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1 Introduction The term anti-Semitism was coined at the end of the nineteenth century to designate a seemingly modern phenomenon— a rational, secular theory of Jewish inferiority and Jewish evil said to be distinct from an older and much discredited religious hostility . It is very likely that this new term was coined in the second half of the nineteenth century by the German publicist and propagandist Wilhelm Marr, the founder of the Anti-Semitic League and author of The Victory of Judaism over Germanism, Considered from a non-Religious Point of View.1 For Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers, religious hostility increasingly had been dismissed as a sign of ignorance and obscurantism unworthy of a modern, rational, and scientific mentality. By contrast, advocates promoted anti-Semitism as a rational viewpoint supported by the findings of modern science. Modern anti-Semites eschewed religious hated of Jews and attempted to replace it with a scientific account of Jewish racial differences said to endanger the purity of European blood and civilization. They also sought to explain older, anti-Jewish religious stereotypes as the product of racial characteristics that have consistently manifested themselves in Judaism as a religious culture.2 For example, it was the Jews’ racial incapacity 1. Wilhelm Marr, Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum vom nicht confessionellen Standpunkt aus betrachtet (Bern: Rudolph Costenoble, 1879). For Marr and his role in the development of a theory of anti-Semitism, see Moshe Zimmermann, Wilhelm Marr, the Patriarch of Antisemitism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). For discussion of The Victory of Judaism over Germanism, see 69–95. 2. Thus F. Roderich-Stoltheim (a pseudonym adopted by Theodor Fritsch) insisted that the Talmud, responsible for so much Christian religious hatred directed against Jews, reflects the racial character of the Jew: his materialism, his sensuality, and lack of spirituality. As a result, “it is doubtful if a Jew can ever 2   introduction for aesthetic experience that explained the Jews’ religious prohibitions against artistic representations of God or the human form in the synagogue .3 Because modern anti-Semitism sought evidence of the Jews’ racial character in their religious texts and customs, many Jewish intellectuals have dismissed the claim that anti-Semitism represented anything new at all: the religiously based anti-Judaism of the past and the racial anti-Semitism of modern theorists were simply two forms of a single historical phenomenon. For these intellectuals, the term anti-Semitism may be applied to all earlier forms of Judeophobia, obscuring the distinction between modern and ancient or modern and medieval hatred of Jews.4 On the surface, however, modern anti-Semitism, which claims to be grounded in the realia of racial difference, does depart in one important respect from religious anti-Judaism. The latter at least promised the possibility of transformation through religious conversion. Once a Jew converted to Christianity, for example, he ceased to be a Jew and eliminated the basis for anti-Jewish hostility. Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, held out no such hope. So long as Jewish identity is based on notions of blood or race, no escape from such race hatred is possible, even should religious conversion occur. A clear example will be found in Nazi Germany ’s First Regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law (November 14, 1935), which not only deprived Jews of German citizenship but also established their racial identification: “a Jew is a person descended from at least three grandparents who are full Jews by race.”5 This definition caught under its umbrella also Jewish converts to Christianity or the children of such converts; as a result, the German Christian movement under the Nazi regime excluded baptized Jews from the Christian community. This racial principle is explicit in an article that appeared in the German Arische completely free himself of the views, derived from his racial peculiarity, which were being prepared and established from the time of Moses to that of Esra and Nehemiah, and which, later on, under the influence of Talmudic Rabbinism, were extended and expanded until they became a gross exaggeration.” The Riddle of the Jew’s Success, trans. Capel Pownall (Leipzig: Hammer-Verlag, 1927), 202. 3. See Elliott Horowitz, “Le Peuple de l’image: les juifs et l’art,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 3 (2001): 665–84. 4. This basic taxonomy is followed in the bibliographic guide by Jack R. Fischell and Susan M. Ortmann, The Holocaust and its Religious Impact: A Critical Assessment and Annotated Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004). 5. See Yitzhak...

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