Anti-Semitism: A Brief History

Disclaimer: This is a huge issue that contains sensitive content. To be frank, I cannot give this issue justice. Antisemitism did not start or end with the Middle East or Nazi Germany, it has been around for millennia. I hope and pray this article will provoke some really good discussion.

At the present moment, even a slight glance at the news clearly shows a disturbing rise in public anti-Semitic activities. Even more shocking is the number of these events in America. Although the front story issues have largely centered around the college campuses of Harvard, MIT, and Penn, countless other smaller instances of Jewish hate have occurred in the last six months. To some extent, some of these protests would be expected, as events like these naturally follow the various conflicts the Western world participates in. Yet, the significant amount of hate that has risen to the cultural spotlight is incomprehensible. For the Christian population, especially Western Christians, a closer look at this issue should be taken. To begin dissecting the difficult plight of anti-Semitism, one should first inspect the roots of this hostility.

Historically, hatred of a people group can stem from a specific aspect of their culture. For most of its history, this prejudice was due to the nature of the population being a “people without a homeland” (except during their control of Israel during the Old Testament times, and post-1947, although both of these occasions were highly disputed diplomatically). Due to their “outsider” nature, the Jews have been quite easy to single out from the more homogenous populations of their residence.

The proper definition of anti-Semitism is stated as “hostile to or prejudiced against Jews.” In that case, any instance of singling out the entire Jewish population for being Jewish, in a negative light, would be considered anti-Semitism. Targeted hatred of Jews goes back millennia, deep into Biblical times. Not only did the Egyptians enslave the entire Jewish Population, but several noted persecutions occurred, most notorious the brutal murder of all newborn boys during the early life of Moses. This, combined with several other events, led to the Jewish Exodus, the first of many mass expulsions of the Jewish nation.

Throughout the rest of the Old Testament, a few instances of anti-Semitism appeared, but it was not until the early first century that the modern roots of this hate began to take form. In the first century BC, when the Romans conquered Israel, the Hebrew nation again endured years of Roman dominance. Much of the disparities felt by the Jews during this period are highlighted in the Gospels, which take place during the middle of the Roman occupation. Eventually, these culminated in the Jewish-Roman wars, a series of large-scale revolts that occurred in the first and second centuries AD, culminating with the destruction of Solomon’s temple in seventy AD, and the siege of Masada in seventy-three AD.

After the fall of Rome in the fifth century AD, due to the Jewish Diaspora, or Dispersion, much of the anti-Semitism found in the Early Modern Age developed, sadly, in the predominately Christian Europe, especially in Eastern Europe. Although it was the Romans who killed Jesus, due to a misconstrued perspective of Christ’s Passion, many believers often assumed the Jews killed Jesus. This led to a cultural distrust of the displaced Hebrew population, leading to laws that prevented Jews from being able to hold land and becoming skilled tradesmen. This led many Jews to pursue banking as a viable way to make money, but in turn, led to an even greater distrust of the lending practices of Jews. This Church-influenced anti-Semitism, as the bureaucratic church grew, expanded with it. For some time, the dispersed Hebrew population was not safe, despite widespread rumors about them, and often blamed for terrible events such as the black death. In many cases, Hebrew populations were outright banished for several centuries, as was seen in England in 1290, France in 1306, Switzerland in 1348, and Germany in 1394.

Thankfully, much of their rhetoric died out with them, but it was not gone from the public sphere forever. From the mid-to-late fourteenth century to the early nineteenth century, anti-Semitism in Europe died down. However, it saw a resurgence in the late nineteenth century, especially after Charles Darwin’s work On the Origin of Species. Due to his comments about “racial superiority” in some ethnic groups, many nationalist movements utilized these comments to unite homogenous “superior” ethnic groups into one national identity, especially in Europe, this came at the expense of the resident Jewish population. Due to their relative minority status in nearly every European nation. This led to much social ostracization and a certain cultural hostility towards the Jews.

Due to several prevalent issues in the world at the time, the cultural acceptance of modern anti-Semitism peaked during the period from 1930 to 1950. As Mussolini and Hitler, arguably the two leaders of the most anti-Semitic modern cultures of the 20^th century, rose to power, they each sought to pin the blame for the economic woes of countries deep in the Great Depression. As the minority Jewish population, due to their middlemen status in banking and commerce, was already distrusted by the general population (for accusations of bad moneylending/cheating customers), it was easy to pin the blame on the Hebrew population for the rest of the people’s woes.

The story infamously and tragicly continues with Kristallnacht, the opening of death camps, and the Final Solution. To only mention the fact that over six million Jews died in less than ten years would be a gross understatement. One-third of the Jewish population died in the Holocaust. Even eighty years later, the Jewish population of 1939 has not come back from the atrocities of the Holocaust.

After the horrors of the thirties and forties, the Jewish people vowed to never again have to experience the horrors of the Holocaust again. The first step in achieving their independence was to create an independent country. After World War One, the Ottoman Empire, which encompassed much of the Near Middle East at its peak, completely collapsed, leaving its territory to the dominion of the Allied Powers, especially England. After much deliberation over several decades, with its drastically speeding up after World War Two, an official state of Israel, under the support of the UN, was created in May 1948, for the express purpose of relocating several hundred thousand migrant Jews from Europe. However, millions of Muslims still lived in the area and resisted the thought of sharing a homeland with thousands of Jews. Due to the ensuing 1948 war in Israel, seven hundred thousand Muslim Arabs fled the fighting in the region, which catalyzed a generations-long series of regional conflicts in the region. Even today in 2024 the continued fighting is starkly evident, with news about Hamas terrorists and claims of genocide gracing the news daily.

I was able to spend a day at the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC. in the summer of 2023. I would not have guessed such an education would come full circle just months later with the conflict in the Gaza Strip. Even a World War, which murdered over six million, nearly one-half of the Jewish population in just six years, did not stamp this age-old evil out, as evidenced by every new revelation in higher education, mass media, and politics. We need to be rattled by this. We cannot forget the Holocaust. We must never forget the horrors of anti-Semitism, because when we forget, we will, in turn, fall prey to the same twisted ideologies that anyone who hates Jews, simply for being Jews, carries.

“Medieval Antisemitism.” Medieval Antisemitism – The Holocaust Explained: Designed for Schools, www.theholocaustexplained.org/anti-semitism/medieval-antisemitism/. Accessed 27 Feb. 2024.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/antisemitism-in-history-the-era-of-nationalism-1800-1918. Accessed 27 Feb. 2024.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org/antisemitism/what-is-antisemitism/explained. Accessed 27 Feb. 2024.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org/antisemitism/what-is-antisemitism/why-the-jews-history-of-antisemitism. Accessed 27 Feb. 2024.