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Comment by reissbaker | Hacker News Reader

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

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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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