Persecution of Jews in the context of "Aliyah"

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.

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.

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.

Some Christian churches, Christian groups, and ordinary Christians express antisemitism—as well as anti-Judaism—towards Jews and Judaism. These expressions of antisemitism can be considered examples of antisemitism expressed by Christians or antisemitism expressed by Christian communities. However, the term Christian antisemitism has also been used in reference to anti-Jewish sentiments that arise out of Christian doctrinal or theological stances (by thinkers such as Jules Isaac, for example—especially in his book Jésus et Israël). The term is also used to suggest that to some degree, contempt for Jews and Judaism is inherent in Christianity as a religion, and as a result, the centralized institutions of Christian power (such as the Catholic Church or the Church of England), as well as governments with strong Christian influences (such as the Catholic Monarchs of Spain), have generated societal structures that have survived and perpetuate antisemitism to the present. This usage particularly appears in discussions about Christian structures of power within society—structures that are referred to as Christian hegemony or Christian privilege; these discussions are part of larger discussions about structural inequality and power dynamics.

Antisemitic Christian rhetoric and the resulting antipathy towards Jews date back to early Christianity, resembling pagan anti-Jewish attitudes that were reinforced by the belief that Jews are responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. Christians imposed ever-increasing anti-Jewish measures over the ensuing centuries, including acts of ostracism, humiliation, expropriation, violence, and murder—measures which culminated in the Holocaust.

The Mishnah or the Mishna (/ˈmɪʃnə/; Hebrew: מִשְׁנָה, romanized: mišnā, lit. 'study by repetition', from the verb לִשְׁנוֹת‎ lišnot, "to repeat") is the first written collection of the Jewish oral traditions that are known as the Oral Torah. Having been collected in the 3rd century CE, it is the first work of rabbinic literature, written primarily in Mishnaic Hebrew but also partly in Jewish Aramaic. The oldest surviving physical fragments of it are from the 6th to 7th centuries. It is viewed as authoritative and binding revelation by most Orthodox Jews and some non-Orthodox Jews.

The Mishnah was redacted by Judah ha-Nasi probably in Beit Shearim or Sepphoris, in the late second or early third century CE. in a time when the persecution of Jews and the passage of time raised the possibility that the details of the oral traditions of the Pharisees from the Second Temple period (516 BCE – 70 CE) would be forgotten.

The history of the Jews during World War II is almost synonymous with the persecution and murder of Jews which was committed on an unprecedented scale in Europe and European North Africa (pro-Nazi Vichy-North Africa and Italian Libya). The massive scale of the Holocaust which happened during World War II greatly affected the Jewish people and world public opinion, which only understood the dimensions of the Final Solution after the war. The genocide, known as HaShoah in Hebrew, aimed at the elimination of the Jewish people on the European continent. It was a broadly organized operation led by Nazi Germany, in which approximately six million Jews were murdered methodically and with horrifying cruelty. Although the Holocaust was organized by the highest levels of the Nazi German government, the vast majority of Jews murdered were not German, but were instead residents of countries invaded by the Nazis after 1938. Of the approximately 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, approximately 160,000 to 180,000 were German Jews. During the Holocaust in occupied Poland, more than one million Jews were murdered in gas chambers of the Auschwitz concentration camp alone. The murder of the Jews of Europe affected Jewish communities in Albania, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Channel Islands, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Libya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine.

Leading to World War II, nearly all Jewish businesses in Nazi Germany had either collapsed under financial pressure and declining profits, or had been forced to sell out to the Nazi German government as part of the "Aryanization" policy inaugurated in 1937. As the war started, massacres of Jews took place originally as part of Operation Tannenberg against the Polish nation. The much larger and methodical mass killings of Jews began with the onset of Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Led by Einsatzgruppen and the Order Police battalions, the destruction of European Jews took place with the active participation of local Auxiliary Police including Belarusian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian units.

The history of the Jews in France deals with Jews and Jewish communities in France since at least the Early Middle Ages. France was a centre of Jewish learning in the Middle Ages, but persecution increased over time, including multiple expulsions and returns. During the French Revolution in the late 18th century, on the other hand, France was the first European country to emancipate its Jewish population. Antisemitism still occurred in cycles and reached a high in the 1890s, as shown during the Dreyfus affair, and in the 1940s, under Nazi occupation and the Vichy regime.

Before 1919, most French Jews lived in Paris, with many being very proud to be fully assimilated into French culture, and they comprised an upscale subgroup. A more traditional Judaism was based in Alsace-Lorraine, which was recovered by The German Empire in 1871 and taken by France in 1918 following World War I. In addition, numerous Jewish refugees and immigrants came from Russia and eastern and central Europe in the early 20th century, changing the character of French Judaism in the 1920s and 1930s. These new arrivals were much less interested in assimilation into French culture. Some supported such new causes as Zionism, the Popular Front and communism, the latter two being popular among the French political left.