Nazi Anti-Judaism

Anti-Judaism existed well before the Holocaust, creating several contradictory ideas about the Jews. Despite these ideas, an important conclusion stated that anti-Judaists must tolerate yet segregate Jews, and that society must preserve Jews as witnesses to the bible. However, if Jews didn’t follow the bible, this opened the door to Jewish disenfranchisement, allowing anti-Judaism to cross the threshold towards harsher persecution. Thus, the term ‘antisemitism’ arose, an anachronism that incorrectly categorized the Jews per their ancestral language, but eventually evolved to devastate their population nonetheless. Despite the history concerning anti-Judaism and the everchanging views on how to resolve the “Jewish Problem”, Nazi antisemitism …show more content…
It began with mob violence – “the Nazis made raids and pulled out men, made them wash floors, all sorts of things.”13 This violence escalated when Herschel Grynszpan attempted to assassinate Ernst vom Rath in Paris in November of 1938, resulting in the nationwide November Pogrom, also known as Kristallnacht. During this, Nazis “[destroyed] synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses; the police would not intervene and those involved would not be arrested.”14 The compliance of both the German people and the government on destroying Jewish religious and economic life showed that Nazis had the ability to persecute Jews publicly while still holding political support. Nazi antisemitism encompassed more than just mob-violence; it began to involve “bureaucratic, systematized persecution.”15 This systematized persecution induced the organized isolation of the Jews. For example, the resettlement of Jews into ghettos arose from “the wretched conditions of eastern Jewry [which] provided the Germans with the empirical evidence to “prove” their antisemitic ideology.”16 For years, antisemitic ideology pictured Jews as unruly and unkempt, so Nazis exploited eastern Jew ghettos to establish German Jew ghettos. Upon the introduction of these ghettos, “Germans transformed Jews into the caricatures the Nazis had depicted from the beginning” through the implementation of laws that kept Jews “dressed in …show more content…
The evolution of this belief started with the idea to persecute all Jews, no matter their background or whether they practiced the Jewish faith. The representation of Jews began to shift to something more aligned with recent events, displaying them as traitors and evil capitalists who only cared about money. Indeed, Nazi antisemitism capitalized on these ideas and plotted a total Jewish disenfranchisement through the erasure of all forms of Jewish influence and presence. The accomplishment of such thereby prepped the road for the Holocaust