The word anti – Semitism refers to an aversion created by certain sectors of society against people of Jewish origin , who are people of the Semitic ethnic lineage. Anti-Semitism is as old in society as Judaism and started with the hatred of populations in certain places to the migration of Jews from their diasporas – originally: expulsions, enslavements and flight of Jewish people from their places of origin.
In contemporary times , anti-Semitism has become more intense in Europe, and the culmination of this form of prejudice occurred during the holocaust – a period when more than six million Jews were killed in concentration camps , in addition to millions of arrests and violations of Jewish civil rights promoted by the Nazi totalitarian dictator Adolf Hitler.
Star of David, a Jewish symbol, used by the Nazis to identify German Jews. [1]
Learn more: Secular state: the untying of the state with any religion
Semites
We use the term anti-Semitism to designate hatred and aversion against Jews because of the historical events that resulted in the migration of these peoples to various corners of the world, which gave the native populations of these territories a xenophobic feeling of foreign invasion. However, Jews are not the only Semitic peoples. In contemporary times, Semites are Jewish and Arab . In antiquity, these peoples were Phoenicians , Hebrews (Jews), Babylonians , Arameans, Assyrians and others who, in the third millennium BC, moved from the Arabian Peninsula to Mesopotamia .
According to Brazilian linguist Rosário Farâni Mansur Guérios, professor emeritus at the Federal University of Paraná in the 1970s and 1980s, the term Semite as a word to designate the peoples of the Middle East who came to Mesopotamia was coined by the modern German historian August Ludwig von Schloezer , in 1871. Schloezer sought biblical references to define the common ancestry of such peoples who, despite religious and traditional differences, shared a unity, which, according to the Old Testament, was the fact that they were all descendants of Shem, Noah’s son.
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What is anti-Semitism?
Anti-Semitism has always been used to express prejudiced and xenophobic distaste for Jews . The word “Jew” originated in Greek antiquity to designate the peoples that inhabited the Kingdom of Judah. The monotheistic religion of the peoples of that kingdom was also expressed by the word Jew, from which Judaism derived. The stem of these words came from the Greek term ioudai , which in turn was derived from the Hebrew yehudy . Peoples of similar origin and the same religion inhabited a nearby territory, south of Judah, called Israel.
It turns out that the Hebrew peoples, also called Jews, were enslaved by the Egyptians in antiquity . According to the “Old Testament”, they were released by the prophet Moses, who would have been guided by God to free that people from Egyptian tyranny by opening the Red Sea so that the caravan could pass. This first escape was known as the diaspora , and all the escapes and dispersions of these peoples throughout history are also given this name, used to designate a migration due to political, social and religious persecutions.
The ancient Hebrew peoples, enslaved by the Egyptians and inhabitants of Judah, were expelled from that kingdom with the rise of the Macedonian Greek Empire promoted by the conquests of Alexander the Great (Alexander the Great). They promoted an uprising against Alexander’s Macedonian Empire and founded the Kingdom of Judea . Judea, however, was later subjected to the Roman Empire , and this submission led the Jews to a new diaspora that occurred during the officialization of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 2nd century AD
Landless and dispersing across the West, the Jews founded on their religion and ethnic origin a kind of national feeling of patriotic belonging to preserve their tradition and origin. For this reason, Jews today usually call themselves that before expressing their country of origin, as Brazilian Jews or German Jews. There are also atheist Jews, who do not share the belief in the Jewish religion and do not believe in God, but find their ethnic origin in Judaism.
Why are Jews so hated?
Precisely because they did not have a territory, the Jews who dispersed throughout Europe fleeing persecution did not live on agriculture , as was common among medieval peoples . Their subsistence was withdrawn from commerce , which allowed them to accumulate money throughout the medieval period, and the practice of usury (obtaining profit from the loan), condemned by the Catholic Church until the 17th century, was common among them. Jews were also the founders of the first banks .
The financial rise of the Jews through usury and the banks aroused the rage of Europeans, especially Catholics, who began to harass them, creating a stereotype that they were greedy, cunning, hostile and conspiratorial. From the 17th century on, then, modern anti-Semitism was created, which was represented even in the play The Merchant of Venice , by the English dramatist and tragedyographer William Shakespeare, which highlights the persecution suffered by a Jewish merchant by the population.
In the 19th century, anti-Semitism was common in European nations , especially in Germany. There was a German anti-Semitic movement, which blamed the Jews for the misery of the population they believed to be originally German, based on the mythology of the Arya , peoples of Germanic origin who would have founded the largest Germanic empires, such as Prussia.
An anti-Semitic ideology was then founded, which placed the responsibility for hunger and German crises on Jewish economic growth , which later served for Hitler to persecute, arrest and kill millions of Jews, under the justification of an ethnic cleansing that would free Germany of your ailments.
See also: Human rights: set of basic rights for all citizens
What was the Holocaust?
The term holocaust comes from ancient Hebrew to designate sacrifice, also called Hebrew in shoah . It may be the sacrifice of a son, as in “Genesis”, chapter 22, verse 2, in which God tests Abraham’s loyalty by proposing to him that he sacrifice his son Isaac, in the name of faith. However, the word holocaust took on another meaning in the 20th century, being used to designate the sacrifice of thousands of Jews, beginning with the so-called final solution implemented by the Nazi government.
Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, which killed the most Jews. [2]
In the 1920s, Jewish Germans began to be more integrated into German society due to the republican period beginning with the Republic of Weimar , which ended the German imperial period (II Reich), issued a constitution (the Weimar Constitution) and established a democratic rule of law.
This integration of Jews into society through constitutional rights, coupled with anti-Semitism and the hatred of the conservative right, grew the National Socialist Party of German Workers ( der Nazionalsocialistische Arbeiterpartei , from where the Nazi acronym , from Nazional , which means national) . The small party benefited from the financial crisis in which Germany found itself after the end of the First World War and the damage caused to the country by the Treaty of Versailles . Adolf Hitler, a military man still little known in the German political milieu, appears with ideas of revaluing German patriotic culture and identity in order to restore the country’s economic order.
In order to unite the German people with him, the future totalitarian dictator looks to the Jews for the common enemy of German society because , in Nazi optics, he is the main cause of German problems. From there, the great intensification of anti-Semitism by the German extreme right began, culminating in the holocaust.
With the arrival of Hitler to the presidency via popular vote in 1933, the anti-Semitic measures enacted by the government intensified . At first, it was just investigations and arrests of leaders of the Jewish community. Alongside this, there was an official propaganda from the German government and Hitler’s speeches defending a German sovereignty that excluded the participation of Jews in society, and, still in 1933, there was also the construction of the first concentration camp in Munich. It included Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Communists, as well as Jews.
From 1935 onwards, the offensive against Jews intensified and there were more and more arbitrary arrests, isolation of Jews in the so-called city ghettos and confiscation of property , in addition to the intensification of the construction of internment camps for forced labor. , the so-called concentration camps. At that time, despite deaths in the camps, genocide through the gas chamber had not yet started.
In 1941, with the overcrowding of the concentration camps , an order from the Nazi high command was sent to officer Reinhard Heydrich, ordering him to draw up a plan for the extermination of Jews residing in German territories. Although it was only actually implemented in 1941, the idea of extermination has existed in Hitler’s speech since the 1920s, even appearing in his book, Mein Kampf .
Before the final execution, there was a plan to deport Jews to Madagascar, which was abandoned because it was not viable. With the order of the final solution, the intention was to arrest Jews from dominated territories, many of whom had migrated to them due to persecution since 1933, take them to the fields and annihilate them with the use of hydrocyanic acid, an extremely chemical compound volatile, which, by the rapid dispersion in a closed environment, is able to corrode the airways of people in a few minutes.
It is estimated that approximately six million Jews died during the final settlement period (1941 – 1945) . This fact became known as the Jewish holocaust or, simply, holocaust.
See also: Was Nazism left or right?
The night of the crystals
One of the precedents of the holocaust was the night of the crystals . On the night of 9 to 10 November 1938, paramilitary forces of the SA ( Sturmabteilung ), which were non-military detachments officially commanded by Ernst Röhm, an officer in the German army, along with popular people who supported Nazism , promoted a night of looting, plundering and destruction of Jewish heritage .
The event became known as the night of the crystals due to the amount of broken glass (from store windows and windows of stores, grocery stores, barber shops and Jewish houses) that remained on the floor on the morning of November 10. Some historical sources point out that at the time 36 Jews died, others point out that the total number of dead reached 91.
The crystal night was incited by the Nazi government, which reported the death of German diplomat Ernst von Rath in 1938, in Paris, by a Jew, Herschel Grynszpan. The German authorities did not intervene and let the looting take place in German cities, giving the population the supposed right to act against the Jews.
Anti-Zionism
Zionism is a Jewish movement that rekindled in the 19th century. Justified by the expulsion of territories and diasporas experienced by Jews since antiquity, the Zionists intended to reoccupy the territory of Palestine , their homeland, in order to build a nation-state that would again house this ethnic group dispersed throughout the world.
The Zionist term derives from the biblical word sion , which designates “Jerusalem” (holy city for Jews, Muslims and Christians) and Jews. The movement’s intention was to retake the territory of the city of Jerusalem and to further consolidate the Jewish people there.
Jews in traditional dance of Jewish culture. [3]
There was strong opposition to Zionism among non-Jews and even on the part of Jews, who realized that the occupation of Palestine would cause conflicts with Arab Muslims who had lived there for a long time. Assimilated Jews, who were integrated into the culture of the places where they lived, were the greatest opponents of the Zionist movement. Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt , from an assimilated Jewish family, reintegrated into Jewish culture and came to participate in the Zionist movement, having abandoned it in the 1940s due to differences with leaders.
The consolidation of the Zionist prophecy took place with the creation of the State of Israel , promoted by the UN in 1948, in order to avoid a new holocaust. The problem is that the Palestinians (of Muslim majority) who already lived in the current territory of Israel do not accept the imposition of Jewish hegemony, which has caused conflicts and wars since 1948.
