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Persecution of the Jews

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Persecution of the Jews
Anti-Semitism: (Historical / Modern)

Persecution of the Jews deals with various persecutions that the Jewish people have experinced throughout history.

Related articles: Anti-Semitism; History of anti-Semitism; Modern anti-Semitism

Contents

Christian

Main article: Christianity and anti-Semitism

Christianity, which owes its origins and theology to Jewish teachings about the Messiah, has long had an ambiguous relationship with Judaism, giving rise to Christianity and anti-Semitism. Christians had difficulty with the Jews' claim to being God's chosen people, and they were seen as having contributed to the demise of Jesus, who according to the Christians was the Messiah and the "Son of God". Judaism considers this to be a serious heresy that negates the absolute unity, definite non-corporality, and complete invisibility of the Jewish God as mandated by the Torah.

In medieval Europe, many notorious persecutions of Jews in the name of Christianity occurred, notably during the Crusades—when Jews all over Germany were massacred—and in the Spanish Inquisition, when the entire Jewish population that had refused to be baptized into Christianity was expelled. They found refuge mainly in the Ottoman Empire and the Low Countries. From Alexander III's reign until the end of Tsarist times in Russia, Jews were restricted to the Jewish Pale of Settlement and subjected to frequent pogroms. On the other hand, in the 16th century, article four of the Council of Trent declared that the Jews were no more responsible for death of Jesus than Christians, and this was later reaffirmed by the Second Vatican Council.

Arab and Islamic

Main articles: Islam and Judaism, Islam and anti-Semitism

Islam and Judaism have a complex relationship. Jews were allowed to live as dhimmis under Islam; yet the political conflict between Muhammad and the Jews of Medina in the 7th century left ample ideological fuel for Islam and anti-Semitism through the centuries.

During the Middle Ages, Jews typically had a better status in the Muslim world than in Christendom, though still short of full equality with Muslims. As the Muslim empire expanded during the centuries, the status of the non-Muslim communities was at times precarious, and they were generally subject to dhimmi laws. These laws freed them from military service and paying zakah, but placed additional jizyah and land taxes on them. While the dhimmi status in theory protected the rights of non-Muslim minorities, in practice their application varied. Restrictions regarding identifying clothing, building houses of worship, holding public offices, riding on horses and camels, and others were at times enforced. Over the centuries Jewish communities in some Muslim countries prospered, while others were subject to persecution.

The period between about 900 and 1200, known as the "Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain", when the Arab and Jewish intellectual worlds amalgamated, marked the revival of Jewish culture and science. It ended with the invasion of the Almohades.

During the Holocaust, the Middle East was in turmoil. Britain prohibited Jewish immigration to the British Mandate of Palestine. In Cairo the Jewish Lehi (perhaps better know as the Stern Gang) assassinated Lord Moyne in 1944 fighting the British closure of Palestine to Jewish immigration, complicating British-Arab-Jewish relations. While the Allies and the Axis were fighting for the oil-rich region, the Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husayni staged a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq and organized the Farhud pogrom which marked the turning point for about 150,000 Iraqi Jews who, following this event and the hostilities generated by the war with Israel in 1948, were targeted for violence, persecution, boycotts, confiscations, and near complete expulsion in 1951. The coup failed and the mufti fled to Berlin, where he actively supported Hitler. In Egypt, with a Jewish population of about 75,000, young Anwar Sadat was imprisoned for conspiring with the Nazis and promised them that "no British soldier would leave Egypt alive" (see Military history of Egypt during World War II) leaving the Jews of that region defenseless. In the French Vichy territories of Algeria and Syria plans were drawn up for the liquidation of their Jewish populations were the Axis powers to triumph.

The tensions of the Arab-Israeli conflict were also a factor in the rise of animosity to Jews all over the Middle East, as hundreds of thousands of Jews fled as refugees, the main waves being soon after the 1948 and 1956 wars. In reaction to the Suez Crisis of 1956, the Egyptian government expelled almost 25,000 Egyptian Jews and confiscated their property, and sent approximately 1,000 more Jews to prisons and detention camps. The population of Jewish communities of Muslim Middle East and North Africa was reduced from about 900,000 in 1948 to less than 8,000 today.

Nazism

Main article: Holocaust

Persecution of the Jews reached its peak under the Third Reich (1933-1945). As encapsulated in Hitler's book Mein Kampf (1925) Nazism had obsessive and racist beliefs about Jews as "racial enemies". Jews were subjected to arbitrary arrest, internment, torture and murder. The German Nazis thought of themselves as an Aryan "Master Race" of Übermenschen. To them the Jews, as well as "Negros" and the Slavic peoples, were "inferior" subhuman Untermenschen. These racist beliefs and ideologies were embodied in the Nuremberg Laws (1935-1939) specifically designed to discriminate against Jews, legalizing and enforcing racial segregation and discrimination.

Following the Nazi party's take-over of Germany (1933) and Austria (1938), the new Nazi Germany went to war against Poland (1939), France (1940), and Russia (1941), and took over Hungary (1944). These countries had a combined population of over 11 million Jews, the majority of Europe's Jews. They became the victims of a vast undertaking to "exterminate" them via planned genocide. From shortly after they took power in Germany in 1933, the Nazis had constructed concentration camps to incarcerate (and later, often to kill) their opponents and those they saw as "undesirables". Many Jews became victims of this policy. After the Nazi conquest of the European mainland, plans for the "Final Solution (Endlösung) of the Jewish question" (1941) were put into full motion, and formalized at the Wannsee Conference (1942). Six major extermination camps were built in Poland by Nazi Germany and its allies for the express purpose of genocide against Jews, even for those who had long assimilated and had been baptized into Christianity, as well as for other minority groups deemed enemies of the Nazi regime.

The bulk of the Jewish prisoners were mass-executed in gas chambers at Treblinka, Sobibór, Majdanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau) and their bodies disposed in crematoria. This was the first full-scale genocide using the innovations of modern science and engineering. Approximately six million Jews perished under these policies during the Holocaust.

After the 1945 defeat of the Axis Powers by the Allied Nations, many high German officials were punished by the Nuremberg Trials (1945-1949) and Germany paid reparations to Holocaust survivor s world-wide and to the new Jewish State of Israel after it arose in 1948.

In recent years a rise in historical revisionism about the Holocaust has resulted in Holocaust denial. The articles Nizkor Project and Holocaust denial examined deal with this phenomenon.

Soviet Union

Main article: History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union

Even though many of the Old Bolsheviks were ethnically Jewish, they sought to uproot Judaism and Zionism and established the Yevsektsiya to achieve this goal. By the end of the 1940s the Communist leadership of the former USSR had liquidated almost all Jewish organizations, with the exception of a few token synagogues. These synagogues were then placed under police surveillance, both openly and through the use of informants.

The anti-Semitic campaign of 1948-1953 against so-called "rootless cosmopolitans," the fabrication of the "Doctors' plot," the rise of "Zionology" and subsequent activities of official organizations such as the Anti-Zionist committee of the Soviet public were officially carried out under the banner of "anti-Zionism," but the use of this term could not obscure the anti-Semitic content of these campaigns, and by the mid-1950s the state persecution of Soviet Jews emerged as a major human rights issue in the West and domestically.


See also


Last updated: 02-18-2005 23:36:48
Last updated: 05-03-2005 17:50:55