Antisemitism in Europe

Antisemitism (also spelled anti-Semitism)—prejudice, hatred of, or discrimination against Jews has existed since antiquity. In the 20th century, antisemitism in Europe led to the rise of the Nazis, the the Holocaust (or Jewish genocide) of six-million people and the dislocation of the continent's surviving Jewish population.

Quotes

• The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices, both ecclesiastical and temporal, which they can never get rid of. They are all infected with episcopal and presbyterian creeds, and confessions of faith. They all believe that great Principle which has produced this boundless universe, Newton’s universe and Herschell’s universe, came down to this little ball, to be spit upon by Jews. And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.
  • John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson (22 January 1825). The section in italics is often attached to fragments from an earlier letter from Adams to Jefferson (17 January 1820)

• In short, while the 'final solution' was unmistakably German in design, it is impossible to overlook the enthusiasm with which many other European peoples joined in the killing. Nor did the anti-Semitic violence of the early 1940s come as a bolt from the blue. It had been prefigured by the escalating persecutions of the 1930s. It did not take much to move some Poles from prejudice to discrimination to violent exclusion and finally, as in Jedwabne, extermination. Yet the point about Jedwabne is that it is simply an extreme, and now well-documented, case of a Europe-wide phenomenon. Collaborators could be found not only in countries that allied themselves with Germany - Italy, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria - but also in Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Greece and the Soviet Union, countries the Germans invaded and occupied. Some were undoubtedly motivated by a hatred of the Jews as violent as that felt by the Nazi leadership. Others were actuated by envy or base greed, seizing the opportunity afforded by German rule to steal their neighbours' property. Self-preservation also played its part. There were even Jewish collaborators, like the uniformed men of the Office to Combat Usury and Profiteering who policed the Warsaw ghetto, or the leaders of the various Jews' Councils who helped organize the liquidation of the ghettos, or the concentration camp prisoners who accepted a measure of delegated authority in the (usually vain) hope of saving themselves.
  • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp. 454-455

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Antisemitism in Europe on Wikipedia