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Antisemitism

hostility, prejudice, or discrimination against Jews

Antisemitism (also spelled anti-Semitism or anti-semitism) is hostility to, prejudice, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is usually considered to be a form of racism.

Of all the bigotries that savage the human temper there is none so stupid as the anti-Semitic. It has no basis in reason; it is not rooted in faith; it aspires to no ideal; it is just one of those dank and unwholesome weeds that grow in the morass of racial hatred. —David Lloyd George

Quotes

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Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

A

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  • Political antisemitism developed because the Jews were a separate body, while social discrimination arose because of the growing equality of Jews with all other groups.
    • Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, San Diego: Harvest Harcourt [1985 edition], 1951, p. 54; opening of Chapter 3 "The Jews and Society" (Antisemitism, Chapter 4)

B

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  • I know you hesitate to appoint the man I recommended because he is a Jew. Who do you think you are, Harvard?
    • Harvard Professor G. D. Birkhoff from "A Century of mathematics in America", Volume 1, By Peter L. Duren, Richard Askey, Uta C. Merzbach pg 235.

C

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  • "Dozens of Judensaus... intersect with the portrayal of the Jew as a Christ killer. Various illustrations of the murder of Simon of Trent blended images of Judensau, the devil, the murder of little Simon himself, and the Crucifixion. In the seventeenth-century engraving from Frankfurt … a well-dressed, very contemporary-looking Jew has mounted the sow backward and holds her tail, while a second Jew sucks at her milk and a third eats her feces. The horned devil, himself wearing a Jewish badge, looks on and the butchered Simon, splayed as if on a cross, appears on a panel above."
    • Jeremy Cohen (2007) quoted in Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen, Oxford University Press, p. 208, ISBN 0195178416

D

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  • There has been no tragedy in modern times equal in its awful effects to the fight on the Jew in Germany. It is an attack on civilization, comparable only to such horrors as the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade. It has set civilization back a hundred years, and in particular has it made the settlement and understanding of race problems more difficult and more doubtful. It is widely believed by many that the Jewish problem in Germany was episodic, and is already passing. Visitor to the Olympic Games are apt to have gotten that impression. They saw no Jewish oppression. Just as Northern visitors to Mississippi see no Negro oppression.

E–L

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  • So why did National Socialism take up the Jewish question in its programme already during the period of the party’s struggle? The Jewish population had in percentage terms relative to the rest of the population a disproportionately high share in the management of the economy, in the free professions, in the press, in the radio, in the theatre, etc. So the enmity between host people and guests, between the Jewish part and the non-Jewish part of the population grew to such an extent that this would have doubtless led at some point to an explosion. That was why the leadership was concerned to reduce the tension in an orderly, normal and legal way. This enmity had been present already for a long time in the German population, because the Jews had been able to enrich themselves with brutality and violence, and to let the German people starve. Especially during the period of hyperinflation dramatic events had arisen and the Jews themselves partially admit that they had enriched themselves at the expense of the German people, their host people.
  • Without anti-Semitism, Nazism would have been inconceivable, both as an ideology and as a catalyst of the emotions. As for German society only two of its many sub-groups, the cultivated liberal minority among the bourgeoisie, and the politically educated segment of the working class, were relatively immune to anti-Semitism.
    • Richard Grunberger, "The 12-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany 1933-1945", New York: NY, Holt, Rinehart and Winston (1971) p. 466
  • [A]nti-Semitism was rife in almost all varieties of socialism.
    • Sidney Hook, "Home Truths About Marx," Commentary (September 1978), reprinted in Marxism and Beyond, Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield (1983) p. 117.
  • Anti-Semitism means spreading enmity towards the Jews. When the accursed tsarist monarchy was living its last days it tried to incite ignorant workers and peasants against the Jews. The tsarist police, in alliance with the landowners and the capitalists, organised pogroms against the Jews. The landowners and capitalists tried to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants who were tortured by want against the Jews. In other countries, too, we often see the capitalists fomenting hatred against the Jews in order to blind the workers, to divert their attention from the real enemy of the working people, capital. Hatred towards the Jews persists only in those countries where slavery to the landowners and capitalists has created abysmal ignorance among the workers and peasants. Only the most ignorant and downtrodden people can believe the lies and slander that are spread about the Jews. This is a survival of ancient feudal times, when the priests burned heretics at the stake, when the peasants lived in slavery, and when the people were crushed and inarticulate. This ancient, feudal ignorance is passing away; the eyes of the people are being opened. It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. Among the Jews there are kulaks, exploiters and capitalists, just as there are among the Russians, and among people of all nations. The capitalists strive to sow and foment hatred between workers of different faiths, different nations and different races. Those who do not work are kept in power by the power and strength of capital. Rich Jews, like rich Russians, and the rich in all countries, are in alliance to oppress, crush, rob and disunite the workers. Shame on accursed tsarism which tortured and persecuted the Jews. Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations. Long live the fraternal trust and fighting alliance of the workers of all nations in the struggle to overthrow capital.
  • Of all the bigotries that savage the human temper there is none so stupid as the anti-Semitic. It has no basis in reason; it is not rooted in faith; it aspires to no ideal; it is just one of those dank and unwholesome weeds that grow in the morass of racial hatred.

M

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  • Anti-Semitism is a Socialist movement, only nobler and purer in form than Social Democracy.
    • Wilhelm Marr , as quoted in The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, Peter Pulzer, revised edition, Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 45.
  • Any discussion of anti-Semitism is frequently lost in a misunderstanding of the distinction between Hebrews, Jews, and Zionists. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language describes a Hebrew as a member of the Semitic people, a race descended from Abraham of the Old Testament which, ironically enough, also includes most Arabs. A Jew, on the other hand, is a adherent of Judaism, a religion handed down by the Israelites. A Zionist is a member of a political movement concerned with preserving and furthering the aims of the state of Israel. These constitute three separate issues: race, religion, and politics.
    • Jim Marrs Rule by Secrecy (HarperCollins, 2001)
  • But overall, the political Right tended to oppose Jewish equality, and to eschew cooperation with Jews. This exclusion meant that politically active European Jews often had few political choices other than the political Left.
    • Philip Mendes, Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance (2014) Springer, pg. 11
  • World Jewry has been, for sixteen years, despite our policy, an irreconcilable enemy of Fascism. In Italy our policy has led, in the Semitic elements, to what can today be called a true rush to board the ship.

N

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P

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  • Marx and the early French socialist, developed antisemitism ideals that have characterized much of the Left to this day.

R

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  • The Holocaust was the product not of Christendom, but of Christendom's collapse. The destruction of Christendom effected (1) the rejection of Catholic natural law and (2) the rise of the absolute nation-state, previously impossible because popes could depose and counterbalance kings. Hitler, to be sure, contributed a neo-paganism and anti-Semitism all his own. But in mobilizing opinion and wielding power, he was helped more by these two innovations than by any Catholic doctrines.

S

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  • We have to be clear that while antisemitism is a threat to Jews everywhere, it is also a threat to democratic governance itself. The antisemites who marched in Charlottesville don’t just hate Jews. They hate the idea of multiracial democracy. They hate the idea of political equality. They hate immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ people, women, and anyone else who stands in the way of a whites-only America. They accuse Jews of coordinating a massive attack on white people worldwide, using people of color and other marginalized groups to do their dirty work.
  • The forces fomenting antisemitism are the forces arrayed against oppressed people around the world, including Palestinians; the struggle against antisemitism is also the struggle for Palestinian freedom. I stand in solidarity with my friends in Israel, in Palestine, and around the world who are trying to resolve conflict, diminish hatred, and promote dialogue, cooperation, and understanding.
  • Zosa Szajkowski concluded his painstakingly researched article, 'The Jewish Saint-Simonians and Socialist Anti-Semitism in France,' by noting that try as he might, he could not find a single word on behalf of Jews in the whole of French socialist literature from 1820 to 1920.
    • Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, Why the Jew? The Reason for Antisemitism, Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (2003) [1983]), p. 128, from the 1947 research paper by Zosa Szajkowski, "The Jewish Saint-Simonians and Socialist Anti-Semitism in France."
  • The anti‐Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to him. He has placed himself on other ground from the beginning. If out of courtesy he consents for a moment to defend his point of view, he lends himself but does not give himself. He tries simply to project his intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse. I mentioned awhile back some remarks by anti‐Semites, all of them absurd: "I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc." Never believe that anti‐ Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.
  • Following publication of the first edition of this book, some individual anti-Semites and anti-Semitic groups began to utilize parts of what Israel Shahak and I wrote about Jewish fundamentalists to justify their hatred of Jews. They alleged that by revealing ideas of Jewish fundamentalists we have confirmed generalizations about the "evil nature" of Jews. They have taken our criticism of Jewish fundamentalism out of context and have utilized it in an invalid manner for their ugly purpose. … It should be obvious that Israel Shahak and I abhor what these anti-Semites do but that we are not responsible for them or for what they do.
  • The anti‐Semite understands nothing about modern society. He would be incapable of conceiving of a constructive plan; his action cannot reach the level of the methodical; it remains on the ground of passion. To a long‐term enterprise he prefers an explosion of rage analogous to the running amuck of the Malays. His intellectual activity is confined to interpretation; he seeks in historical events the signs of the presence of an evil power. Out of this spring those childish and elaborate fabrications which give him his resemblance to the extreme paranoiacs. In addition, anti‐Semitism channels evolutionary drives toward the destruction of certain men, not of institutions. An anti‐Semitic mob will consider it has done enough when it has massacred some Jews and burned a few synagogues. It represents, therefore, a safety valve for the owning classes, who encourage it and thus substitute for a dangerous hate against their regime a beneficent hate against particular people. Above all this naive dualism is eminently reassuring to he anti‐Semite himself. If all he has to do is to remove Evil, that means that the Good is already given. He has no need to seek it in anguish, to invent it, to scrutinize it patiently when he has found it, to prove it in action, to verify it by its consequences, or, finally, to shoulder he responsibilities of the moral choice be has made. It is not by chance that the great outbursts of anti‐Semitic rage conceal a basic optimism. The anti‐Semite as cast his lot for Evil so as not to have to cast his lot for Good. The more one is absorbed in fighting Evil, he less one is tempted to place the Good in question. One does not need to talk about it, yet it is always understood in the discourse of the anti‐Semite and it remains understood in his thought. When he has fulfilled his mission as holy destroyer, the Lost Paradise will reconstitute itself. For the moment so many tasks confront the anti‐Semite that he does not have time to think about it. He is in the breach, fighting, and each of his outbursts of rage is a pretext to avoid the anguished search for the Good.
  • Anti-Zionism is all but indistinguishable from anti-Semitism in practice and often in intent, however much progressives try to deny this.
    • Bret L. Stephens, A Despicable Cartoon in The Times, 28 April 2019, The New York Times
  • Whenever a Jew is killed, it is for the benefit of Islam.
    • Ahmad Sirhindi, quoted from Bostom, A. G. (2015). Sharia versus freedom: The legacy of Islamic totalitarianism.
  • Jews in Medina are singled out as "men whose malice and enmity was aimed at the Apostle of God". The Yahūd in this literature appear not only as malicious, but also deceitful, cowardly and totally lacking resolve. However, they have none of the demonic qualities attributed to them in mediaeval Christian literature, neither is there anything comparable to the overwhelming preoccupation with Jews and Judaism (except perhaps in the narratives on Muhammad’s encounters with Medinan Jewry) in Muslim traditional literature. Except for a few notable exceptions... the Jews in the Sira and the Maghazi are even heroic villains. Their ignominy stands in marked contrast to Muslim heroism, and in general, conforms to the Qura'nic image of "wretchedness and baseness stamped upon them."

T

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  • We are up against a failure of Americans to take seriously the pitch Jewhating attained so quickly in Europe in the thirties, for example, because Americans think Europe and the thirties so far away. They know about evil Germans, sheeplike Jews, and heroic Americans, but are not taught to see the war against the Jews as a culmination to centuries of Jewhating. Americans are told lies about the base of Nazism, so that we imagine Jewhating goes with a lack of education: working-class people are-as with white racism in this country-blamed. We are not told of the doctors and doctorates trained in Europe's finest universities. For most Americans the Holocaust blurs safely, almost pleasantly, with other terrible events of the past, like Bubonic Plague in the Middle Ages. Nor have most Americans paid much attention to the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union, or Argentina, or Ethiopia, unless an ideological point is to be scored against these nations.

W

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  • The Jews were seen as the most immediate threat to racial purity inside Germany, and as the main motor of resistance outside the country. A policy of extreme anti-Semitism would accordingly be a central concern of the government in peace first and in war later. Furthermore, a key internal need was the urgency of increasing the birthrate of the allegedly better and reducing the birthrate of the supposedly inferior racial stocks within the German population, measures that required a dictatorial regime, which alone could in addition prepare for, and hope to succeed in, the wars a racial policy called for in external affairs. Measured by the criterion of feeding a growing German population with the products of its own agricultural land, the boundaries Germany had once had were almost as useless as those of the 1920s; and thus a revision of the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919 could be only a propaganda excuse and never a goal of German policy. The vast reaches of additional land to be obtained would never be granted peacefully, and war was therefore both necessary and inevitable.
    • 'Gerhard L. Weinberg. A World at Arms : A Global History of World War II, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
  • There is no official anti-Semitism in Russia; anti-Semitism in Russia is a crime against the State.
    • Chaim Weizmann. The Jewish People and Palestine. London: Zionist Organization, 1939. p. 7

Dialogue

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Soloviev: Now, Golovinski, to begin with…I hate jews. They are a sly race who will creep in and destroy the purity of our Russian culture!
So, I want you to write me a piece on this subject…and make sure it makes a clear case!
Golivinski: Excuse me sir!
Soloviev: Back so soon? What is it Golovinski?
Golovinski: Here is the article you asked for.
Soloviev: In only one hour? Let em read it.
Where did you get these official statistics?
Golivinski: Oh, I made them up! No one would dare to challenge them.
Soloviev: Good work! From here on you will write for our regular campaign against the new modernization!
Golvinski: Why that?
Soloviev: All liberal, capitalistic, socialistic movements are directed by jews. We must expose them.
They are the anti-christ!
Golivinski: But sir, shouldn’t we keep this political?
Soloviev: In Russia religion and politics are the same!
Our people will believe anything negative about the Jews! Go ahead boy!
  • Will Eisner, The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, (10/2/2005), pp. 45-48.
J. Robert Oppenheimer: You're talking about turning theory into a practical weapons system faster than the Nazis.
Leslie Groves: Who have a twelve month head start.
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Eighteen.
Leslie Groves: How could you possibly know that?
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Our fast neutron research took six months. The man they've undoubtedly put in charge will have made that leap instantly.
Leslie Groves: Who do you think they put in charge?
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Werner Heisenberg. He has the most intuitive understanding of atomic structure I've ever seen.
Leslie Groves: You know his work?
J. Robert Oppenheimer: I know him. Just like I know Walter Bothe, von Weizsäcker, Diebner... In a straight race, the Germans win. We've got one hope.
Leslie Groves: Which is?
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Antisemitism.
Leslie Groves: What?
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Hitler called quantum physics "Jewish science", said it right to Einstein's face. Our one hope is that Hitler is so, so blinded by hate that he's denied Heisenberg proper resources, because it'll take vast resources.

See also

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Look up antisemitism in Wiktionary, the free dictionary
  1. ↑ Il discorso di Trieste. archivioluce. Retrieved on 2021-01-04.
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