Presented by LIONEL STEIMAN at the Lanny Remis Speakers Forum, May 8, 2025.

One of the questions I wanted to answer in my course on the history of antisemitism was why culturally assimilated European Jews seemed blind to the rising tide of antisemitism during the years in which they had grown up? Of course they didn’t have the benefit of hindsight. They knew of the pogroms, of course, but they were in Russia, not in such sophisticated centres like Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, cities to which Jews from the east had flocked by the thousands, taking advantage of the opportunities offered during the rapid industrialization of the later nineteenth century. In Vienna they would eventually become the propertied and educated elites of the upper middle class. What they underestimated was the danger they faced from masses prone to the appeals of antisemitic demagogues.

The reason was that these Jews were the beneficiaries of what was called “Jewish emancipation,” the removal of age-old restrictions on Jews that had limited what they could do, where they could live, and much more. Emancipation facilitated the admission of Jews to society on terms of equality with other citizens. They were granted the right to vote, freedom of movement, access to education, and other areas from which they had been barred. France was the first country in Europe to emancipate its Jewish population, which it did during the French Revolution. Subsequently, the process of ‘Emancipation’ was launched everywhere in Europe except the Russian Empire, and by the later 19th century was relatively complete.
Emancipation had been the product of the so-called Enlightenment, when philosophers and rulers got the bright idea that Jews, whom they had regarded as scarcely human, would stop being Jews if only they were given an opportunity to be like everyone else. If they were given freedom, the right to vote, and access to other occupations than peddling and money-lending they would lose the negative characteristics associated with Jews. This Jewish ‘character’ was not considered a matter of ‘race’ or ‘blood’, but was seen as a product of the environment in which Jews were forced to live. But behind these novel ideas lay centuries of popular hatred and prejudice rooted in religion and superstition.

So it was almost inevitable that there would be a popular reaction against the emancipation of Jews, and attempts made to roll it back. Jewish entry into areas in which they’d never before been seen made people uneasy, to say the least. And because Jews in western Europe were abandoning their distinctive dress and manner, thus assimilating and becoming indistinguishable from non-Jews, their presence came to be feared all the more. Opponents of emancipation demanded the re-imposition of restraints and restrictions on Jews, many of which dated back centuries. They organized and gave themselves a name intended to distinguish themselves from the religious bigots they scorned. Their “The League of Antisemites”, was founded in 1878 by a journalist by the name of Wilhelm Marr.
The word ‘Antisemite’ was a totally new, totally invented word. But it had a scientific ring to it, as did so much else in this age of scientific progress. Antisemitism dissociated itself from the age-old anti-Jewish prejudices rooted in religion and legend, claiming instead to have a basis in science. The word ‘Semite’ was taken from the field of philology and referred to a grouping of languages, though soon it was referring to a category of people as well. And since Jews were the only “Semites” in Europe, it was they whom anti-Semites opposed. Soon, inflammatory antisemitic publicists and their products proliferated in various countries, most especially in France and Germany, the countries where ‘Emancipation’ had proceeded furthest, and needed to be rolled back. Meanwhile, beneficiaries of Emancipation dismissed antisemitism as a matter for the gutter, or for cynical politicians

The most prominent politician to exploit antisemitism before Hitler was Karl Lueger, the famous mayor of Vienna, who used it to woo the masses. During his tenure from 1897 to 1910, Vienna became the most advanced city in the world: public facilities such as gasworks, public transit, and housing were unmatched anywhere else. And nowhere else in Europe did Jews feel more secure. Lueger was a charming man; with Jewish friends, he was often seen attending Jewish marriages and bar mitzvahs. When the contradiction was pointed out, he replied, “I decide who’s a Jew.” Antisemitism was socially acceptable and taken for granted everywhere. After all, compared to Jews in Russia, with regular pogroms claiming hundreds of lives, Jews in Vienna, Prague, Paris, or Berlin were safe and could relax. They would never have dreamed of joining the hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing Russia for America every year. In fact, they scorned them, and their Yiddish, which they regarded as a “jargon and not a language at all.

Nothing remotely like the Russian pogroms had occurred in the West since the First Crusade of 1095. Prior to that, the Jews of Europe had enjoyed relative peace and security. And because their value as physicians, merchants, and scholars were prized by rulers, Jews often enjoyed privileges later denied them. So why had everything changed in 1095, with the launch of the first Crusade, the armed campaign to secure recapture the Holy Land from Islam? When Pope Urban II proclaimed the Crusade he made clear there was no act more deserving of heavenly reward than to die on Crusade: to do so was assurance of immediate salvation. But when the first crusaders set out for the Holy Land, they asked themselves: “Why are we going all the way to the Jerusalem to defeat Christ’s Muslim enemies when the Jews who murdered him are right here among us?” So as the armies of French Knights set out for the East, they plundered and massacred age-old Jewish communities en route, and even made significant detours to do so. Some of the Jewish victims believed their suffering heralded the coming of the Messiah. Others thought the Pope had promised a blanket pardon to anyone who killed a Jew. Jews could save themselves by becoming Christian, and some were offered baptism. Such conversions were rare. Far more common was mass ritual suicide, or “Kiddush ha-Shem”, sanctification of the divine name.

Within a century, popular pressures moved the Pope to decide to legislate that Jews everywhere be required to wear some distinguishing mark. Specifics were left to individual countries. France required Jews to wear a yellow patch on their cloaks; Germany required a yellow, cone-shaped hat. To this day, ‘yellow’ has negative connotations, notably that of cowardice. The year of this legislation was 1215: from that point on, Jews are seldom depicted without such insignia, whether in art, sculpture, or other illustrations. This began a process that continued for centuries: the separation of the ‘image’ of the Jew from their human reality. The very word ‘Jew’ became a synonym for various undesirable qualities, triggering repugnance by its very mention.

This separation of the ‘image’ from the individual allowed Jew-hatred to flourish in the absence of Jewish people. In the mid-1970s a student of mine from Sioux Lookout told me that before he came to Winnipeg he thought that “Jew” was simply a word for crooked bargaining. The boy was himself no anti-Semite; he seemed totally open-minded, and eager to learn. I found that people with Jewish friends or a Jewish doctor or other professional could still hold antisemitic views simply because their prejudices were independent of their lived experience. A colleague from a town in the north of England told me that folks there seemed to have three categories of Jews: there were “powerful international Jewish financiers”; there were the Jews in the Bible- the “Israelites”; and there were Jewish shopkeepers, who were well liked but who didn’t affect their prejudices about “the Jews.”

Where did all this begin, this separation of “Jews” from the individual human beings they really were? We have to go back to the very beginning of Christianity, which began as a radical messianic sect of Jews, whose leader, a young rabbi called Jesus, was tried and executed by a Roman court under the authority of the Roman Governor. His followers believed he was the “Messiah” who would transform Israel. Their foremost missionary was Saul of Tarsus, much later known as St. Paul. Although Saul’s original mission was to persecute the followers of Jesus, he underwent a conversion “on the road to Damascus” and joined them. Paul’s sermons and letters became central books in what eventually became the New Testament. Because Greek was the common language of the eastern Mediterranean world, Saul became Paul, and “Messiah” became ‘Christos’. Soon Christians and Jews became ever deeper entrenched in an antagonistic relationship. Christians couldn’t understand why Jews refused to recognize the truth and accept Christ. Either they must be blind, or stupid. Since obviously they were neither, they must be evil. And so in the New Testament’s book of John they are “sons of the devil” and bound to do his work. (John 8:14) During the Holocaust, some people cited the passage from Matthew in which the Jews implicitly confess their guilt for the death of Christ: “His blood be upon us and our children” (Matthew 27:25).

Throughout the centuries that followed, Jews were depicted in various art forms as devil-like creatures, with horns and tails and cloven feet. Sculptures on churches and public places showed Jews with blindfolds signifying they were blind to truth. A particularly popular motif was the so-called “Judensau”, which depicted a rabbi lifting the tail of a huge pig to look for his Talmud, while other Jews gathered beneath the pig to suckle. Variations of the “Judensau” can still be found sculpted in public places in Europe. Then there was the so-called “foetor judaicus.”, the innate stench of the Jewish body. And it only got worse.

The Church Fathers who laid the theological and pastoral foundations of Christianity defined Jews as a threat to the moral and political foundations of Christendom, just as they were a threat to the soul of every individual Christian. Some Church Fathers accused Jews of killing Christ, thus making all Jews thereafter guilty of the crime of “Deicide”, killing God! Scores of other accusations against Jews proliferated. The logic was simple: for if you would kill the Savior, what else wouldn’t you do? Soon Jews were being accused of all manner of outlandish crimes: spreading plague by poisoning wells; killing Jewish children to use their blood in baking matzoh; and even drinking Jewish blood in their rituals. If you would believe what was patently impossible- since drinking blood was taboo for Jews, what wouldn’t you believe? And thus, reasoned one prominent historian of antisemitism, the road to Auschwitz was begun over a thousand years ago.

Incidentally, the last “blood libel” trial was held in Kiev (then in the Russian Empire) Russia in 1913. The verdict was ambiguous: yes, the crime had indeed been committed, but the accused, Mendel Beilis, was not the murderer. Although both sides could claim victory, the trial helped perpetuate the myth of ritual murder: the killing of a Jewish child to use its blood to bake matzoh.
But if the “road to Auschwitz” was begun a thousand years ago, why wasn’t the attempt to exterminate Jewry also begun a thousand years ago? After all, in the 4th century C.E. Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire; the Romans made life difficult for Jews but made no attempt to kill them all. Why not? The answer lies with the greatest of the Church Fathers, St. Augustine (354-430). It is true, he wrote, that the Jews are guilty of the crime of Deicide, of killing the Savior. So they should be persecuted, but not too much; and they must be made to suffer, but not too much. And they should not live near Christians. Their suffering and eternal “wandering” would be proof of their guilt; and they would be living (if unwilling) witnesses to the truth of the Christian faith. This idea was repeated in variations by subsequent Popes, who in any case held out the possibility that Jews could avoid all this by converting. The Jewish communities of Europe, despite some ups and downs, were able to live relatively peaceful lives. Theirs was not an unbroken tale of suffering. But the myths, legends, and lies about them remained.

The attack on this hateful tradition began in the 18th century, the age of Enlightenment. The absurd notions of Jews having horns or drinking Christian blood now seemed out of place. Philosophers and intellectuals attacked all manner of superstitions including those that appeared to support Christianity. In attacking the Church these thinkers also attacked its beliefs that justified Jew-hatred. The further decline of religion in subsequent centuries occasioned by the rising prestige of science might have resulted in a decline of anti-Jewish prejudice, but instead the whole cluster of prejudice and superstition only found a more secure foundation in science.
Of course the word ‘science’ here must be qualified, for in the 19th and even part of the 20th centuries “science” included craniology, physiognomy, and eugenics. Today they are regarded as pseudo-sciences and historical curiosities, but prior to World War II they enjoyed a respect like that accorded to physics or any other exact science. Everywhere, “race” was accepted as a valid category for defining human groups, though its analytical usefulness was increasingly questioned until the term itself was discarded. By the 1880s Europe had completed its ranking of the world’s so-called “races” along a sliding scale. White, northern Europeans topped the list, which ranked other inhabitants according to skin colour, head-shape, physiognomy, and other physical characteristics, all of which were believed to denote the intellectual and moral qualities indicating a group’s level of ‘civilization. So where did Jews fit in? At first they were ranked simply as a sub-group of Europeans; one theory even had them at the apex of the white race; but antisemites attempted to find a scientific basis for excluding them. Since the Middle Ages, as was pointed out, Jews were believed to have a distinctly unpleasant odor, so there must be a scientific basis for it; but none was found. Researchers fanned out over Europe measuring skulls, noses, and other physical features thought to distinguish Jews from other white people. Was there a typical ‘Jewish nose’? One survey found the so-called Jewish nose was most prevalent in the Polish nobility. Research found no support for the popular belief that Jews were dark while gentiles were fair. Regional variations were such that many different ‘races existed within any given country. Wider research showed that Jews tended to resemble the populations in whose midst they resided.

In today’s “post-Truth” era we know too well that dangerous beliefs can persist despite overwhelming evidence against them. This is what happened with the cluster of beliefs encompassed in the term ‘antisemitism.’. The failure of science to support antisemitism or the notion of “race” did not stop people from believing that it did. Others recognized that science could provide little support to prejudice, so antisemites shifted their ground again: the essence of race, they argued, was in the blood—not in its physical elements but in elements which could not be measured, and whose power was therefore all the greater. By thus elevating ‘race’ to the level of ‘mystery’ late 19th century racists were merging prejudices based on religion with the emerging force of nationalism based on “race.” To the ancient belief that Jews were the enemies of Christ was added the modern belief that they posed a threat to the nation. Thus religious and racial antisemitism were strengthened by the most powerful political force ever to emerge, modern nationalism. And because Jews were a threat to race, which was the biological foundation of the nation, they were enemies of the state.

The political force of this antisemitism showed itself in 1897 with the election of Karl Lueger as mayor of Vienna, who was mentioned earlier. The antisemitism that was such a powerful force in central Europe also ignited the worst political crisis in France since the French Revolution, the Dreyfus Affair. Raging at the very time Lueger was making Vienna the most advanced city in Europe, the Dreyfus Affair threatened to destroy the French Republic. Spreading far beyond the issue of the guilt or innocence of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer charged with treason, it polarized the nation between supporters of the Republic, and those who would restore the pillars of the old order: Monarchy, Church, and Aristocracy.
With the spread of industrialism and its threat to agrarian and village life, there was a heightened urgency to demands that the influence of Jews be curbed. The prominent role of Jews in finance capital and speculation earned them blame for the scandals and crashes that dogged the era. Jewish prominence in the free professions of medicine, law, journalism and publishing all increased Jewish vulnerability to various charges of malfeasance. Add to this the persistence of the blood libel, and public depiction of Jews as pigs, goats, and devils; the stereotypes of greedy, conniving Jews proliferating in literature and fairy tales everywhere—the list goes on and on. The reality is that antisemitism had come to permeate the intellectual and cultural life of Europe. Its assumptions were widely shared across the political spectrum; general distaste for Jews was fashionable in high society; blatant antisemitism was articulated at all levels of culture, and freely expressed from church pulpits and in parliaments- including those of Canada.

But what was it about antisemitism in Germany that made the country ripe for a rabidly obsessive anti-Semite like Adolf Hitler? Israel’s most respected Holocaust historian once commented: “If people had been told in 1914 that within one generation most of the Jews of Europe would be murdered, their answer would most certainly have been: The French are capable of any crime.” The reason for this comment was that France was by far the most prolific producer and disseminator of antisemitic literature, purveyed by some of its most respected writers and intellectuals across the political spectrum; it was the home of repeated outbursts of vicious Jew-hatred, most notorious of which was the Dreyfus Affair, the likes of which had never been seen in Germany. The name Edouard-Adolphe Drumont (1844-1917) is synonymous with French antisemitism. In 1886 he published La France Juive. Its Index listed not only prominent Jews but all prominent figures having anything to do with Jews, implicating thousands in what many already believed was an inevitable national degeneration. Drumont provided a list of “hidden Jews” who had been masquerading as Frenchmen. Since antisemitism permeated every element of French culture and politics, there was no need for a specifically anti-Semitic party or movement. Antisemitism was simply a constant in culture and society.

Germany was considered the safest country in Europe for Jews, and although antisemitism was certainly widespread, it hadn’t occasioned significant violence there since the revolutionary upheavals of 1848. So what happened? Why was the Holocaust “Made in Germany”? The answer is Adolf Hitler. There is a consensus amongst many historians: “No Hitler, No Holocaust.” Antisemitism was a necessary cause of the Holocaust, but it was not a sufficient cause. The Nazis were an insignificant bubble in the froth of discontent, for which people commonly blamed the Jews. In the years following World War I, Antisemitism was common currency in political discourse all over Europe. For Hitler, communism and capitalism were both Jewish conspiracies, and the major figures in both were all of them Jews, whether in Moscow or New York. During the 1920s, support for the Communists and Nazis grew, especially during the Great Depression. In 1932, 30% of the German labour force were unemployed, compared to 22.5% in the US and 24% in Canada. Even so, the Nazi victory was not inevitable. In late 1932 the party’s electoral support was declining. There were several other options available, and yet President Hindenburg chose to appoint Hitler Chancellor.
Hitler’s subsequent dismantling of German democracy is part of a complex political story involving far more than the antisemitism which was common everywhere. In any case, Hitler’s genocidal hatred of Jews was not wholly representative. Antisemites may have desired the exclusion of Jews, but not the annihilation of the Jewish people. While Hitler’s murderous fantasies were exceptional, he was able to gain control over the entire state apparatus necessary to realize them. And however extreme his views, their individual elements were available and accessible throughout the Christian West. Everywhere in Europe, the Nazis found accomplices in murder because their victims were Jews, everywhere the historical ‘other’. The Holocaust was the product of a pervasive antisemitism that, in the Nazi mind, placed the Jewish people outside the bounds of humanity, and marked them for extinction.