Antisemitism is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is considered to be a form of racism.
Antisemitism in Christianity, a form of religious antisemitism, is the feeling of hostility which some Christian Churches, Christian groups, and ordinary Christians have towards the Jewish religion and the Jewish people.
Alfred Ernst Rosenberg was a Baltic German Nazi theorist and ideologue. Rosenberg was first introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart and he held several important posts in the Nazi government. He was the head of the NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs during the entire rule of Nazi Germany (1933–1945), and led Amt Rosenberg, an official Nazi body for cultural policy and surveillance, between 1934 and 1945. During World War II, Rosenberg was the head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (1941–1945). After the war, he was convicted of crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials in 1946. He was sentenced to death and executed on 16 October 1946.
Religious antisemitism is aversion to or discrimination against Jews as a whole, based on religious doctrines of supersession that expect or demand the disappearance of Judaism and the conversion of Jews, and which figure their political enemies in Jewish terms. This often has led to false claims against Judaism and religious antisemitic canards. It is sometimes called theological antisemitism.
German Christians were a pressure group and a movement within the German Evangelical Church that existed between 1932 and 1945, aligned towards the antisemitic, racist and Führerprinzip ideological principles of Nazism with the goal to align German Protestantism as a whole towards those principles. Their advocacy of these principles led to a schism within 23 of the initially 28 regional church bodies (Landeskirchen) in Germany and the attendant foundation of the opposing Confessing Church in 1934.
Michael Cardinal Ritter von Faulhaber was a German Catholic prelate who served as Archbishop of Munich for 35 years, from 1917 to his death in 1952. Created Cardinal in 1921, von Faulhaber criticized the Weimar Republic as rooted in treason in a speech at the 62nd German Catholics' Day of 1922. Cardinal von Faulhaber was a leading member and co-founder of the Amici Israel, a priestly association founded in Rome in 1926 with the goal of advocating Jewish-Christian reconciliation.
The Wiener Holocaust Library is the world's oldest institution devoted to the study of the Holocaust, its causes and legacies. Founded in 1933 as an information bureau that informed Jewish communities and governments worldwide about the persecution of the Jews under the Nazis, it was transformed into a research institute and public access library after the end of World War II and is situated in Russell Square, London.
A census in May 1939, six years into the Nazi era and after the annexation of mostly Catholic Austria and mostly Catholic Czechoslovakia into Germany, indicates that 54% of the population considered itself Protestant, 40% considered itself Catholic, 3.5% self-identified as Gottgläubig, and 1.5% as "atheist". Protestants voted for the Nazi Party and made up its membership more than Catholics did.
Positive Christianity was a movement within Nazi Germany which promoted the belief that the racial purity of the German people should be maintained by mixing racialistic Nazi ideology with either fundamental or significant elements of Nicene Christianity. Adolf Hitler used the term in point 24 of the 1920 Nazi Party Platform, stating: "the Party as such represents the viewpoint of Positive Christianity without binding itself to any particular denomination". The Nazi movement had been hostile to Germany's established churches. The new Nazi idea of Positive Christianity allayed the fears of Germany's Christian majority by implying that the Nazi movement was not anti-Christian. That said, in 1937, Hans Kerrl, the Nazi Minister for Church Affairs, explained that "Positive Christianity" was not "dependent upon the Apostle's Creed", nor was it dependent on "faith in Christ as the son of God", upon which Christianity relied, rather, it was represented by the Nazi Party: "The Führer is the herald of a new revelation", he said. Hitler's public presentation of Positive Christianity as a traditional Christian faith differed. Despite Hitler's insistence on a unified peace with the Churches, to accord with Nazi antisemitism, positive Christianity advocates also sought to distance themselves from the Jewish origins of Christ and the Christian Bible. Based on such elements, most of positive Christianity separated itself from traditional Nicene Christianity and as a result, it is in general considered apostate by all mainstream Trinitarian Christian churches, regardless of whether they are Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant.
Racial antisemitism is prejudice against Jews based on a belief or assertion that Jews constitute a distinct race that has inherent traits or characteristics that appear in some way abhorrent or inherently inferior or otherwise different from the traits or characteristics of the rest of a society. The abhorrence may find expression in the form of discrimination, stereotypes or caricatures. Racial antisemitism may present Jews, as a group, as a threat in some way to the values or safety of a society. Racial antisemitism can seem deeper-rooted than religious antisemitism, because for religious antisemites conversion of Jews remains an option and once converted the "Jew" is gone. In the context of racial antisemitism Jews cannot get rid of their Jewishness.
The German Faith Movement was a religious movement in Nazi Germany (1933–1945), closely associated with University of Tübingen professor Jakob Wilhelm Hauer. The movement sought to move Germany away from Christianity towards a religion that was based on Germanic paganism and Nazi ideas.
The Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany began on April 1, 1933, and was claimed to be a defensive reaction to the anti-Nazi boycott, which had been initiated in March 1933. It was largely unsuccessful, as the German population continued to use Jewish businesses, but revealed the intent of the Nazis to undermine the viability of Jews in Germany.
James William Parkes was an Anglican clergyman, historian, and social activist. With the publication of The Jew and His Neighbour in 1929, he created the foundations of a Christian re-evaluation of Judaism. He also published under the pseudonym John Hadham.
Martin Luther (1483–1546) was a German professor of theology, priest and seminal leader of the Reformation. His positions on Judaism continue to be controversial. These changed dramatically from his early career, where he showed concern for the plight of European Jews, to his later years, when embittered by his failure to convert them to Christianity, he became outspokenly antisemitic in his statements and writings. Recent historical studies have focused on Luther's influence on modern antisemitism, with a particular focus on Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
Popes Pius XI (1922–1939) and Pius XII (1939–1958) led the Catholic Church during the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. Around a third of Germans were Catholic in the 1930s, generally in southern Germany; Protestants dominated the north. The Catholic Church in Germany had opposed the Nazi Party, and in the 1933 elections, the proportion of Catholics voting for the Nazi Party was lower than the national average. Nevertheless, the Catholic-aligned Centre Party voted for the Enabling Act of 1933, which gave Adolf Hitler additional domestic powers to suppress political opponents in Germany as Chancellor. President Paul Von Hindenburg continued as Commander and Chief and responsible for negotiation of international treaties until his death, 2 August 1934.
Anti-Jewish boycotts are organized boycotts directed against Jewish people to exclude them economical, political or cultural life. Antisemitic boycotts are often regarded as a manifestation of popular antisemitism.
A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide is a 2014 book by Alon Confino published by Yale University Press, which seeks to explain Nazi antisemitism and the Holocaust by looking into the imaginations and fantasies of Nazis. It received mixed reviews in scholarly and popular publications. Some reviewers praised Confino's analysis for its originality, while others criticize it for making assertions that are not sufficiently backed by evidence.
The Patriotic Citizens of Viitasaari was an organization operating in Viitasaari in Central Finland. The association was one of the first prominent, explicitly anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic organizations in Finland. From 1928 to 1930, the group was run by Gunnar von Hertzen, a municipal physician.
Ajan Suunta was the newspaper of the Finnish Patriotic People's Movement (IKL) that ran from 1932 to 1944. IKL published thirty newspapers and magazines, but the daily newspaper Ajan Suunta was the main organ of the party. Ajan Suunta was preceded by the newspaper Ajan Sana published from 1930 to 1932.
