Daniel S.

Brown, Professor
Ph.D., Louisiana State University
M.A., Miami University, Oxford, Ohio
 Hatred of Jews or Judaism

 Economic Antisemitism
 Religious Antisemitism
 Nationalistic Antisemitism
 Racial Antisemitism

 On April 1, 1933, the boycott which was

announced by the National Socialistic party
began.

 Placard reads, "Germans, defend yourselves, do

not buy from Jews", at the Jewish Tietz store.
Berlin.
Roman Catholic historian Edward Flannery in The Anguish of the Jews:
Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism, (1965 and 2004).

 Political and economic antisemitism: Cicero, Henry Ford,

and Charles Lindbergh
 Theological or religious antisemitism, sometimes known
as anti-Judaism
 Nationalistic antisemitism: Enlightenment thinkers, who
attacked Jews for supposedly having certain
characteristics, such as greed and arrogance, and for
observing customs such as kashrut and Shabbat;
 Racial antisemitism: Based on pseudo-science…quite
obvious in Nazi propaganda films.
 “The Jew” appears powerful and rich. Publications such as
the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which first appeared in
1905 in Russia, generated or provided support for theories
of an international Jewish conspiracy.
 Jews are supposedly able to carry on trade under more
positive conditions than the rest of the people.
 During the Middle Ages the usurer was hated as much as, if
not more than, for “Deicide.”
 Religious Antisemitism
 Anti-Judaism
 The practice of Judaism itself that was the
defining characteristic of the antisemitic
attacks.
 Attacks would often stop if Jews stopped
practicing or changed their public faith,
especially by conversion to the official or
“right” religion.
 Sometimes Christians practiced the liturgical
exclusion of Jewish converts
 Example: Iberian Jews in the late 15th and 16th
centuries convicted of secretly practicing
Judaism or Jewish customs.
 “The Jews are the most worthless of all men.
They are lecherous, greedy, rapacious. They are
perfidious murderers of Christ. They worship the
Devil. Their religion is a sickness. The Jews are
the odious assassins of Christ and for killing God
there is no expiation possible, no indulgence or
pardon. Christians may never cease vengeance,
and the Jew must live in servitude forever. God
has always hated the Jews. It is essential that all
Christians hate them.”
 St. Ambrose in Milan, A.D. 379
 From 1800 into the early 20th centuries, European
nations established the principle of equality under
the law and dropped all restrictions on residence or
occupational activities for Jews and other national
and religious minorities.
 These European societies changed rapidly.
 The State came to be viewed (romantically?) as
society’s most important social unit.
 Where do the Jews fit in this model?
 Jews faced new forms of political antisemitism.
 It was secular, social, and influenced by economic
considerations, though it often reinforced and was
reinforced by traditional religious stereotypes.
Racial Antisemitism
 European Antisemitism until the
17th century was religious in
character, not racial or ethnic.
 Notable Exception : Spain under the
Inquisition - where descendants of
converts continued to be as suspect
as their Jewish forbears
 “Secular” Antisemitism
 Based on the “Aryan” myth.
Pseudo-science.
 Genetics. Physical or Psychological
Attributes. “Stereotypical”
behaviors.
 “If only one country, for whatever reason, tolerates a
Jewish family in it, that family will become the germ
center for fresh sedition. If one little Jewish boy
survives without any Jewish education, with no
synagogue and no Hebrew school, it [Judaism] is in
his soul. Even if there had never been a synagogue or
a Jewish school or an Old Testament, the Jewish
spirit would still exist and exert its influence. It has
been there from the beginning and there is no Jew,
not a single one, who does not personify it.”
 - Robert Wistrich, Hitler's Apocalypse, p. 122; from a
conversation with Croatian Foreign Minister General
Kvaternik, July 21, 1941
 In the 1990s, some writers began to
identify a New Antisemitism:
 It comes simultaneously from the far left, the
far right, and radical Islam
 It tends to focus on opposition to Zionism and
a Jewish homeland in the State of Israel.
 The New Antisemitism often uses traditional
antisemitism motifs, including older motifs
like the “Blood Libel”
 The Crusades (1096 - )

 Romantic Nationalism

 Richard Wagner's Jewry in Music (1850)

 The Alfred Dreyfus Affair (1894)

 Theodore Herzl
 1897 First World Zionist Congress
 1917 Balfour Declaration
A figure from medieval
Christian folklore
whose legend began
to spread in Europe in
the thirteenth century.

The original legend

concerns a Jew who
taunted Jesus on the
way to the Crucifixion
and was then cursed
to walk the earth until
the Second Coming.
Filmed in the Yiddish language, The
Wandering Jew features Jacob Ben-Ami as
a young Jewish artist living in Germany in
the early 1930s. As the Nazis gain in
influence, the artist's life and livelihood
are slowly eroded: his non-Jewish fiancee
leaves him and his paintings are rejected
by the Academy of Art. Growing to
despise his heritage, the artist prepares to
destroy his latest painting, a portrait of his
father titled The Eternal Jew. Suddenly the
figure in the portrait comes to life.
--Hal Erickson in All Movie Guide

 Der Vanderner Yid , USA, 1933

aka Abraham Our Patriarch,
Jews in Exile,
Nazi Terror, and
The Jew in Germany
The Eternal Jew is an antisemitic
German Nazi propaganda film. Its
title in German is the German term
for the character of the
“Wandering Jew” in medieval
folklore.

At the insistence of Nazi Germany’s

Minister of Propaganda, Joseph
Goebbels, the film was directed by
Fritz Hippler.

The film consists of feature and

documentary footage combined
with materials filmed shortly after
the Nazi occupation of Poland.