"Anti-Semitism" is a term meaning hatred and/or discrimination directed against Jews. It does not traditionally refer to prejudice against non-Jews who speak Semitic languages (e.g., Arabs or Syriacs). As Princeton professor Bernard Lewis explains, "Anti-Semitism has never anywhere been concerned with anyone but Jews." It is a widespread phenomenon throughout the world today, most notably in Europe and the Arab/Muslim world.
Holocaust scholar Helen Fein defines anti-Semitism as "a persisting latent structure of hostile beliefs towards Jews as a collective manifested in individuals as attitudes, and in culture as myth, ideology, folklore and imagery, and in actions - social or legal discrimination, political mobilisation against the Jews, and collective or state violence - which results in and/or is designed to distance, displace, or destroy Jews as Jews."
In its 2005 Report on Global Anti-Semitism, the U.S. Department of State defines anti-Semitism as "hatred toward Jews—individually and as a group—that can be attributed to the Jewish religion and/or ethnicity." Also in 2005, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, which is a creation of the European Union, defined the phenomenon this way: "Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities. In addition, such manifestations could also target the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. Antisemitism frequently charges Jews with conspiring to harm humanity, and it is often used to blame Jews for 'why things go wrong'."
Prior to the nineteenth century, anti-Semitism focused primarily on Jews as a distinct religious group worthy of enmity because of their spiritual beliefs, and was expressed by sporadic persecutions and expulsions, as well as severe economic and personal restrictions. Some European countries went so far as to issue edicts requiring Jews to live in quartered-off ghettos, separate from all other people; the earliest European ghettos date back to fourteenth-century Spain and Portugal. Jews were prime targets for European and Arab persecution because they were generally the largest minority religion in Christian Europe and much of the Islamic world, thus serving as convenient scapegoats for a host of social and economic ills.
During the Crusades, the rising religious fervor of Christians inspired angry mobs to massacre Jewish "unbelievers" by the thousands. Throughout Medieval Europe, Jews were reatedly victimized by confiscatory taxation, mass expulsions, mob violence, and property destruction. They were often blamed for calamities that could not otherwise be explained. For example, during the Black Death that killed perhaps half the European population during the mid-1300s, many claimed that Jews had created the plague by poisoning the drinking water in Europe's wells. In retribution for this alleged treachery, legions of Jews were slaughtered in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, France, and Spain.
In the Muslim world, Jews were subjected to open humiliation and were forced to convery under pain of execution. According to the scholar Bat Ye'or, "The fate of Jews in Arabia foreshadowed that of all the peoples subsequently conquered by the Arabs. The primary guiding principle was to summon the non-Muslims to convert or accept Muslim supremacy, and, if faced with refusal, to attack them until they submitted to Muslim domination."
Thousands of Jews fell prey to the recurring riots and massacres of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Spain. Seventeenth-century eastern Europe was marked by almost untinterrupted masacres of Jews, at least 100,000 of whom were slaughtered in Poland alone between 1648 and 1658. The Greek Orthodox Cossacks of that period ravaged Jews with startling savagery, sawing them to pieces, flaying them alive, roasting them to death over slow fires - even slitting infants in half with their swords.
After the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, religious resentments were gradually replaced by animosity stemming from the notion of Jews as a distinct race. This was partly due to the rising nationalism of nineteenth-century Europe, where there were widespread resentments over Jewish (particularly Orthodox) attempts to preserve cultural and religious customs that were alien to outsiders. Racial anti-Semitism gave rise to racial demagoguery and conspiracy theories, most notably the infamous nineteenth-century forgery "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," purporting to outline a Jewish plan for world domination. This document is still cited as a justification for anti-Semitic hatred throughout much of the Muslim world today.
Race-based anti-Semitism also spawned pseudoscientific racial theories of so-called Aryan superiority which emerged in the nineteenth century writings of individuals like Joseph Arthur Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Alfred Rosenberg. These theories would later be incorporated in the official doctrine of German National Socialism by Adolf Hitler, in whose death camps some 6 million European Jews were exterminated between 1939 and 1945.
The word "antisemitic" (antisemitisch in German) was probably first used in 1860 by the Jewish scholar Moritz Steinschneider, who coined the phrase "antisemitic prejudices" (German: "antisemitische Vorurteile") to characterize Ernest Renan's notion that "Semitic races" were inferior to "Aryan races." The related German word antisemitismus - meaning "Jew-hatred" or Judenhass -- was introduced by the German journalist and political agitator Wilhelm Marr in his 1879 book The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism. Marr's intent was to characterize the hatred of Jews as a rational, reasonable phenomenon. That same year, he established the League of Anti-Semites (Antisemiten-Liga), which advocated the forced removal of Jews from Germany. This was the first German organization whose explicit mission was to counter the alleged threat that Jews posed to the nation. It was not until 1881 that the term anti-Semitic was printed with any regularity.
