My exact dates may be off but I think the above might be somewhat inaccurate. In the immediate aftermath of WWI, there wasn’t initially widespread antisemitism that would later sweep over Germany in the 1930s when the Nazis took power and made antisemitism a national policy. That’s not to say that antisemitism didn’t exist in Germany - it almost surely did, but in late 1910s and much of the 1920s, there wasn’t the same level of antisemitism as compared to say to say Poland and Russia where there had already been pogroms, or even in neighboring France which had been torn apart by the Dreyfus Affair. That’s partly what was so shocking and sickening about Nazism: their political agenda and propaganda take the seeds of antisemitism and made it flower.
Germany was a focal point of European antisemitism through the 1800s. Even the word “antisemitism” was coined by a German author in an essay entitled “The Victory of Jewry over Germandom.” In 1879. Martin Luther’s own intense hatred of Jews has already been mentioned above, and that was in the 1500s.
The only thing unique about the Nazis was the scale and organization of their attempted genocide - not the ideology or intent behind it.
Cultural hatred of Jews in pre-war Europe is bedrock, foundational stuff. Forwarding the idea that the Nazis somehow ‘made it flower’ diminishes the scale and pervasiveness of that hatred and likewise minimizes the impact of modern antisemitism.
Nazis are not a necessary ingredient for widespread, virulent hatred of Jewish people. Not then, not now.
Well, it is complicated, while it is true that antisemitism was already present the reality is that Jews in Germany got better opportunities and served in the military *, science and other industries by the time of WWI and a bit later. Then the Nazis came.
It was Hitler and the Nazis though the ones that allowed and made that antisemitism to regrow where it was actually fading a bit.
And that cycle of “Jews migrate somewhere (because they escaped/were expelled from somewhere else), Jews become successful but retain their cultural identity, persecution and violence grows until a terrible culmination” is ancient and well documented.
Yes, but then if that was the usual, then in the USA that would had taken place too.
The difference IMHO was that the federal government then was not like the Nazis in the way the Nazis applied ‘Miracle-gro’ to the antisemitic saplings.
As anyone who read my post can plainly see, I clearly mentioned that there was antisemitism present in Germany prior to the Nazism. Even during periods of relative tolerance, Jews have lived in a state of unease in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. But to suggest that antisemitism in Germany in the 19th and early 20th Centuries was anything close to the scale of what became what we now know as the Holocaust is not supported by historical evidence.
There was episodic antisemitism in German culture and law - I’m not denying or minimizing that. However, there is no evidence that German society was so collectively hateful toward Jews in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries that they supported their elimination or even that they endorsed the idea of stripping them of citizenship (the period after Napoleon’s defeat perhaps being the exception). The point I was trying to make - and I get the sense we’re more or less on the same page - was that simmering hostilities can quickly explode into a conflagration of genocide in a very short span of time.
We can look back the Holocaust now and say that it shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it was a surprise. It was even a surprise to many of the Jews who ended up being driven out of the country their families had called home for hundreds of years. Sure, there had been incidents of antisemitism, but nothing like a complete and total genocide.