Posted by Antisemitism During the Enlightenment
The 18th century (the Age of Reason) presented a dilemma for the Jews. On the one hand, corporate, hierarchical forms of society were being dismantled in favor of individual equality of citizens before the law. On the other hand, these changes often required assimilation and the forswearing of many of the marks of Jewish identity. Persecution had pushed the Jews into ghettos where they called on their age-old traditions to protect them; but these traditions also made them a continuing object of contempt and hatred.
Even Voltaire, the doyen of the Enlightenment, who, in almost every other matter, was a beacon of toleration, held the Jews in contempt. For example, during WWII Sorbonne professor Henri Labroue curried favor with the occupying German regime by compiling a volume of Voltaire’s anti-Jewish writings; it ran to nearly 250 pages. Another mark of his “obsession” with Jews came in his 1764 Philosophical Dictionary, a work of purportedly wider scope: some thirty out of its 118 articles attack Jews, and the article “Jew” is the single longest. The Dictionary entry on “Jew”—after allowing that the Jews are “an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched”—charitably concludes: “Still, we ought not to burn them.”
Antisemitism in Eastern Europe
By 1850 the majority of European Jews had settled in Eastern Europe. In Russia, Jews were largely confined to the Pale of Settlement, which included all of Belarus, Lithuania and Moldova, much of present-day Ukraine, parts of eastern Latvia, eastern Poland, and some parts of western Russia. Jews in the Pale were frequently persecuted by pogroms, semi-organized riots that broke out from time to time, maiming and killing Jews of all ages. It is estimated that over fifty years these pogroms killed 50,000 Jews.
Antisemitic canards have abounded almost since the time of Christ. In addition to killing the Savior, Jews have been charged with poisoning wells, desecrating the host, and, most infamously, murdering Christian children to use their blood in Jewish rituals, such as the Passover Seder. The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion is a fabricated antisemitic text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination. The hoax, was first published in Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the 20th century. According to the claims made by some of its publishers, the Protocols are the minutes of a late 19th-century meeting where Jewish leaders discussed their goal of global Jewish hegemony subverting the morals of Gentiles, and by controlling the press and the world’s economies.
Henry Ford funded printing of 500,000 copies of the Protocols that were distributed throughout the United States in the 1920s. The Nazis sometimes used the Protocols as propaganda against Jews; it was assigned by some German teachers to be read by German schoolchildren after the Nazis came to power in 1933. It is still widely available today in numerous languages, in print and on the Internet, and continues to be presented by some proponents as a genuine document.
The Holocaust. The nadir of antisemitism was reached during the regime of Adolph Hitler, when six million Jews were murdered with an efficiency and ruthlessness that the world has never seen and hopefully will never see again. This is one of the few examples in history where a people determined to eliminate another people from the face of the earth. That this crime occurred in modern times and was carried out by the most cultured people in the West, should give us all pause, and warn of us the evil we are all capable of.
The Return of Antisemitism. The last few years have seen a surge in antisemitic hate crimes in the United States. According to the FBI, in 2017, the last year data was available, the number of crimes against Jews (1,749) was greater than the number against Muslims (325), against Hispanics (552), against the LGBT community (1,338) or any other group, with the exception of African-Americans (2,458). However, if we take the ratio of crimes to population, Jews are 58 times more likely to be victims of hate crimes than are African-Americans.
Antisemitism is not returning; it never left. But recent years have seen an increase in the willingness of anti-Semites to make their hatred known. White nationalists are coming out of the closet and are bolder, louder and more violent than any time since the Second World War. We cannot stay silent in the face of this evil.
