Comment by reissbaker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reissbaker | Hacker News Reader

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I think you're trying to draw a hard line distinction where only a blurry evolution exists. While antisemitism in the 19th and 20th centuries had some unique characteristics that co-evolved with other forms of racism, antisemitism existed before the 19th century and there are clear evolutionary roots e.g. "Jewish badges" [1] that date back to the 1100s, which the famous "Jude" badge from the Nazi era was a continuation of.

I don't know of many mainstream Jewish historians who would agree that antisemitism didn't exist prior to the 19th century. They would agree that racial antisemitism developed largely during the 19th century alongside pseudoscience about race in general, but that religious and economic antisemitism has existed for over a thousand years, and that the latter two also informed the development of the racial version. [2] For example, the Rhineland massacres in 1096 are generally considered to be antisemitic [3] and part of a sequence of historical mass murders of Jews that lead to the Holocaust, despite Europe not then having a clear concept of race.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_badge

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres

i think the main difference is that in the middle ages conversion to Christianity was a way to avoid persecution, while this was not an option under nazi Germany.

Racial excuses replaced religious excuses.

> I don't know of many mainstream Jewish historians who would agree that antisemitism didn't exist prior to the 19th century.

Depends on your your definition of "antisemitism"; if you mean "general prejudice against Jews", then sure, obvious that existed. But if you you mean "anti-Semitism against the Semitic race (as opposed to the Aryan race)", then that's quite a different thing.

I don't think it's a hard-line distinction; obviously there's overlap and nuance. But the move from more or less generic religious persecution to racial-based persecution was a very marked and notable shift that many many people have commented on, and that's really not very controversial.

Does this distinction matter? Well, it seems to me that it does. I don't think the holocaust would have happened without this. And all of this strongly shaped Nazi world-views, which was really the point I wanted to make.

I linked to a lot of resources that cover the points you're trying to make and IMO it'd be worth reading them if you want to have an informed discussion of antisemitism, e.g. antisemitic events that occurred hundreds of years prior to the 19th century and are viewed by mainstream scholarship as being part of European antisemitism that directly led to the Holocaust.

When you say a lot, do you just mean the three Wikipedia articles? Because I looked at them and they reaffirm what the other person is saying, that there is a distinction between anti-Judaism and antisemitism. In fact right in the very link you post it states:

>The development of racial and religious antisemitism has historically been encouraged by the concept of anti-Judaism, which is distinct from antisemitism itself.

It's that distinction that is being discussed, and the other Wikipedia articles which do recognize that distinction point out that this was a 19th century development:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_antisemitism

If you could read past the first paragraph you would find:

> Although the term "antisemitism" did not come into common usage until the 19th century, it is also applied to previous and later anti-Jewish incidents. Notable instances of antisemitic persecution include the Rhineland massacres in 1096; the Edict of Expulsion in 1290; the European persecution of Jews during the Black Death, between 1348 and 1351; the massacre of Spanish Jews in 1391, the crackdown of the Spanish Inquisition, and the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492; the Cossack massacres in Ukraine, between 1648 and 1657; various anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire, between 1821 and 1906; the Dreyfus affair, between 1894 and 1906; the Holocaust by Nazi Germany during World War II; and various Soviet anti-Jewish policies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism

No dispute about that, antisemitism as a term to describe persecution of Jews certainly is used to apply to instances that took place 1000s of years ago. That does not mean that antisemitism didn't change, with different forms emerging with different excuses. Hatred of a group of people often precedes rationales for that hatred, excuses are made after the fact.

That doesn't change the fact that hatred towards Jews as a race, hatred towards them on the basis of their birth, their intrinsic nature, as opposed to on the basis of their religion or as a culture, emerged in the 19th century. In almost all of the instances you mention prior to the 19th century, with the exception of the Cossack uprising, conversion from Judaism to Christianity would have spared you. The Cossack uprising and in particular the Khmelnytsky Uprising was not on racial grounds, it was on mercantile grounds and opposed to Jews on the basis of their status as tax collectors as well as propaganda about their collaboration with Polish nobility. Certain Jewish communities seen to have not been involved in either aspect were spared, indicating that the hatred towards Jews was not based on race.

In Nazi Germany, if you were considered a Jew by race, nothing you did could have spared you. Nothing.

I am simply disputing the original claim that "anti-Semitism as we know today is very much rooted in racial science (well, "science") of the 19th century. Before that it was an anti-religious thing: anti-Judaism, which was a markedly different and similar to Anti-Catholicism, anti-Protestantism, and things like that."

Antisemitism predates the 19th century, and not all hatred of Jews prior to the 19th century was "similar to Anti-Catholicism, anti-Protestantism, and things like that." While there is a term "anti-Judaism" used by historians to describe religious strife similar to anti-Catholicism, the term "antisemitism" isn't limited to the 19th century and later, and not all hatred and oppression of Jews prior to the 19th century was simply anti-Judaism.

For example, during the Black Death, Jews were blamed for outbreaks and were mass-murdered, with no attempts at conversion at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Jews_during_the...

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