Why dislike jews

In the s and early s, the defeated country was still in a major economic crisis. According to the Nazis, expelling the Jews was the solution to the problems in Germany. This political message and the promise to make Germany economically strong again won Hitler the elections in After he had come to power, the laws and measures against the Jews increased all the time. It ended in the Shoah, the Holocaust, the murder of six million European Jews.

Antisemitism Hitler did not invent the hatred of Jews. More about Hitler's antisemitism. Are all Jews Zionists? Is all criticism of Israel antisemitic? But this continuing hostility towards Jews from pre-modern to modern times has been manifest to many.

In fact, up until the Holocaust, antisemitism flourished just as much in western Europe as in central or eastern Europe. Consider, for example, how French society was bitterly divided between , after the Jewish army officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus , was falsely accused and convicted of spying for Germany.

It saw conservatives squaring up against liberals and socialists, Catholics against Jews. The Russian editor of the infamous Protocols of Zion — a crude and ugly, but tragically influential, forgery alleging a Jewish world conspiracy — was the political reactionary, ultra-Orthodox, and self-styled mystic Sergei Nilus. So modern antisemitism cannot be easily separated from its pre-modern antecedents.

As the Catholic theologian Rosemary Ruether observed:. The mythical Jew, who is the eternal conspiratorial enemy of Christian faith, spirituality and redemption, was … shaped to serve as the scapegoat for [the ills of] secular industrial society. Some scholars would look to the pre-Christian world and see in the attitudes of ancient Greeks and Romans the origins of an enduring hostility. Finding examples of hostility towards Jews in classical sources is not difficult.

The Roman historian Tacitus , c. The Roman poet and satirist Juvenal , c. These few examples may point towards the existence of antisemitism in antiquity. Juvenal was every bit as rude about Greeks and other foreigners in Rome as he was about Jews.

And yet what part of the dregs comes from Greece? It is in the theology of early Christians that we find the clearest foundations of antisemitism. In his most celebrated work, Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, Justin strove to answer Trypho when he pointed to the contradictory position of Christians who claimed to accept Jewish scripture but refused to follow Torah the Jewish law.

Justin responded that the demands of Jewish law were meant only for Jews as a punishment from God. It was with his fellow Christians. At a time when the distinction between Judaism and Christianity was still blurred and rival sects competed for adherents, he was striving to prevent gentile converts to Christianity from observing the Torah, lest they go over wholly to Judaism.

It was an ugly charge, soon levelled again in the works of other Church Fathers, such as Tertullian c. The objective of using such invective was to settle internal debates within Christian congregations. The allegations did not reflect the actual behaviour or beliefs of Jews. When Tertullian attempted to refute the dualist teachings of the Christian heretic Marcion c.

He achieved this by presenting the Jews as especially wicked and especially deserving of righteous anger; it was thus, Tertullian argued, that Jewish behaviours and Jewish sins explained the contrast between the Old and the New Testament.

To demonstrate this peculiar malevolence, Tertullian portrayed Jews as denying the prophets, rejecting Jesus, persecuting Christians and as rebels against God. These stereotypes shaped Christian attitudes towards Jews from late antiquity into the medieval period, leaving Jewish communities vulnerable to periodic outbreaks of persecution. Although it was real people who often suffered as a result of this ugly prejudice, antisemitism as a concept largely owes its longevity to its symbolic and rhetorical power.

And this weapon has been wielded to devastating effect for centuries. The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner not only annexing the power of money but also through him and also apart from him money has become a world power and the practical spirit of the Jew has become the practical spirit of the Christian people.