Anti-semitism

10 Pages 2492 Words

European anti-Semitism was the building blocks for Nazi propaganda. European anti-Semitism is an outgrowth of Christianity. Since the time of the Roman Empire, Christian leaders preached boundlessly against Jews. It escalated from generation to generation, and as long as the Jews rejected Jesus as their Messiah, they were going against the whole belief system of Christianity. The idea that the Jews killed their savior also arose from that time period, bringing forward the notion that all Jews of forever were responsible for Jesus’ death. As the Medieval period came, the Christians’ hatred for Jews further articulated and was brought to a new level. The Christians in the medieval world saw Jews in twofold opposition to Christianity: they rejected his revelation and were his killers. Church members had much detested the Jews on the basis that they should have accepted Jesus as their Messiah. Consequently, persecution and killing of the Jews became a part of everyday life, leaving many regions of Western Europe without any Jews by the end of the sixteenth century.
Entering the nineteenth century, German anti-Semitism went through an acute transformation. It was then that it made its change from a religious issue, to a very racial one. Germans naturally detested Jews with a passion. Nineteenth century Germans now saw Jews as the symbol for everything wrong in their declining economy, even though they made up but a mere one percent of the population. Soon the cultural taboos that had formerly shaped the moral fabric of Germany at the time lost all influence. It was then that German anti-Semitism reached a high point: false, cruel, yet indisputable accusations. By the time the Nazi party instituted totalitarian control, all that remained was to build on the framework provided by the nineteenth century. A framework which included anti-Semitism being common knowledge, Germans’ obsessive hatred toward Jews, the common beli...