Antisemitism in the context of "White movement"

Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Germany during the Nazi era, which lasted from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming the chancellor of Germany in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934. Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 under his leadership marked the outbreak of the Second World War. Throughout the ensuing conflict, Hitler was closely involved in the direction of German military operations as well as the perpetration of the Holocaust, the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims.

Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn in Austria-Hungary and moved to Germany in 1913. He was decorated during his service in the German Army in the First World War, receiving the Iron Cross. In 1919, he joined the German Workers' Party (DAP), the precursor of the Nazi Party, and in 1921, was appointed the leader of the Nazi Party. In 1923, he attempted to seize governmental power in a failed coup in Munich and was sentenced to five years in prison, serving just over a year. While there, he dictated the first volume of his autobiography and political manifesto Mein Kampf (lit. 'My Struggle'). After his early release in 1924, he gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles as well as promoting pan-Germanism, antisemitism, and anti-communism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda. He frequently denounced communism as being part of an international Jewish conspiracy. By November 1932, the Nazi Party held the most seats in the Reichstag, but not a majority. Former chancellor Franz von Papen and other conservative politicians convinced President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor on 30 January 1933. Shortly thereafter on 23 March, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act of 1933, which ultimately began the Weimar Republic's transformation into Nazi Germany.

Theodor W. Adorno (/əˈdɔːrnoʊ/ ə-DOR-noh; German: [ˈteːodoːɐ̯ aˈdɔʁno] ; born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; 11 September 1903 – 6 August 1969) was a German philosopher, musicologist, and social theorist. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the works of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and G. W. F. Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Minima Moralia (1951), and Negative Dialectics (1966)—strongly influenced the European New Left.

In an intellectual climate shaped by existentialism and logical positivism, Adorno developed a dialectical conception of history and philosophy that challenged the foundations of both, anticipating the divide that would later emerge between the analytic and continental traditions. As a classically trained musician, Adorno studied composition with Alban Berg of the Second Viennese School, influenced by his early admiration for the music of Arnold Schoenberg. Adorno's commitment to avant-garde music formed the backdrop of his subsequent writings and led to his collaboration with Thomas Mann on the latter's novel Doctor Faustus (1947), while the two men lived in California as exiles during the Second World War. Working at the newly relocated Institute for Social Research, Adorno collaborated on influential studies of authoritarianism, antisemitism, and propaganda that would later serve as models for sociological studies the institute carried out in post-war Germany.

Antisemitism, the prejudice or discrimination against Jews, has had a long history since the ancient times. While antisemitism had already been prevalent in ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, its institutionalization in European Christianity after the destruction of the ancient Jewish cultural center in Jerusalem caused two millennia of segregation, expulsions, persecutions, pogroms, genocides of Jews, which culminated in the 20th-century Holocaust in Nazi German-occupied European states, where 67% of all European Jews were murdered.

Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in late 19th-century Europe; it primarily seeks to establish and support a Jewish homeland through the colonization of the Palestine region, which corresponds to the Land of Israel in Judaism and is central to Jewish history. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.

Zionism initially emerged in Central and Eastern Europe as a secular nationalist movement in the late 19th century, in reaction to newer waves of antisemitism and in response to the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. The arrival of Zionist settlers to Palestine during this period is widely seen as the start of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the notion that the Jews' historical right to the land outweighed that of the Arabs.

Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch (/blɒk/ BLOCK; French: [maʁk leɔpɔld bɛ̃ʒamɛ̃ blɔk]; 6 July 1886 – 16 June 1944) was a French historian. He was a founding member of the Annales School of French social history. Bloch specialised in medieval history and published widely on medieval France over the course of his career. As an academic, he worked at the University of Strasbourg (1920 to 1936 and 1940 to 1941), the University of Paris (1936 to 1939), and the University of Montpellier (1941 to 1944).

Born in Lyon to an Alsatian Jewish family, Bloch was raised in Paris, where his father—the classical historian Gustave Bloch—worked at Sorbonne University. Bloch was educated at various Parisian lycées and the École Normale Supérieure, and from an early age was affected by the antisemitism of the Dreyfus affair. During the First World War, he served in the French Army and fought at the First Battle of the Marne and the Somme. After the war, he was awarded his doctorate in 1918 and became a lecturer at the University of Strasbourg. There, he formed an intellectual partnership with modern historian Lucien Febvre. Together they founded the Annales School and began publishing the journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale in 1929. Bloch was a modernist in his historiographical approach, and repeatedly emphasised the importance of a multidisciplinary engagement towards history, particularly blending his research with that on geography, sociology and economics, which was his subject when he was offered a post at the University of Paris in 1936.

Raphael Lemkin (Polish: Rafał Lemkin; 24 June 1900 – 28 August 1959) was a Polish lawyer who is known for coining the term "genocide" and for campaigning to establish the Genocide Convention, which legally defines the act. Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, he fled the country and sought asylum in the United States, where he became an academic at Duke University and campaigned vigorously to raise international awareness of the atrocities that the Axis powers were committing across occupied Europe. It was amidst this environment of World War II that Lemkin coined the term "genocide" to describe Nazi Germany's extermination policy.

As a young Jewish law student who was deeply conscious of antisemitism and the persecution of Jews, Lemkin learned about the Ottoman genocide of the Armenian people during World War I and was deeply disturbed by the absence of international provisions to charge, punish, and hold accountable those who were responsible for organizing and executing it. In his view, the suffering of the Jewish people was part of a larger pattern of like-minded atrocities occurring around the world and throughout history, such as the Holodomor.

The history of the Jews in Alexandria dates back to the founding of the city by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE. Jews in Alexandria played a crucial role in the political, economic, cultural and religious life of Hellenistic and Roman Alexandria, with Jews comprising about 35% of the city's population during the Roman era.

In the Ptolemaic period, Alexandrian Jews played a central role in the development of Hellenistic Judaism and were instrumental in the translation of the Torah from Hebrew to Koine Greek, which produced the Septuagint. Many important Jewish writers and figures came from or studied in Alexandria, such as Philo, Ben Sira, Tiberius Julius Alexander and Josephus. The position of Alexandria's Jewry began deteriorating during the Roman era, as deep antisemitic sentiment began developing amongst the city's Greek and Egyptian populations. This led to the subsequent Alexandrian pogrom in 38 CE and the Alexandria riot in 66 CE, which was in parallel with the outbreak of the First Jewish–Roman War. Alexandria's Jewry began to diminish, leading to a mass immigration of Alexandrian Jews to Rome, as well as other Mediterranean and North African cities. It appears that the Jewish community of Alexandria was completely eradicated by the end of the Diaspora Revolt in 117 CE, with various rabbinic legends associated with the final destruction of the community.