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Antisemitism

In: Social Issues

Submitted By myel123
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Antisemitism in Nazi Germany The term antisemitism has been defined in a variety of ways since its creation in 1879, but boils down to simply, the hatred of Jews. While antisemitic prejudices can be traced back long before the Holocaust, the state-sponsored mass murder of roughly six million Jews in addition to millions of other non-Jews by Nazi Germany, it is of course the most extreme example in human history. This paper will examine the invention of the word itself by Wilhelm Marr and what its invention contributed to the Nazi ideology, how the political status and long-standing hatred of the Jews influenced support for antisemitic prejudices, and the ideas that Nazism drew on for their own form of antisemitic beliefs. As previously mentioned, the term antisemitism was coined by journalist Wilhelm Marr to contrast his scientific and racial hatred of the Jews with religious forms of anti-Judaism. While Marr could have used the conventional German term, “Judenhass,” to refer to his hatred of the Jews, his new term eliminated the any religious connotation that the conventional word may have carried with it. The distinction between the hatred of the Jews for political, economic, or religious reasons and the hatred of them for racially based reasons is important to antisemitic beliefs because while in theory, the Jews could have adjusted their political, economic, and religious practices to assimilate with society, but attributing the problem to their supposed “race” left them no outlet. Prior to the invention of the term, enlightenment antisemitism and liberal antisemitism offered some explanation aside from racially based issues as to why the Jews couldn’t assimilate with the rest of society effectively. For example, enlightenment antisemitism from the 18th century suggested that the Jews simply needed to be given the same rights as other citizens to become

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