Semitism is Natan Sharansky’s 3D model :

1. Demonization: Contrary to classic anti-Semitism, where Jews are demonized, Israel-related anti-Semitism shows a demonization of the State of Israel. Examples of this are frequent comparisons between Israel and National Socialism .
2. Double standards: Selective perception of the politics of Israel, which is subject to a different standard than the politics of another state. A stricter level of legitimacy is applied to state actions.
3. Delegitimization: Classical anti-Semitism occurs when the legitimacy of the Jewish religion, the Jewish people or both is questioned or denied. In anti-Semitism related to Israel , the legitimacy and thus Israel's right to exist is called into question.

However, this model is also subject to extensive criticism, as it cannot always be used to distinguish between Israel-related anti-Semitism and criticism of a specific government policy.

According to Samuel Salzborn, anti-Semitism also exists when symbols, metaphors and comparisons are used to describe Israel that are associated with traditional anti-Semitism or religious anti-Judaism , such as the accusation of the murder of Christ or the legend of the ritual murder , or when all Jews worldwide are for Actions of the State of Israel or individual actors in Israeli politics are held responsible.

In Germany in particular, it is not uncommon to find a reversal of the perpetrator-victim pattern, especially as an apology strategy in relation to the Holocaust. These ideas culminate in an equation of Israeli and National Socialist politics. But it is above all the Middle East conflict that supports anti-Semitic prejudices as Israel-related anti-Semitism. All over Europe there are cartoons that equate the Holocaust and the actions of the Israeli military in the Middle East conflict . The 2014 Gaza conflict in particular sparked a broad public discourse on Israel-related anti-Semitism. The "Free Gaza" demonstrations were z. T. Prime examples of the connection between classic anti-Semitic stereotypes and criticism of Israel. According to a study on group-related enmity in a European context, 47.7 percent of Germans agreed with the statement "Israel is waging a war of extermination against the Palestinians". In other countries, too, such as Great Britain, the Netherlands, Hungary and Poland, there were above-average approval rates (GB: 42.4; Netherlands 38.7; Hungary: 41; Poland 63.3).

As the sociologist Julia Bernstein points out, the creation of the word “criticism of Israel” already makes it clear that this is anti-Semitic slander, because there is no such thing as “criticism of the state” according to common usage for other states.

The Federal Government's anti-Semitism commissioner , Felix Klein , observed in debates about the Middle East conflict that church representatives were also anti-Semitic: “If German Jews are made responsible for Israeli settlement policy - then that is anti-Semitic, and I expect the church leaders to distance themselves from it . "

Goldhagen's and Finkelstein's theses

In 1996, Daniel Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executors caused heated controversy in the media and research. For him, the Germans persecuted the Jews out of a special “eliminatory anti-Semitism” that was one of the “long-standing and hardly questioned basic convictions of German culture”. In contrast to prevailing attempts at explanation, Goldhagen identified German anti-Semitism, which was not so extreme in other countries, as the central cause of the Holocaust. Specialist historians, including Hans Mommsen and Raul Hilberg, accused his book of arbitrary source inspection, a lack of scientific methodology, an outdated state of research and a poor level of quality.

In 1998, the US political scientist Norman Finkelstein published a study entitled A Nation on the Test Stand , in which he accused Goldhagen of falsifying historical facts, of adopting racist thought patterns himself with his declaration of an alleged German anti-Semitic national character and of bringing the Germans to collective indictment.

Opinion polling

Since the 19th century, attempts have been made to empirically capture anti-Semitic attitudes through opinion polls. Representative opinion polls were first carried out in Germany in 1946 by the US occupation authorities. Since then they have been repeated by scientists in the Federal Republic of Germany at intervals of about a decade.

These regular surveys to date have shown that anti-Jewish attitudes are widespread, but have continuously decreased. They were estimated to be around 20 percent of the total population in 2004, with more common in older people than in young people. Regional differences between West (15 percent) and East Germans (four to six percent) established in 1990 had leveled out by 2006.

Other surveys came to different results because of different questions and definitions of terms. These range from seven (1994) to 12 percent (2006) in eastern Germany and 17 (1994) to 31 percent (2006) in the old federal states. Women agreed to anti-Semitic statements less often, and the unemployed more often. These findings did not coincide with statistics on right-wing extremism .

According to recent pan-European surveys, anti-Semitism is still not a country-specific but an international phenomenon. The main results are:

• A connection between the presence of Jews in a society and the extent of anti-Semitism cannot be proven. Spain, Italy and Poland e.g. B. took "top positions", although the Jewish population in these countries is very low.
• In France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Great Britain, immigrants of Arab-Islamic origin have established themselves as the main representatives of hostility towards Jews. This is essentially determined by their attitude to the Middle East conflict , whereby Islamism and anti-Zionism are combined with racial anti-Semitism of European origin.
• Overall, Germany ranks in the middle of Europe, but comes out on top when it comes to relativizing Nazi rule and the Holocaust.
• In the former Eastern Bloc countries, anti-Semitism has combined with a new nationalism that is both anti-Russian and anti-Western. Religious prejudices are also stronger in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe.

Demoscopic anti-Semitism studies attempt to measure not only the manifest anti-Semitism of an “incorrigible” minority, but also latent anti-Semitic attitudes. The significance of their results is just as controversial in the social sciences as the methods of the survey. The representativeness of the surveyed target groups, inconsistent and possibly suggestive questions and the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the answers are considered questionable. The definition of “latent anti-Semitism” - for example as “a tacit agreement in everyday discourse about the existence of the Jews as a not precisely defined collective” - is criticized as being too imprecise in contrast to general prejudices. Empirical studies alone are therefore considered insufficient for unambiguous statements and are supplemented with other research methods.

See also

• Holocaust research
• Nazi research

literature

overview

• Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Handbook of anti-Semitism . Hostility to Jews in the past and present. Eight volumes. Walter de Gruyter / Saur, Berlin 2009–2013.

Marxist ideology criticism

• Ulrich Enderwitz: Anti-Semitism and People's State: On the Pathology of Capitalist Crisis Management. Ça ira, Freiburg im Breisgau 1998, ISBN 3-924627-28-2 . ( Full text online in the reader, free of charge)
• Abraham Léon : The Jewish Question: A Marxist Representation. Arbeiterpresse, Essen 1995, ISBN 3-88634-064-3 .

psychology

• Wolfgang Hegener: Redemption through destruction. Psychoanalytic Studies on Christian Anti-Semitism. Psychosocial, Giessen 2004, ISBN 3-89806-355-0 .
• Bela Grunberger, Pierre Dessuant: Narcissism, Christianity, Anti-Semitism. A psychoanalytic investigation. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-608-91832-9 .
• Mortimer Ostow: Myth and Madness. The Psychodynamics of Antisemitism. Transaction, 1995, ISBN 1-56000-224-7 .
• Jean Paul Sartre: Reflections on the Jewish Question. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1994, ISBN 3-499-13149-8 .
• Ernst Simmel (Ed.): Anti-Semitism. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-596-15530-4 .
• Rudolph Maurice Loewenstein: Psychoanalysis of anti-Semitism. (1968). Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1982, ISBN 3-518-10241-9 .

Critical theory

• Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer: Elements of anti-Semitism. In: Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-596-50519-4 .

• Detlev Claussen: Limits of the Enlightenment. The social genesis of modern anti-Semitism. Extended new edition. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16389-7 .
• Lars Rensmann : Critical Theory on Anti-Semitism. Studies on structure, explanatory potential and topicality. 3. Edition. Argument, Hamburg / Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-88619-642-9 .
• Moishe Postone: National Socialism and Anti-Semitism: A Theoretical Attempt. In: Dan Diner (ed.): Civilization break: Thinking after Auschwitz. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-596-24398-X , pp. 242-254.

Crisis Theory of Modernity

• Werner Jochmann: Social crisis and hostility to Jews in Germany 1870-1945. Christians, Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-7672-1056-8 .
• Norbert Kampe: Students and the “Jewish question” in the German Empire. The emergence of an academic backing of anti-Semitism. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1988, ISBN 3-525-35738-9 .
• Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): Hostages of Modern Civilization: Studies on Modern Antisemitism 1870–1933 / 39. Two volumes. Berlin / New York 1992/93.

Church history studies

• Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz (Ed.): Christian anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. Haag & Herchen, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-86137-187-1 .
• Claus-E. Bärsch: Anti-Judaism, Apocalyptic and Satanology. The Religious Elements of National Socialist Anti-Semitism. In: Journal of Religious and Intellectual History. Volume 40, 1988, pp. 112-133.
• Stefan Lehr: Anti-Semitism: Religious Motives in Social Prejudice. Christian Kaiser, Munich 1974, ISBN 3-459-00894-6 .

Cultural history studies

• Gerhard Henschel: shouts of envy. Anti-semitism and sexuality. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-455-09497-8 .
• Martin Friedrich: From Christian anti-Judaism to modern anti-Semitism. The dispute about assimilation, emancipation and mission of the Jews at the turn of the 19th century. In: Journal of Church History. Volume 102, 1991, pp. 319-347.
• Gunnar Heinsohn : What is anti-Semitism? The origin of monotheism and hatred of Jews. Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-8218-0418-1 . ( scribd.com full text online )
• Christhard Hoffmann: New studies on the history of ideas and mentality of anti-Semitism. In: Yearbook for Research on Antisemitism. Volume I, 1992, pp. 274-285.
• Christhard Hoffmann: Judaism as an antithesis. To the tradition of a cultural valuation model. In: Werner Bergmann, Rainer Erb (ed.): Anti-Semitism in political culture after 1945. Opladen 1990.
• Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Images of Jews. Cultural history of anti-Jewish myths and anti-Semitic prejudices. Reinbek 1991.
• Shulamit Volkov: Anti-Semitism as a cultural code. In: Jewish life and anti-Semitism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Ten essays. Beck, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-406-42149-0 .

history

• George L. Mosse : The Volkish Revolution. About the spiritual roots of National Socialism. Frankfurt am Main 1991.
• Paul Lawrence Rose: Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany. From Kant to Wagner. Princeton 1990.
• Werner Bergmann, Rainer Erb: The night side of the emancipation of Jews. The resistance to the integration of the Jews in Germany 1780-1860. Metropol, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-926893-77-X .
• Jacob Katz: From prejudice to destruction. Anti-Semitism 1700–1933. Munich 1989.
• Helmut Berding : Modern anti-Semitism in Germany. Frankfurt am Main 1988.
• Nicoline Hortzitz: “Early Anti-Semitism” in Germany (1789–1871 / 72). Tübingen 1988.
• Herbert A. Strauss, Norbert Kampe (ed.): Anti-Semitism. From hostility towards Jews to the Holocaust. Frankfurt am Main 1985.
• Leon Poliakov: History of Antisemitism, Volume V: The Enlightenment and its anti-Semitic tendency. Worms 1983.
• Hermann Greive: History of modern anti-Semitism in Germany. Darmstadt 1983.
• Uriel Tal: Christians and Jews in Germany. Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870–1914. Ithaca / London 1975.
• Walter Mohrmann: Anti-Semitism. Ideology and History in the Empire and the Weimar Republic. Berlin (East) 1972.
• Thomas Nipperdey , Reinhard Rürup: Anti-Semitism. Article in: Basic historical concepts. Historical lexicon on political-social language. Volume 1, Stuttgart 1972, pp. 129-153.
• Eleonore Sterling: hatred of Jews. The beginnings of political anti-Semitism in Germany (1815–1850). Frankfurt am Main 1969.
• Peter Pulzer: The emergence of political anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria 1867–1914. Gütersloh 1966.

Opinion polling

• Anti-Defamation-League (Ed.): European Attitudes towards Jews. A 5 Country Survey. New York 2002.
• Werner Bergmann: Anti-Semitism - Surveys after 1945 in an international comparison. In: Yearbook for Research on Antisemitism. Volume 5, 1996, pp. 175-195.
• Werner Bergmann, Rainer Erb: Anti-Semitism in the Federal Republic of Germany. Results of empirical research 1946–1989. Leske + Budrich, Opladen 1991, ISBN 3-8100-0865-6 .

present

• Monika Schwarz-Friesel, Evyatar Friesel, Jehuda Reinharz (ed.): Current anti-Semitism - a phenomenon of the middle. de Gruyter, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-11-023010-9 .
• Christoph Nonn: Anti-Semitism. Darmstadt 2008, ISBN 978-3-534-20085-6 .
• Reiner Zilkenat , D. Rubisch, H. Helas: News from anti-Semitism: conditions in Germany. Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02142-9 .
• Lars Rensmann, Julius H. Schoeps (Ed.): Enemy Judaism, Anti-Semitism in Europe. Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86650-642-8 .
• Doron Rabinovici, Ulrich Speck, Natan Sznaider (eds.): New anti-Semitism? A global debate. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2005.
• Philipp Gessler: The new anti-Semitism. Behind the scenes of normality. Herder, Freiburg 2004, ISBN 3-451-05493-0 .
• Wolfgang Benz, Angelika Königseder (ed.): Anti-Semitism as a Paradigm: Studies on Prejudice Research. Metropol, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-936411-09-3 .

Research history

• Hans-Joachim Hahn, Olaf Kistenmacher (Ed.): Attempts to describe hostility towards Jews: On the history of anti-Semitism research before 1944. de Gruyter 7 Oldenbourg, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-11-033905-5 .
• Werner Bergmann, Mona Körte: Research on anti-Semitism in the sciences. Metropol, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-936411-48-4 .
• Till van Rahden: Ideology and violence: new publications on anti-Semitism in German history of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In: New Political Literature. Volume 41, 1996, pp. 11-29.
• Gavin I. Langmuir: Towards a Definition of Antisemitism. Berkeley / Los Angeles 1990, ISBN 0-520-06143-8 .
• Reinhard Rürup : On the development of modern anti-Semitism research. In: Emancipation and Anti-Semitism. Studies on the “Jewish question” in civil society. (Göttingen 1975) Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-596-24385-8 .

Web links

Research centers

• Berlin Center for Research on Antisemitism
• International Institute for Education and Research on Antisemitism (Berlin / London)
• The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, Tel-Aviv University ( Memento from September 30, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
• The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism
• The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA) ( archive link)

History

• Wolfgang Benz : Anti-Semitism and anti-Semitism research . In: Docupedia contemporary history . February 11, 2010.

Frankfurt School

• Tobias Jaecker: Political Psychology of Anti-Semitism . In: jaecker.com , (about the anti-Semitism research of the Frankfurt School).

Others

• Mihran Dabag: Perspectives and Topicality of Interdisciplinary Genocide Research . In: Ruhr University Bochum (Hrsg.): Economy and science . tape 1 , 2004, p. 62–69 ( available online in the web archive ( Memento from August 24, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) [PDF]).
• Christian Mentel: Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial - New Perspectives . In: H-Soz-u-Kult. January 29, 2011 (conference report).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ zfa.kgw.tu-berlin.de: Yearbook for Antisemitism Research .
2. ↑ Anti-Semitism is a closed world view. In: The time. 4th July 2011.
3. ↑ Augustine: De civitate Dei , XVIII, 46. German translation online
4. ↑ Jacob Katz: From prejudice to destruction. Anti-Semitism 1700–1933. Munich 1990, p. 30 ff.
5. ↑ Gotthold E. Lessing: The education of the human race. §. 20 and 51; Berlin 1780. Dtv, 1997, ISBN 3-423-02630-8 .
6. ^ Rainer Erb, Werner Bergmann: The night side of the Jewish emancipation. The resistance to the integration of the Jews in Germany 1780-1860. Berlin 1989.
7. ^ Christian Wilhelm Dohm: About the bourgeois improvement of the Jews. Olms, 1973, ISBN 3-487-04631-8 .
8. ↑ Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, Fritz Lenz: Outline of the human heredity theory and racial hygiene . Volume 1, JF Lehmanns Verlag, Munich 1923, p. 294, quoted from The standard work on human heredity and racial hygiene by Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz in the mirror of contemporary review literature 1921-1941.
9. ^ Karl Marx: On the Jewish question (1843). In: Marx-Engels works . Volume 1, pp. 353, 372. ( mlwerke.de ).
10. ^ Friedrich Engels: About anti-Semitism (from a letter to Vienna). (1890). In: Marx-Engels works . Volume 22, Berlin 1963, pp. 49-51 ( marxists.org ).
11. ^ Walter Mohrmann: Anti-Semitism - Ideology and history in the German Empire and in the Weimar Republic. Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaft, 1972, DNB 740542303 .
12. ^ Moishe Postone: Germany, the Left and the Holocaust. Political Interventions. Ça ira-Verlag, 2005, ISBN 3-924627-33-9 , p. 168.
13. ↑ Günter Schulte: Freud's "Moses and Monotheism" . at guenther-schulte.de
14. ^ Wilhelm Reich: The mass psychology of fascism. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1986, ISBN 3-462-01794-2 , p. 73.
15. ↑ German Society for Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, Psychosomatics and Depth Psychology (DGPT) e. V.
16. ↑ Otto Fenichel: Elements of a psychoanalytic theory of anti-Semitism. In: Ernst Simmel: Anti-Semitism. P. 36.
17. ^ Bernhard Berliner: Some religious motives of anti-Semitism. In: Ernst Simmel: Anti-Semitism. P. 106f.
18. ^ Nathan W. Ackerman, Marie Jahoda, Nathan Ward: Anti-Semitism and emotional disorder, a psychoanalytic interpretation. Harper, New York 1950, p. 242.
19. ↑ Bela Grunberger: The anti-Semite and the Oedipus complex. In: Psyche. XIV, 1962, p. 258.
20. ^ Rudolph Maurice Loewenstein: Psychoanalysis of anti-Semitism. (1968) Suhrkamp, ​​1982, ISBN 3-518-10241-9 , p. 72 ff, p. 124 ff.
21. ↑ Ernst Simmel: Anti-Semitism and mass psychopathology. P. 71.
22. ↑ Ernst Simmel: Anti-Semitism and mass psychopathology. P. 68.
23. ↑ Mortimer Ostow: Myth and Madness. The Psychodynamics of Antisemitism. Pp. 21, 88ff. and 126.
24. ↑ Arno Gruen: The stranger in us. Dtv, 2002, ISBN 3-423-35161-6 .
25. ↑ Margarete Mitscherlich: Anti-Semitism - A Male Disease? In: Ginzel (Ed.): Antisemitism. Cologne 1991, pp. 336-342.
26. ↑ Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse : Studies on Authority and Family. (1936) 2nd new edition, Zu Klampen, 1987, ISBN 3-934920-49-7 .
27. ↑ Max Horkheimer: The sociological background of the psychoanalytic research approach. In: Ernst Simmel: Anti-Semitism. P. 23.
28. ^ Theodor W. Adorno: Negative Dialektik. (1966) Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2000, p. 358.
29. ↑ Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-596-27404-4 , pp. 201f.
30. ↑ Else Frenkel-Brunswik, R. Nevitt Sanford: The anti-Semitic personality. A research report. In: Ernst Simmel: Anti-Semitism. Pp. 119 and 125 ff
31. ↑ Max Weber: The Protestant ethics and the "spirit" of capitalism . P. 181: “Judaism stood on the side of the politically or speculatively oriented“ adventure ”capitalism. Its ethos was, in a word, that of pariah capitalism - Puritanism carried the ethos of rational civil enterprise and the rational organization of work. He only took from Jewish ethics what fit into this framework. ” Zeno.org
32. ^ Karl-Siegbert Rehberg: The image of Judaism in early German sociology. In: Horch (ed.): Judaism, anti-Semitism and European culture. Tübingen 1988, pp. 151-186.
33. ↑ Peretz Bernstein: Anti-Semitism as a group phenomenon. Berlin 1926.
34. ^ Arnold Zweig: Today's German anti-Semitism. Four articles in: Martin Buber (Ed.): Der Jude 1921 und 1922; Balance of German Jewry 1933, Aufbau-Verlag, 1998, ISBN 3-351-03423-7 ; Max Frisch, Andorra (1961).
35. ^ Parsons: The Sociology of modern Antisemitism. In: Graeber and others (eds.): Jews in the Gentile World. Pp. 101-122.
36. ↑ Reichmann: The flight into hatred (original title: Hostages of Civilization ). Frankfurt am Main 1956. Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarism. New York 1951, German: elements and origins of total domination. Anti-Semitism, imperialism, total domination. Piper, Munich 1955, 10th edition 2005, ISBN 3-492-21032-5 , p. 28. Gavin Langmuir: Toward a definition of antisemitism. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1990, ISBN 0-520-06144-6 , p. 328.
37. ↑ Hans Rosenberg: Great Depression and Bismarckian Period. Economic process, society and politics in Central Europe. Berlin 1967, ISBN 3-548-03239-7 , p. 88.
38. ↑ Reinhard Rürup: Emancipation and anti-Semitism. Studies on the Jewish question in civil society. (1975) Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-596-24385-8 , p. 123.
39. ↑ Norbert Kampe: Students and the "Jewish question" in the German Empire. The emergence of an academic backing of anti-Semitism. Goettingen 1988.
40. ^ Olaf Blaschke: Catholicism and anti-Semitism in the German Empire. Göttingen 1997. Wolfgang Heinrichs: The image of Jews in Protestantism of the German Empire. A contribution to the mentality history of the German bourgeoisie in the crisis of modernity. Cologne 2000.
41. ^ Samuel Salzborn : Global anti-Semitism. A search for traces in the abyss of modernity. Beltz Juventa, Weinheim 2018, pp. 17–23 and 189–211.
42. ↑ Augustine: Adversusu Iudaeos Tractatus ( Memento of May 24, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) on sant-agostino.it
43. ^ The IV Lateran Council chaired by Pope Innocent III. Adopts various measures against the Jews. ( Memento of May 27, 2007 in the web archive archive.today ) (Latin). On uni-trier.de and in English
44. ↑ Gregor X in the year 1272 ( papalencyclicals.net ): Those Christians who claim that the Jews stealthily and secretly took away and killed these children are completely wrong, [...] because in this case their law specifically and explicitly offers them sacrifice, consumption, and drinking blood or eating clawed animals.
45. ↑ Susanna Buttaroni (Ed.): Ritualmord. Legends in European History. Vienna 2003.
46. ↑ Brief overview: F. Lotter: Judenfeindschaft (hatred, persecution) . In: Lexicon of the Middle Ages (LexMA). Volume 5, Artemis & Winkler, Munich / Zurich 1991, ISBN 3-7608-8905-0 , Sp. 790-792. as well as Johannes Heil : hostility towards Jews as an object of medieval research. In: W. Bergmann, M. Körte (Ed.): Research on anti-Semitism in the sciences. Berlin 2004, pp. 83–116.
47. ^ Langmuir: History, Religion, and Antisemitism . Berkeley 1990. Oberman: Roots of Anti-Semitism . Berlin 1983. Heil: "Anti-Judaism" and "Anti-Semitism". In: Yearbook for Research on Antisemitism. Volume 6, 1997, pp. 92-114. Salvation: "enemies of God" - "enemies of man" . Essen 2006.
48. ↑ RGG , 1, 1998, Col. 573.
49. ↑ Léon Poliakov : History of Antisemitism , 8 vols., Worms 1977-88. Jacob Katz: From Prejudice to Distruction . Cambridge 1980. Robert S. Wistrich: Antisemitism . New York 1991. William Nicholls: Christian Antisemitism . Northvale 1993. Albert S. Lindemann: Esau's Tears . Cambridge 1997.
50. ↑ to Streicher: Helmut Berding: Moderner Antisemitismus in Deutschland . Klett, 1988, p. 93. Hitler: "In defending myself against the Jew, I am fulfilling the work of the Lord". In: Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf . 1925/27, Volume I, Chapter II, (70)
51. ^ Günter Brakelmann: Adolf Stoecker as an anti-Semite. 2 parts. Waltrop 2004.
52. ↑ Detmers: Judaism and Reformation . Stuttgart 2001. Osten-Sacken: Martin Luther and the Jews . Stuttgart 2002.
53. ^ McGovern: From Luther to Hitler. New York 1941; was the beginning of an extensive, partly popular science, partly serious “From Luther to Hitler Research”.
54. ↑ Martin Luther: Of the Jews and their lies . 1543. sgipt.org
55. ↑ Bucer: From the Jew / whether un like the unde the Christian are to be considered . Strasbourg 1539. Eck: Ains Judenbüchleins relocation . Ingolstadt 1541. Bucer's proposal to the Hessian Landgrave Philipp the First to expel the Jews from Hesse  ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) on stad.hessen.de
56. ^ Goldhagen: The Catholic Church and the Holocaust . Berlin 2002.
57. ↑ Blaschke et al. (Ed.): Catholic anti-Semitism in the 19th century . Zurich 2000. Urs Altermatt: Anti-Judaism and its extensions - The syndrome of Catholic anti-Semitism . on israel-information.net
58. ↑ Lehr: Anti-Semitism - Religious Motives in Social Prejudice . Munich 1974.
59. ↑ Bärsch: Anti-Judaism, Apocalyptic and Satanology. In: Journal of Religious and Intellectual History . Volume 40, 1988, pp. 112-133. Hoffmann: Christian anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism. In: Siegele-Wenschkewitz (ed.): Christian anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism . Frankfurt am Main 1994, pp. 293-317.
60. ↑ Alex Bein: Die Judenfrage II. Biography of a world problem . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980, ISBN 3-421-01963-0 , p. 164. Bein sees the emergence of modern anti-Semitism towards the end of the 1870s as the “conclusion of a centuries-long development and at the same time the beginning of a new era”.
61. ^ Hermann Greive: History of modern anti-Semitism in Germany. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1995, ISBN 3-534-08859-X , p. 1. Grieve writes that “... the modern, post-Enlightenment development in the history of anti-Semitism has produced something new that - in other words - modern anti-Semitism is an independent phenomenon that can be distinguished from the older forms of hatred of Jews. "
62. ↑ For the entire paragraph: Hertzberg: The Enlightenment and the Jews ; Sterling: hatred of Jews ; Puschner u. a. (Ed.): Handbook on the völkisch movement ; Volkov: Antisemitism as a Cultural Code. In: LBIYB 23, 1978, pp. 25-46.
63. ↑ Rose: Revolutionary Antisemitism . Ley: A Little History of Anti-Semitism . Munich 2003.
64. ^ Tal: Christians and Jews in Germany . Ithaca 1974. Jensen: Educated doppelgangers . Göttingen 2005.
65. ^ Raul Hilberg: The annihilation of the European Jews . Through u. extended Paperback edition in three volumes, S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-596-24417-X (English original edition 1961)
66. ^ Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann, Helmut W. Smith: Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History . University of Michigan Press 2002, ISBN 0-472-06796-6 .
67. ^ Langmuir: History, Religion, and Antisemitism . Berkeley 1990. Heil: "Anti-Judaism" and "Anti-Semitism". In: Yearbook for Research on Antisemitism. Volume 6, 1997, pp. 92-114.
68. ↑ Micha Brumlik, Doron Kiesel, Linda Reisch: Antisemitism and the Left . Haag + Herchen, Frankfurt 1991, ISBN 3-89228-726-0 , p. 7ff.
69. ^ Karl Marx: The capital . The metamorphoses of capital and their cycle - Chapter five: The period of circulation
70. ↑ European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC). Manifestations of Anti-Semitism in the EU.
71. ^ Peter Wahl: On the anti-Semitism discussion in and around Attac . ( Memento from January 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) In: steinbergrecherche.com .
72. ^ Danièle Weber: No good news - The dispute over the unpublished EU study on anti-Semitism . In: Jungle World . Number 51, December 10, 2003.
73. ^ Attac self-image, October 2001 . In: attac-netzwerk.de .
74. ^ Thomas Schmidinger: Structural anti-Semitism and condensed criticism of capitalism
75. ^ Gerhard Hanloser - criticism of capitalism and false personalization
76. ^ Andrei S. Markovits: European anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism, twin brother of anti-Americanism. In: Exclusive Solidarity, Left Anti-Semitism in Germany - From Idealism to the Anti-Globalization Movement. Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2007, p. 240.
77. ↑ Philipp Gessler: Secondary anti-Semitism. Argumentation pattern in right-wing extremist anti-Semitism . Federal Agency for Political Education .
78. ↑ ^{a b} Jochen Böhmer: Secondary anti-Semitism . In: shoa.de .
79. ↑ Ingolf Seidel: Comments on Critical Theory: Anti-Semitism in Germany . In: Antisemitismus.net .
80. ↑ Henryk M. Broder: The Eternal Anti-Semite: About the meaning and function of a constant feeling. Chapter 5: The perpetrator as a probation officer or The Germans will never forgive the Jews of Auschwitz . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1986, pp. 125, 130; further evidence from Zvi Rix .
81. ↑ Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Anti-Semitism in Germany . Munich 1995. Werner Bergmann: Anti-Semitism in public conflicts . Frankfurt am Main 1997. Wood: The presence of anti-Semitism . Hamburg 2005.
82. ^ Samuel Salzborn: Anti-Semitism. History, theory, empiricism. (= Interdisciplinary research on anti-Semitism. Volume 1). Nomos, Baden-Baden 2014, p. 16.
83. ↑ Samuel Salzborn, Marc Schwietring "affective mobilizations in the social center. The 'Möllemann Debate' as a catalyst for secondary anti-Semitism. ”In: Samuel Salzborn (Ed.): Antisemitism since 9/11. Events, debates, controversies. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2019, p. 30.
84. ↑ Ilka Quindeau: "Defense against guilt and national identity - psychological functions of anti-Semitism." In: Matthias Brosch, Michael Elm, Norman Geissler, Brigitta Elisa Simbürger, Oliver von Wrochem: Exclusive Solidarity. Left anti-Semitism in Germany. Metropol, Berlin 2007, p. 163
85. ^ Dan Diner: Enemy America. About the persistence of resentment . Propylaen Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-549-07174-4 .
86. ↑ Armin Pfahl-Traughber: Anti-Semitic and non-anti-Semitic criticism of Israel. An examination of the criteria for differentiation. In: Enlightenment and Criticism. No. 1, 2007, pp. 49, 55 f.
87. ^ Criticism or anti-Semitism. Amadeu Antonio Foundation brochure, p. 11f.
88. ^ Juliane Wetzel: Forms and spread of anti-Semitic attitudes in Germany and Europe. In: APuZ . No. 28-30, 2014, pp. 25ff.
89. ↑ Anti-Semitism or Israel Criticism - A German Phenomenon. In: Spiegel online. 23rd July 2014.
90. ^ Juliane Wetzel: Forms and spread of anti-Semitic attitudes in Germany and Europe. In: APuZ. No. 28-30, 2014, pp. 25ff.
91. ^ Julia Bernstein: Anti-Semitism in schools in Germany. Findings - analyzes - options for action. Beltz Juventa, Weinheim 2020, p. 41 f.
92. ↑ Klein calls for anti-Semitism officers in all federal states. Domradio, October 18, 2018. Accessed December 16, 2018.
93. ^ Daniel Jonah Goldhagen: Hitler's willing executors. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Translated by Klaus Kochmann. Goldmann, 2000, ISBN 3-442-15088-4 , p. 47ff.
94. ↑ Ruth Bettina Birn : Revising the Holocaust. In: The Historical Journal. Volume 40, No. 1, 1997.
95. ↑ Eberhard Jäckel in Julius H. Schoeps: A people of murderers? - The documentation on the Goldhagen controversy about the role of the Germans in the Holocaust . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-455-10362-6 , p. 187.
96. ^ Hermann Bahr: Anti-Semitism. An international interview . Vienna 1893.
97. ↑ Wolfgang Benz: What is anti-Semitism? P. 194.
98. ↑ Werner Bergmann: History of Antisemitism . CH Beck, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-406-47987-1 , p. 135 f.
99. ↑ Oliver Decker, Elmar Brähler : Right-wing extremist attitudes in Germany. Federal Agency for Political Education .
100. ↑ Werner Bergmann: History of Antisemitism . CH Beck, Munich 2002, pp. 133-138.
101. ↑ Ulrike Spohn: Anti-Semitism in Everyday Discourse - What is Anti-Semitism? In: powimag.de .

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on December 28, 2006 .