[arp242]

From a Nazi perspective, what you're saying makes little sense. It would be similar to "we should enlist Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh in the army, because they've shown to be excellent at bombing stuff". That would be silly because these people and the organisations they associate with are considered a corrupting influence. In the Nazi view, Jews consisted a corrupting influence.

"Hitler and his friends hated the Jews more than they wished for some positive outcome for Germany" really misunderstands the world-view of the Nazis, and what Hitler did and didn't believe.

Anti-Semitism came rolling out of 19th century racial science; many people self-described themselves as such. As in: "against the Semitic race" (as opposed to the Aryan race), in the same way someone might describe as "anti-" any number of things today.

A number of organisations in the late 19th century carried the label (e.g. Antisemitische Volkspartei in Germany, or Antisemitic League in France), and a number of elected candidates from other parties were explicitly and proudly self-described anti-Semitic.

From outside the Nazi world-view, it of course makes a lot more sense. A lot of the Nazi rhetoric isn't even internally consistent and it was all a load of bollocks. But I don't think you can so easily separate Nazi-ism and the second world war.

[greedo]

Anti-Semitism as a 19th century development doesn't seem historically accurate. While anti-Semites in the 19th century glommed on to racial theories as backing for their hate, the origins of anti-Semitism are millennia old.

[adastra22]

It’s true in a very strict sense: before the 19th century it was called Jew hatred. “Antisemitism” was an attempt to dress it up in a veneer of science.l, and that does date to the late 19th/early 20th centuries.

[woooooo]

As a modern, industrial phenomenon about specifically jews as an ethnicity its unique.

People generically hated every religion that wasn't theirs for millenia. The idea of hating a Semitic race after God was pronounced dead is different.

[arp242]

It's not; anti-Semitism as we know today is very much rooted in racial science (well, "science") of the 19th century. Before that it was an anti-religious thing: anti-Judaism, which was a markedly different and similar to Anti-Catholicism, anti-Protestantism, and things like that.

Especially in the context of the Nazi ideology, this really matters. Recall that the Nazis killed more Slavs than Jews, who were also considered racially inferior, and the plan was to kill many more. Nazis treated the Danish, Dutch, French, English, etc. much better (no mass executions of prisoners of war, and the occupation of those countries was markedly different from the occupation of Slavic countries).

[tptacek]

There's a lot of weird things in this comment, but the weirdest is the claim that antisemitism is a 19th century innovation; Google "expulsion of the Jews from" and see where it autocompletes for you. Similarly: pogroms in the Pale of Settlement were not motivated by (and predate) 19th century race science.

[Kranar]

No one would dispute that hatred towards Jews existed for 1000s of years, but I think you're mincing words here and being somewhat uncharitable. The kind of anti-Semitism that was based on an innate racial inferiority rather than based on religion and culture was very much a 19th century development and it was that specific form of hatred towards Jews that was widespread across Europe and America rather than an opposition towards Jewish customs and beliefs.

Indeed the term "anti-Semitism" was coined to reflect the shift in hatred towards Jews from one rooted in culture and religion to one root in race. The very fact that you acknowledge that pogroms prior to the 19th century were not based on race suggests that if you had just taken the time to actually understand what was being said you could have avoided your confusion.

[adamwk]

But I don't think that's true either. See: the Inquisition where even converted Jews weren't safe

[mistermann]

> Indeed the term "anti-Semitism" was coined to reflect the shift in hatred towards Jews from one rooted in culture and religion to one root in race.

It's kind of interesting how any such distinctions have been essentially eliminated. Nature is very mysterious.

[mmorriso]

While the impact on Jewish individuals was the same, it's true that Nazi style antisemitism focused on them as a racial group (Their ancestry), whereas previously they were targeted as a faith group (What they believed).

Your example of the Pale actually makes the point; Converting to Russian Orthodox actually released you from the rules imposed on Jews within the Pale. Conversion wouldn't save you from Nazis.

[wolf550e]

Eh.

Russian folk wisdom says "Жид крещёный - что вор прощеный. Веры нет" - "A converted Jew (slur) is like a forgiven thief - no faith/trust".

And in later times, "бить будут не по паспорту, а по морде" - you'll get beaten up on your face, not on (according to) your identification papers, a play on words meaning if you look Jewish, it doesn't matter that your papers say otherwise.

[arp242]

I didn't claim that "antisemitism is a 19th century innovation", I claimed that Anti-Semitism in the sense of "against the Semitic race", as I described in my previous comment, is a 19th century invention. A distinction I made to describe a specific part of the Nazi world view.

This is not "weird thing", it's a mainstream view that I got from mainstream Jewish authors on the history of Jews. But hey, maybe those are also weird *shrug*

And your extremely condescending attitude is not appreciated.

[tptacek]

So, I didn’t read you that way, and, fair enough. But that’s still not true. Antisemitism was racialized in Spain, too, and I think you can find sources for earlier strains. And all “scientific racism” will of course stem from the 1800s, along with science itself.

[arp242]

Actually I believe it was invented in France, although I could be misremembering that. It was certainly big in France for a time. I didn't mean to imply it was uniquely German.

[FdbkHb]

> Google "expulsion of the Jews from"

Hatred of a people based solely on religion while despicable has a different nature from racial hatred.

If you had googled "expulsion of jews from" you would notice there were many times they were allowed to stay if they converted (at least, give the appearance of). The Marrano during the times of the Spanish Inquisition is a notable example.

But if you are a jew in the era of antisemitism, there is nothing you can adopt to not be a jew. In the eyes of racists, you will always be a jew and the object of their hatred.

So, yes, 19th century antisemitism has a markedly specific nature that doesn't compare to the past.

[bsder]

Um, please explain The Merchant of Venice. c. 1600 in an England which basically had no Jews.

Or the Edict of Explusion c. 1290.

Or the Jews being under the direct whim and jurisdiction of the king. c. 1066

I can go further and further back ...

Anti-semitism is old.

[arp242]

Again, anti-Judaism is not the same thing. This is just "normal" religious persecution that has been around since forever and that many (if not all) religious groups have experienced at some point or another. Does this matter? Well, in the context of discussing Nazi world-views it does.

None of this is especially controversial among mainstream Jewish historians, as far as I know.

[reissbaker]

I think you're trying to draw a hard line distinction where only a blurry evolution exists. While antisemitism in the 19th and 20th centuries had some unique characteristics that co-evolved with other forms of racism, antisemitism existed before the 19th century and there are clear evolutionary roots e.g. "Jewish badges" [1] that date back to the 1100s, which the famous "Jude" badge from the Nazi era was a continuation of.

I don't know of many mainstream Jewish historians who would agree that antisemitism didn't exist prior to the 19th century. They would agree that racial antisemitism developed largely during the 19th century alongside pseudoscience about race in general, but that religious and economic antisemitism has existed for over a thousand years, and that the latter two also informed the development of the racial version. [2] For example, the Rhineland massacres in 1096 are generally considered to be antisemitic [3] and part of a sequence of historical mass murders of Jews that lead to the Holocaust, despite Europe not then having a clear concept of race.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_badge

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres

[dudefeliciano]

i think the main difference is that in the middle ages conversion to Christianity was a way to avoid persecution, while this was not an option under nazi Germany.

[arp242]

> I don't know of many mainstream Jewish historians who would agree that antisemitism didn't exist prior to the 19th century.

Depends on your your definition of "antisemitism"; if you mean "general prejudice against Jews", then sure, obvious that existed. But if you you mean "anti-Semitism against the Semitic race (as opposed to the Aryan race)", then that's quite a different thing.

I don't think it's a hard-line distinction; obviously there's overlap and nuance. But the move from more or less generic religious persecution to racial-based persecution was a very marked and notable shift that many many people have commented on, and that's really not very controversial.

Does this distinction matter? Well, it seems to me that it does. I don't think the holocaust would have happened without this. And all of this strongly shaped Nazi world-views, which was really the point I wanted to make.

[greedo]

This is splitting hairs in an attempt to minimize both anti-Semitism and the acts of the Nazis.

[Kranar]

The idea that it's minimizing to point out that antisemitism emerged as a form of hatred on the basis of ones race, who one is inherently and born as, as opposed to one's beliefs or customs is really quite an absurd position to take and I hope you'd take some time to reflect on your overall position on this matter.

[greedo]

But you're assuming Nazi ideology was coherent, when it clearly wasn't in almost anything. The "racial" anti-Semitism was merely a fig leaf provided by quack science of the times.

And yes, the Nazis viewed the Slavic peoples as "Untermensch", but didn't harbor as much animus towards them. They were simply in the way of the Nazi expansionist policy of Lebensraum. Whereas anti-Semitism was extremely widespread through German society and further inflamed by the Nazis.

And no, "anti-Semitism as we know today is very much rooted in racial science" is not accurate one bit. The majority of today's anti-Semitism is purely religious in nature. Oh, some white supremacists might try to invoke some bullshit the racial inferiority of the Jews, but the real hate is religious in nature. Combine that with anti-Zionism (which is often a mask for anti-Semitism) and it all falls apart.

And it's incredibly disingenuous to trot out the usual arguments about how the Nazis killed more Slavs than Jew, etc etc. These are part of the playbook that attempts to minimize the Shoah.

Finally, the bit about how the Nazis treated the Western countries much better, EXCLUDES the Jewish citizens of those countries.

I'm pretty sure you're not arguing in good faith at all, but you seem to be wanting to keep this going.

[arp242]

> But you're assuming Nazi ideology was coherent

I very explicitly said it's not: "A lot of the Nazi rhetoric isn't even internally consistent and it was all a load of bollocks"

Are you even reading what I'm writing? Your unhinged ridiculous accusations which directly contradicts what I wrote suggests you're not.

I did not mention or talk about contemporary antisemitism. Don't try to twist things.

And yes, obviously "they treated the Dutch, English etc. better" excludes Jews. It also excludes communists, and gays, and some other groups. This is a boring "gotcha" type argument.

[greedo]

You literally said:

"It's not; anti-Semitism as we know today is very much rooted in racial science (well, "science") of the 19th century."

So yes, you were talking about contemporary anti-semitism.

[arp242]

Anti-Semitism in the context of what we're talking about.

There are many different flavours of antisemitism: from Judeophobia to unhinged criticism of the Israeli state to racial. And all of those can be further subdivided. All of these are very different and worth commenting on, but all I did was describe anti-Semitism as viewed by the Nazi world-view and some background on that. That is the only thing I'm talking about. I don't think I need to include an essay on antisemitism to make such a point.

[paganel]

Anti-semitism wasn't a major factor in European history until the (second-ish part) of the 19th century, for the simple reason that the European Jewish population wasn't that big of a presence for hundreds of years. Once the Enlightenment and French Revolution happened and once the Jewish population started to get some rights (which gets us into the 19th century) then things changed.

Yes, I do know about the very unfortunate anti-semitic acts carried out in German cities as part of the First Crusade, but that kind of proves my point, starting with the 1200s-1300s the Jewish population throughout (what would later be called Western) Europe stopped being a thing.

[reissbaker]

Jews not "being a thing" in Europe from the 1200s until the 1800s is so preposterously wrong it's hard to know where to start. The Spanish expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, with the subsequent very famous Spanish Inquisition, might be a decent place to start reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Jews_from_Spain

Spain is about as West as you can go and still be in Europe...

And where do you think the Jews in the 1800s in Europe came from? Of course, they'd been there all along, except in the countries that actively ethnically cleansed them like Spain.

[paganel]

I didn't count the current territory of Spain up until the late 1400s as "proper" Western European, in fact most of the histories of Spain do not dwell on the history of Al-Andalus in the 14th century for too long, if at all.

> Spain is about as West as you can go and still be in Europe...

Geographically, of course, but in this type of historical discourse geography isn't the ultimate decider. Notice how Northern countries like Norway, Sweden and even Finland are considered as part of "Western Europe", even though there's only about a 3-hour drive between Sankt Petersburg and the Russian-Finnish border.

[reissbaker]

This is once again so wrong it's incredible. History of Spain not including 1492, the year Columbus set sail? Really? The beginning of European colonialism of the Americas is ignored by "most of the histories" of Europe and Spain?

By the way, historians refer to 1400s as the 15th century, not the 14th century. FYI. That's how century counting works.

And there was no Al Andalus at that point, either; the last trace of Muslim rule, the Emirate of Granada, had lost nearly all of its territory before surrendering their final fragment in January of 1492.

[paganel]

Yes, at the end of the 1400s Spain and Portugal were regarded as the "periphery" of Western Europe, they had just gotten "in" more or less as a result of La Reconquista and of the Aragon kings having started doing their thing in the Southern part of Italian peninsula in the 1400s (especially Napoli) but nothing more than that.

And I was referring to the 14th century not in connection to 1492 (because, as a fact, I do know that 1492 was in the 15th century, even though I do like the Italians calling it "il Quattrocento", but I digress), but to the Spanish 14th century being outside the civilization of Western Europe, which it was, because in the 14th century most of Spain was still civilizational Arab in the parts that counted. During that time Granada was the 3rd largest city in geographical Europe, while Cordoba was 9th largest (going by wikipedia [1]), and yet you don't see that many mentions of them when it comes to the history of the European Middle Ages. Which is to say that back in the Spanish 1300s, when the Jewish presence was still of importance in Spain, the then territory of Spain was not civilizational European.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_citie....)

[chuckadams]

I wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition.

[arp242]

There have always been Jews in Europe. Martin Luther famously spent quite some time ranting about them.

All I said is that the shape of antisemitism was different before the 19th century, and that this distinction matters. Not that persecution of Jews didn't exist before that time, and certainly not that there were not Jews in Europe.

Whether it's a major factor in European history is somewhat subjective. It's certainly a major factor in Jewish history.

[seabass-labrax]

I wouldn't agree with the assertion that it wasn't a major factor. The repeated violence against Jews and their expulsion from various areas is not a singular event, but forms a significant common thread across European history. It has happened so many times that the idea of persecuting Jews became a part of European culture, and thus gave the Nazis their inspiration for the Holocaust.

The massacre at York in 1190 took the lives of about a hundred Jews, whilst the population of York at that time was somewhere around 7000. As a proportion of the population, that makes it as bloody, possibly considerably more so, than the Holocaust within their respective scopes. I would posit therefore that antisemitism was a very major factor, but the decentralised, often pastoral political geography of pre-industrial Europe makes it harder to see the extent of that antisemitism.

[paganel]

I did include the caveat "starting with the 1200-1300s", and I did have the expulsion of the Jewish population from England in mind when writing that down.

After that I wouldn't say that there were"repeated" violences against Jews (when it comes to Western Europe) for the simple reason that there were almost no Jews around against whom to have that violence anymore. All that changed starting with the 19th century.

[seabass-labrax]

For the scope of England, I think you are probably right. However, Wikipedia lists a number of events that occurred in western Europe well after the crusades, including one in Spain (referencing the Jewish Encyclopedia):

> https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10442-martinez-f...: The great massacre occurred at Seville June 6, 1391, when several thousand Jews were killed and many forced to accept baptism.

If an estimate of Seville's population at that time at around 90,000 is to be believed, that would make the relative brutality equivalent again to the York incident.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1021985/thirty-largest-c...

This is rapidly exceeding my own background knowledge on the topic, but it looks to me as if re-settlement by Jews (and then subsequent violence against them) was a pattern all through the middle ages.

[WolfCop]

Yes, “very unfortunate”.

[te_chris]

Not to mention that Hitler took a lot of influence from Southern USA racists/Jim Crow. The idea of racial purity was thoroughly globalised by the time the Nazis took power.

[mrguyorama]

American's LOVED eugenics for giving them an excuse to keep believing what they already wanted to believe. Other southerners took the approach of letting their pastors tell them that "it was god's will that the negro serve us" and that keeping slaves was outright the morally upstanding thing to do with "savage races"

We also used eugenics as a "science" to make laws that allowed us to non-consensually sterilize "lesser" people.

We never actually dealt with this hateful undercurrent in our society. Large sections of america still believe in a hierarchical world order where their "type" of person is at the top and other "types" of people are less deserving. It has been holding us back and ruining our country for 250 years.