Modern antisemitism

In 1879 the German journalist Wilhelm Marr coined the word 'antisemitism' to describe the anti-Jewish campaigns then under way in central Europe. Hostility toward Jews in Christian Europe was centuries old, but it had mostly been framed in religious terms, and a Jew who converted to Christianity could in principle escape it. The new movement described Jews instead as a separate people, or 'race', defined by supposed inherited characteristics. In that view, as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum explains, conversion could not change a person's 'Jewishness'. The word 'Semite' itself came from the study of languages, and the term's apparent reference to a 'Semitic race' was misleading from the start, which is why many scholars and Britannica now write it without a hyphen.¹⁵

Marr's pamphlet The Victory of Jewry over Germandom, published in March 1879, argued in secular rather than religious terms that Jews had come to dominate German life, and it ended with the cry 'Finis Germaniae', the end of Germany. It became a bestseller and went through twelve editions in its first year. The same year, the court preacher Adolf Stoecker made hostility to Jews a theme of his Christian Social party, and in November the prominent historian Heinrich von Treitschke wrote that 'the Jews are our misfortune', setting off what became known as the Berlin antisemitism dispute. In 1880 and 1881, campaigners including the schoolteacher Bernhard Förster gathered about 265,000 signatures on a petition asking the government to restrict Jewish immigration and bar Jews from positions of authority. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck declined to respond, and the petition failed, but it showed that the movement could draw mass support.¹²³⁴

These ideas drew on the scientific racism and Social Darwinism of the period and spread beyond Germany. In Austria, politicians such as Georg von Schönerer and Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna, used antisemitism as a political tool, and both influenced the young Adolf Hitler. In France, the Dreyfus affair, which began in 1894 when a Jewish army officer was falsely convicted of treason, divided the country for twelve years before his exoneration in 1906. Historians differ on how sharply to separate this modern, racial antisemitism from older religious anti-Judaism. Britannica describes it as different in nature from earlier prejudice, while other scholars stress how much it drew on centuries-old Christian stereotypes. Most agree that the racial form provided the foundation for Nazi ideology and the Holocaust.¹⁵⁶