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.
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👉 Antisemitism in Europe in the context of Israel
Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in the Southern Levant region of West Asia. It borders Lebanon to the north, Syria to the northeast, Jordan to the east and Egypt to the southwest. Israel occupies the Palestinian territories of the West Bank in the east and the Gaza Strip in the southwest, as well as the Syrian Golan Heights in the northeast. Israel's western coast lies on the Mediterranean Sea, the southern tip reaches the Red Sea, and the east includes the Earth's lowest point near the Dead Sea. Jerusalem is the government seat and proclaimed capital, while Tel Aviv is Israel's largest urban area and economic centre.
The Land of Israel is synonymous with Palestine or the Holy Land. In antiquity it was home to the Canaanites and later the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Its location at a continental crossroads brought demographic shifts under various empires. Nineteenth-century European antisemitism fuelled the Zionist movement for a Jewish homeland. Britain endorsed this goal in the 1917 Balfour Declaration and ruled Mandatory Palestine from 1920. Jewish immigration and British policies intensified Arab-Jewish tensions, and the 1947 United Nations (UN) Partition Plan led to a civil war.
In this Dossier
Antisemitism in Europe in the context of Antisemitism
Antisemitism or Jew-hatred is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who harbours it is called an antisemite. Whether antisemitism is considered a form of racism depends on the school of thought. Antisemitic tendencies may be motivated primarily by negative sentiment towards Jews as a people or negative sentiment towards Jews with regard to Judaism. In the former case, usually known as racial antisemitism, a person's hostility is driven by the belief that Jews constitute a distinct race with inherent traits or characteristics that are repulsive or inferior to the preferred traits or characteristics within that person's society. In the latter case, known as religious antisemitism, a person's hostility is driven by their religion's perception of Jews and Judaism, typically encompassing doctrines of supersession that expect or demand Jews to turn away from Judaism and submit to the religion presenting itself as Judaism's successor faith—this is a common theme within the other Abrahamic religions. The development of racial and religious antisemitism has historically been encouraged by anti-Judaism, which is distinct from antisemitism itself.
There are various ways in which antisemitism is manifested, ranging in the level of severity of Jewish persecution. On the more subtle end, it consists of expressions of hatred or discrimination against individual Jews and may or may not be accompanied by violence. On the most extreme end, it consists of pogroms or genocide, which may or may not be state-sponsored. Although the term "antisemitism" did not come into common usage until the 19th century, it is also applied to previous and later anti-Jewish incidents. Historically, most of the world's violent antisemitic events have taken place in Europe, where modern antisemitism began to emerge from antisemitism in Christian communities during the Middle Ages. Since the early 20th century, there has been a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents across the Arab world, largely due to the advent of Arab antisemitic conspiracy theories, which were influenced by European antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Antisemitism in Europe in the context of Rhineland massacres
The Rhineland massacres, also known as the German Crusade of 1096 or Gzerot Tatnó (Hebrew: גזרות תתנ"ו, "Edicts of 4856"), were a series of mass murders of Jews perpetrated by mobs of French and German Christians of the People's Crusade in 1096 (4856 in the Hebrew calendar). These massacres are often seen as the first in a sequence of antisemitic events in Europe which culminated in the Holocaust.
Prominent leaders of Crusaders involved in the massacres included Peter the Hermit and especially Count Emicho. As part of this persecution, the destruction of Jewish communities in Speyer, Worms and Mainz was noted as the Hurban Shum (Destruction of Shum). These were new persecutions of the Jews in which peasant Crusaders from France and Germany attacked Jewish communities. Many historians have referred to the violence as pogroms.