Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By simmons on July 8, 2015

The end of the Middle Ages brought little change in Jews position in Europe, and the Catholic Reformation renewed anti-Jewish legislation and reinforced the system of ghettoized segregation in Roman Catholic countries. Jews remained subject to occasional massacres, such as those that occurred during wars between Eastern Orthodox Ukrainians and Roman Catholic Poles in the mid-17th century, which rivaled the worst massacres of Jews in the Middle Ages. Periodic persecutions of Jews in western Europe continued until the late 18th century, when the Enlightenment changed their position, at least in the West. It did not necessarily reduce anti-Semitism. Although the major Enlightenment figures championed the light of reason in debunking what they regarded as the superstitions of Christian belief, their thinking did not lead to any greater acceptance of Jews. Instead of holding Jews responsible for the Crucifixion, Enlightenment thinkers blamed them for the advent of Christianity and for the injustices and cruelty committed by followers of monotheistic religions. Some of the most prominent, including Denis Diderot and Voltaire, pilloried the Jews as a group alienated from society who practiced a primitive and superstitious religion.

Until the French Revolution of 1789, the status of Jews in Europe remained tenuous. Treated as outsiders, they had few civil rights. They were taxed as a community, not as individuals. Exclusion from the larger society reinforced their religious identity and strengthened their communal institutions, which served judicial and quasi-governmental functions. In the French Revolution, with its promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the rights of citizenship were extended to Jews. Still, respect and rights were conditioned on the willingness of Jews to abandon their age-old customs and their communal identity. This was the meaning of the slogan To the Jews as individuals everything, to the Jews as a people, nothing.

France was the vanguard of the movement that gave civic and legal equality to the Jews. Napoleons conquest of the German states led to emancipation in some of them, but after his defeat, Jews faced a series of legal setbacks. Full emancipation of Jews throughout Germany came only with the unification of Germany in 1871.

Even in France itself, emancipation did not end anti-Semitism but merely transformed it. With the emergence of nationalism as the defining factor in European society in the 19th century, anti-Semitism acquired a racial rather than a religious character as ethnically homogeneous peoples decried the existence in their midst of alien Jewish elements. Pseudoscientific theories asserting that the Jews were inferior to the so-called Aryan race gave anti-Semitism new respectability and popular support, especially in countries where Jews could be made scapegoats for existing social or political grievances. In this new climate, anti-Semitism became a powerful political tool, as politicians were quick to discover. In the 1890s Karl Lueger won the mayoralty of Viennaa city of diverse culture and many Jewswith his anti-Semitic campaigns. In both Germany and Austria in the late 19th century, anti-Semitism became an organized movement with its own political parties.

The Russian Empire had restricted Jews to western regions known as the Pale of Settlement ever since the partitions of Poland (in the 1790s) had brought large numbers of Jews under Russian rule. The empires May Laws of 1882, enacted after widespread anti-Jewish riots, or pogroms, had broken out in the Russian Pale the previous year, stripped Jews of their rural landholdings and restricted them to the towns and cities within the Pale. These measures, which crippled many Jews activities as rural traders and artisans, spurred the immigration of more than a million Jews to the United States over the next four decades. Another result was a somewhat smaller immigration of Jews to the countries of western Europe, where anti-Semitic agitators exploited xenophobic sentiments against them.

anti-Semitic caricature United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumIn France the Dreyfus Affair became a focal point for anti-Semitism. In 1894 Alfred Dreyfus, a highly placed Jewish army officer, was falsely accused of treason. His final vindication (in 1906) was hampered by the French military and the bitterly anti-Semitic French press, and the wrenching controversy over the case left lasting scars on French political life.

During the first decade of the 20th century, there was a period of moderate decline in anti-Semitic tensionsexcept in Russia, where serious pogroms occurred in Kishinyov (now Chiinu, Moldova) in 1903 and 1905 and where the Russian secret police published a forgery entitled Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which, as the supposed blueprint for a Jewish plot to achieve world domination, furnished propaganda for subsequent generations of anti-Semitic agitators.

The widespread economic and political dislocations caused by World War I notably intensified anti-Semitism in Europe after the war. In addition, the many Jewish Bolshevik leaders in the Russian Revolution of November 1917 gave anti-Semites a new focus for their prejudices in the threat of Jewish Bolshevism. In postwar Germany, anti-Semites joined forces with revanchist nationalists in attempting to blame the Jews for that countrys defeat. In eastern Europe, anti-Semitism became widespread in Poland, Hungary, and Romania in the interwar period.

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anti-Semitism :: Anti-Semitism in modern Europe ...

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