Anti-Semitism and Communication Reference library
Amos Kiewe
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Communication and Critical Cultural Studies
...that a new wave of anti-Semitism is under way. Anti-Semitism in Islam The case of anti-Semitism in the Muslim world offers another variation on the rhetoric of hate. Though Islam has several disparaging statements about Jews in the Quran, hatred of Jews in the Islamic world has never reached the proportion and intensity of Christian anti-Semitism. Yet, a change in Islamic anti-Semitism took place in the second half of the 19th century with the spread of European publications, initially the work of French clergy who imported anti-Semitic tracts into the...
Anti-Judaism and Anti-Semitism Reference library
Christopher Ocker
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Martin Luther
...-Judaism and Anti-Semitism The uncomfortable question of Martin Luther’s place in the development of modern anti-Semitism is raised by Luther’s status as a national cultural icon after German unification (1871) and by the fact that the Third Reich (1933–1945) perpetrated what is arguably the most violently racist state policy known to human history thus far. Luther contributed to the symbiosis of religious and secular prejudices. The reception of Luther’s anti-Jewish discourse illustrates the gradual diffusion of religious hostility into a society where...
anti‐Semitism Quick reference
Lincoln Allison
A Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations (4 ed.)
...‐Semitism Literally, persecution of or discrimination against the Jews. The first use of the term, which came into being in the 1870s, is variously attributed to the German Wilhelm Marr and the Frenchman Ernest Renan. In one respect it was a misnomer from the beginning since, in the jargon of the racial theory of the period, ‘Semites’ were a broad group of non‐European ethnic groups including Arabs, whereas anti‐Semitism was taken to mean, and has continued to mean, an anti‐Jewish racism. Anti‐Semitism differs from the anti‐Jewish ideas and theories which...
anti‐Semitism Quick reference
A Dictionary of World History (3 ed.)
...‐Semitism Hostility towards and discrimination against Jewish people (although there are other Semitic peoples, notably the Arabs, anti‐Semitism is only used to refer to prejudice against Jewish people). In the late 19th and early 20th centuries it was strongly evident in France, Germany, Poland, Russia, and elsewhere, many Jewish emigrants fleeing from persecution or pogroms in south‐east Europe to Britain and the USA. After World War I early Nazi propaganda in Germany encouraged anti‐Semitism, alleging Jewish responsibility for the nation’s defeat. By...
anti-Semitism Quick reference
A Dictionary of Contemporary World History (6 ed.)
...anti-Semitism Modern anti-Semitism (since 1870s) Whilst Christian hostility towards Jews dates back to the first century, modern anti-Semitism denotes hostility towards the Jewish race or, more popularly, towards Jewish culture and traditions. Its origins go back to the late 1870s, when earlier, sporadic outbreaks of anti-Jewish feelings became a permanent phenomenon in European society. In the writings of early anti-Semites, such as the German Wilhelm Marr or the Frenchman Ernest Renan, Jews were identified as a separate race. From this perspective, even if...
anti-Semitism Reference library
Colwyn Williamson and Michael Cohen
The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (2 ed.)
...-Semitism is sometimes treated as a continuous history of prejudice and discrimination extending from the desecration of the Second Temple in 135 bc through to the Holocaust. But in Hellenistic times the Gentiles, who were engaged in commerce, persecuted the Jews, who were farmers. As the official religion of medieval Europe, Christianity, originally a Jewish sect, legitimated a pattern of persecution by reclassifying the Jews as ‘usurers’ and ‘Christ murderers’. Modern anti-Semitism has underwritten the political vision of movements portraying...
Anti-Semitism Reference library
Leonard Dinnerstein
The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History
...Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith monitored incidents of anti-Semitism and sought legislation minimizing its impact. The AJ Committee also engaged in extensive study on the causes of anti-Semitism, worked behind the scenes with elected political officials, and sponsored uplifting radio programs designed to present Jews in a favorable light. The AJ Congress actively challenged existing institutional prejudices through the legal system, and the ADL both engaged in serious research on the causes of anti-Semitism and sought media...
Anti-Semitism Quick reference
A Concise Companion to the Jewish Religion
...-Semitism Hatred of Jews or unreasonable prejudice against them; a term coined in 1875 but with the reality behind it going back virtually to the beginnings of Judaism itself and culminating in the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust in which six million Jews perished. Anti-Semitism has assumed various forms. Greek and Latin authors ridiculed the Jewish religion and the Jews who adhered to it either because the Jews were ‘atheists’ in refusing to acknowledge the Greek and Roman deities, or because they thought of themselves as superior. The...
Anti-Semitism. Reference library
Leonard Dinnerstein
The Oxford Companion to United States History
...Congress, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith monitored incidents of anti-Semitism and sought legislation minimizing its impact. The AJ Committee also engaged in extensive study on the causes of anti-Semitism, worked behind the scenes with elected political officials, and sponsored uplifiting radio programs designed to present Jews in a favorable light. The AJ Congress actively challenged existing institutional prejudices through the legal system, while the ADL both engaged in serious research on the causes of anti-Semitism and sought media...
Anti-semitism Reference library
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions
...cent. Anti-Semitic feelings did not disappear then, however, as is illustrated by the Dreyfus case in France in 1894 , the pronouncements of Richard Wagner in Germany, the circulation of such spurious works as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion , and the huge numbers of Jews who emigrated to the United States to escape the pogroms of E. Europe, culminating in the Holocaust . The foundation of the state of Israel was believed by Zionists to be the only solution to anti-Semitism, but as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Muslim anti-Semitism is...
Anti-Semitism Reference library
Albert S. Lindemann and Joel Beinin
The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World
...-Semitism [ This entry includes two subentries, an overview and a discussion of anti-Semitism in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia . See also Holocaust ; Jews ; and Protocols of the Elders of Zion . ] Overview The term “anti-Semitism,” which spread rapidly in Europe in the economically troubled 1880s, was coined to describe a modern racial rather than a premodern religious hostility to Jews. The claim was that anti-Semitism represented an objective antipathy for what Jews did in the real world, as contrasted with earlier bigoted...
anti-Semitism Reference library
Martin David Goodman
The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization (2 ed.)
...-Semitism ( pagan ) Modern accounts of hostility to Jews in classical antiquity have often been complicated by a concern to relate pagan anti-Semitism to the anti-Judaism of some early Christians and to the history of anti-Semitism in more recent times. A literary tradition hostile to Jews and Judaism can be traced back to Greek writers in Egypt from the 3rd cent. bc . The social, cultural and political background to anti-Jewish invective cannot always be discerned, but it has been plausibly argued that propaganda aimed at Jews after the attack on the...
Anti-Semitism Reference library
Jonathan Z. S. Pollack
The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Social History
...-Semitism Anti-Semitism in the social history of the United States has been a fringe ideology. Nonetheless, from colonial times to the twenty-first century, anti-Semitism has sprung from three consistent sources: Christian beliefs, economic fears, and xenophobia. The creation of the modern state of Israel was a more recent trigger for anti-Semitic beliefs. Colonial Era through 1920 .From 1654 to 1881 , although Jews generally represented less than 1 percent of the population, Christian beliefs and suspicion of Jewish business practices led to...
anti-Semitism Reference library
Norman Davies
The Oxford Companion to World War II
...-Semitism is not a concept on which there can be any general consensus. Its dictionary meaning, ‘hatred of Jews’, gives only limited guidance, since the term is used to refer to a very wide range of attitudes, from petty prejudice to genocide. Many Jewish authors maintain that anti-Semitism is a unique phenomenon, that the Final Solution during the Second World War was the culmination of 2,000 years of Christian anti-Semitism. Religious, political, economic, social, and racial categories of anti-Semitism are often distinguished. Other commentators, in...
Anti‐Semitism Reference library
The Oxford Companion to the Bible
...‐Semitism . Anti‐Semitism has become the term commonly used for attitudes and actions against Jews. It was coined in the 1870s by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr in the campaign to eradicate Jewish influences in German culture. Sometimes the valid distinction is made between anti‐Semitism as a secular term built on racial and cultural thinking out of the Enlightenment, and anti‐Judaism as the earlier theologically grounded forms of contempt for Jews and things Jewish. Not least with the contemporary Arab‐Israeli conflict, the term anti‐Semitism is a sign...
anti-Semitism Reference library
The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages
...-Semitism Though the 19th-century term ‘ anti-Semitism ’ was unknown in the MA, many themes of anti-Jewish sentiment have their genesis in medieval western Christendom. While the medieval perceptions originate in classical Christian doctrine and teachings concerning the Jews, for example their enmity to Christ and their responsibility for his death, the special circumstances of western Christendom and its Jewish minority led to the elaboration of a series of anti-Jewish allegations that have become part of western folklore ever since. Key elements among these...
anti-Semitism Reference library
Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot
...-Semitism . In her early adult life George Eliot showed some symptoms of the anti-Semitism that was rife in 19th-century Europe; subsequently her attitudes underwent radical transformation. In England literary stereotypes of Jews were found in Charles *Dickens 's Oliver Twist , and in Anthony *Trollope 's and Edmund Yates 's novels—to give only three examples from many. Until the second half of the century, Jews were barred from sitting in Parliament or gaining University degrees until they had affirmed allegiance to the Church of England. Frequently ...
Anti-Semitism Reference library
Diane Lichtenstein
The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States
...-Semitism . Anti-Semitism in the United States has been characterized not so much by the violence of Russian pogroms or a Holocaust as by an ambivalent attitude toward Jews. This attitude, which stems in part from America's ideals of tolerance and religious freedom, has been evident since the first Jews arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654 . The ambivalence has revealed itself in stereotyping as well as in exclusionary practices, such as the scheduling of school exams on Jewish holy days. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, overt anti-Semitism has...
anti-Semitism Reference library
Oxford Reader’s Companion To Conrad
...in acknowledging his anti-Semitism, have often attributed the prejudice to his origins as a Polish Catholic and member of the landed gentry, as if all Poles were somehow ‘naturally’ anti-Semitic. Baines, for example, noted that Conrad ‘sometimes showed signs of the anti-Jewish prejudice so widespread among Eastern Europeans’ (374). Bernard C. Meyer , the most prominent of Conrad’s psychoanalytic biographers , adapts the theory of Conrad’s ‘betrayal’ of his Polish homeland as grounds for suggesting that his anti-Semitism had nothing necessarily to do...
Anti-Semitism Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World (2 ed.)
...of the term “anti-Semitism” by Wilhelm Marr in 1879 suggested that opposition was being registered to racial characteristics rather than religious beliefs. Secular racial anti-Semitism has never really been anything other than antagonism to Jews. The myth of Jewish biological inferiority justified the continuing attacks in a more secular age because evils in society supposedly were traceable to the presence of the Jewish race. The argument of biological differences marks the emergence of the genocidal strain in modern anti-Semitism. The world, it was...
