Nazi anti-Semitism and the Holocaust

The storm of anti-Semitic violence loosed by Nazi Germany under the leadership of Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1945 not only reached a terrifying intensity in Germany itself but also inspired anti-Jewish movements elsewhere. Anti-Semitism was promulgated in France by the Cagoulards (French: “Hooded Men”), in Hungary by the Arrow Cross, in England by the British Union of Fascists, and in the United States by the German-American Bund and the Silver Shirts.

In Nazi Germany, anti-Semitism reached a racial dimension never before experienced. Christianity had sought the conversion of the Jews, and political leaders from Spain to England had sought their expulsion because Jews were practitioners of Judaism, but the Nazis—who regarded Jews not only as members of a subhuman race but as a dangerous cancer that would destroy the German people—sought the “final solution to the Jewish question,” the murder of all Jews— men, women, and children—and their eradication from the human race. In Nazi ideology that perceived Jewishness to be biological, the elimination of the Jews was essential to the purification and even the salvation of the German people.

A novelty of the Nazi brand of anti-Semitism was that it crossed class barriers. The idea of Aryan racial superiority appealed both to the masses and to economic elites. In Germany anti-Semitism became official government policy—taught in the schools, elaborated in “scientific” journals and research institutes, and promoted by a huge, highly effective organization for international propaganda. In 1941 the liquidation of European Jewry became official party policy. During World War II an estimated 5.7 million Jews were exterminated by mobile killing units; in such death camps as Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzec, Majdanek, and Treblinka; by being worked to death; or through starvation.

Anti-Semitism after the Holocaust

For a period of time after the Nazi defeat in 1945, anti-Semitism lost favour in western Europe and the United States. Even those who were anti-Semitic were hesitant, if not embarrassed, to express it. American Jews became an integrated part of culture and society in the postwar United States. Barriers to complete Jewish participation in business and politics fell, and Jews found few obstacles in their way as they sought to participate in American life. Anti-Semitism became a fringe phenomenon with occasional lethal manifestations in hate crimes. But even if they were fewer in number, less widespread, and less tolerated by American society, virulent anti-Semitic acts still occasionally occurred.

Moreover, anti-Semitism persisted in many other countries. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, whose troops had liberated Auschwitz, engaged in a purge of Jews that was halted only by his death in 1953. In the Soviet Union, opposition to the State of Israel after the Six-Day War (1967) and to the attempts of Soviet Jews to emigrate was linked to historic Russian anti-Semitism. There also were anti-Jewish purges in Poland in 1956–57 and 1968.

Under the leadership of Pope (later Saint) John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church accepted the legitimacy of Judaism as a continuing religion and exonerated Jews for the murder of Jesus Christ by universalizing responsibility for his Crucifixion. Nostra aetate, arguably the most important document in Christian-Jewish relations in the 20th century also changed the Good Friday liturgy to make it less inflammatory with regard to Jews and altered the Roman Catholic catechism. In 2007, however, Pope Benedict XVI approved wider use of the old Latin mass, which included the Good Friday liturgy and a prayer that most Jews found offensive. Although the prayer was revised in 2008 to address Jewish concerns, some argued that it was still prejudicial.

A centrepiece of the papacy of Pope (later Saint) John Paul II, who witnessed the Holocaust directly as a young man in Poland, was the fight against anti-Semitism and his embrace of Jews. The pope paid a historic visit to a synagogue in Rome in 1986, and under his leadership the Vatican established diplomatic relations with the State of Israel in 1993, shortly after the conclusion of the Oslo peace agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. In March 2000 the pontiff visited Israel. At Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the Holocaust, he described anti-Semitism as anti-Christian in nature and apologized for instances of anti-Semitism by Christians. At the Western Wall, Judaism’s most-sacred site, he inserted a prayer note of apology for past Christian misdeeds into the stones:

we are deeply saddened
by the behaviour of those
who in the course of history
have caused these children of yours to suffer,
and asking your forgiveness
we wish to commit ourselves
to genuine brotherhood
with the people of the Covenant.

In 1998 the Vatican had published a document titled “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,” which called upon the faithful to reflect upon the lessons of the Shoah (the Holocaust). In presenting that document, Edward Idris Cardinal Cassidy, president of the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, said, “Whenever there has been guilt on the part of the Christians, this burden should be a call to repentance.”

Although it might have seemed likely that anti-Semitism would have been dealt a decisive blow by the collapse of the communist bloc in the early 1990s and by the transformation of the Roman Catholic Church’s and other Christian denominations’ teaching regarding Jews, that was not the case. In the 1980s and 1990s, international controversy over the legacies of Nazism in Austria and Switzerland triggered increased anti-Semitism in those countries. Foreign concern over Kurt Waldheim’s Nazi past provoked angry anti-Semitic reactions among some of his supporters during his successful 1986 campaign for the Austrian presidency. During the late 1990s, when it was revealed that Swiss banks had laundered Nazi gold (much of it likely confiscated from Jews) during World War II and had failed to return money to Jewish depositors after the war, international criticism and demands for restitution provoked increased anti-Semitism in Switzerland. In postcommunist Russia, political opposition to that country’s ruling regime and to the disproportionate representation of Jews among the powerful oligarchy often had anti-Semitic overtones.

In Europe the presence of a large Muslim immigrant population that was deeply concerned with events in the Middle East was believed to have intensified anti-Semitism. Often the targets of anti-Semitic actions were the most vulnerable of Jews living in immigrant neighbourhoods. It was argued that the large number of Muslim immigrants and the absence of hate-crime legislation led some European politicians to ignore or to downplay the significance of anti-Semitic incidents. Furthermore, anti-Semitic myths that in the post-Holocaust era had been discarded by western Europe, such as the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and the blood libel, made their way into the Middle East, where they flourished with support from religious authorities, the media, and some governments. Although some observers were quick to argue that Islam was not by its nature anti-Semitic, currents of fiercely anti-Israel and openly anti-Semitic beliefs were abroad in the Muslim world.

For many centuries, Islamic societies had tolerated Jews as People of the Book and dhimmīs, subordinate yet protected people who were required to pay special taxes, wear identifying clothing, and live in specified areas. Jews were thus treated much as other nonbelievers were in Muslim societies. But the immigration of large numbers of Jews to Palestine in the 20th century and the creation of the State of Israel (1948) in a formerly Arab region aroused new currents of hostility within the Arab world. Arab hostility to the State of Israel was primarily political (or anti-Zionist) and religious rather than racial. Whatever the motivation, however, the result was the adoption of many anti-Jewish measures throughout the Muslim countries of the Middle East. In response, most of the Jewish residents of those countries immigrated to Israel in the decades after its founding.

Anti-Semitism in the 21st century

The founders of Zionism and the leaders of the State of Israel had presumed that the normalization of the Jewish condition—that is, the achievement of statehood and with it a flag and an army—would seriously diminish anti-Semitism; however, from the Yom Kippur War of 1973 onward, the existence of the Israeli state seemed to have the opposite effect, fueling rather than quenching the long-standing fires of anti-Semitic hatred. Thus, in the first decades of the new millennium, there seemed to be a marked rise in anti-Semitism.

The manifestations of anti-Semitism in the 21st century prompted careful consideration and debate regarding the definition of anti-Semitism. The evolving conversation prompted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) to adopt a working definition in 2016:

Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

The vehemence of the anger and attacks against Israel often appeared not to differentiate between Israelis and Jews. Armed attacks were aimed at civilian and military targets alike. Some of those who were alarmed by increasing anti-Semitism in the 21st century pointed to examples of Muslim leaders’ employing anti-Semitic tropes when addressing their own populations. At the same time, the Internet linked disparate groups of anti-Semites and provided an online community for previously isolated factions.

In many countries a significant part of the political left had become highly critical of Israel, a development that was disquieting to Jews who were once comfortable on the left and felt that their erstwhile allies had turned against Israel or Israeli policies. Some critics of those policies compared them to those of Nazi Germany, and in political cartoons Jewish figures were depicted in a manner not dissimilar to Nazi propaganda. Controversy embroiled the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, for example, after some of its members were accused of making anti-Semitic remarks in 2016.

Scholars and students of anti-Semitism struggled to distinguish between legitimate criticism of policies of the Israeli government and anti-Semitism. In 2004 then Israeli cabinet minister and one-time Soviet human rights activist Natan Sharansky suggested three markers to delineate the boundary between legitimate criticism and anti-Semitism. Under his “3D test,” when one of these elements was detectable, the line had been crossed: double standards (judging Israel by one standard and all other countries by another), delegitimization (the conclusion that Israel had no right to exist), or demonization (regarding the Israeli state not merely as wrongheaded or mistaken but as a demonic force in the contemporary world).

At the same time, many conservative Christians (including many evangelicals) voiced ardent support for Israel. However, the nationalistic xenophobic far right—which often embodied an open or thinly veiled anti-Semitism while capitalizing on economic dislocation and discontentment with immigration—gained considerable political power in countries such as Greece and Hungary in the early 2010s. Similar political movements later surged in other parts of Europe, including Austria, whose far-right Freedom Party underwent a revival in the mid-2010s; France, where Marine Le Pen, whose National Rally had once been known for fostering anti-Semitism, came second in the 2017 presidential runoff; and Italy, where a party descended from the neofascist National Alliance led the formation of a government in 2022. The global impact in the rise of the far right was exemplified in widespread conspiracy theories, which often utilized anti-Semitic tropes, about the American financier and philanthropist George Soros, a Hungarian-born Jew frequently criticized by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

During the 2010s measurable increases in anti-Semitic rhetoric and attacks were recorded in Europe and North America, including physical and verbal assaults as well as vandalism, graffiti, and desecration. France, which has the largest Jewish population in Europe, saw one of the most notable upticks in vandalism and violence targeting Jewish communities, including a deadly assault on a kosher supermarket in Paris in 2015. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which tracks anti-Semitic activity in the United States, anti-Semitic incidents in the country rose sharply after 2015, averaging about seven incidents per day in 2021. The country suffered one of its deadliest anti-Semitic attacks in October 2018 when a man opened fire at the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during services, killing 11. Public reflection on the rise of anti-Semitism was renewed in October 2022 when the popular rapper Ye (Kanye West) made a series of public comments that were widely seen as anti-Semitic.