Читать книгу The Holocaust: History in an Hour - Jemma Saunders J. - Страница 5

Since the first millennium, the Jews of Europe had faced periods of intense persecution. This was partly because they were widely considered responsible for the death of Jesus Christ in 33 CE and partly because they fulfilled moneylending roles in society, a practice known as usury. Early anti-Semitism manifested itself in property confiscation, expulsion and outright violence.

Martin Luther’s 1543 treatise On the Jews and their Lies

Jews were massacred on at least two occasions in thirteenth-century England, while under the Spanish Inquisition thousands were forced to convert to Christianity or to leave the country. Martin Luther, whose rhetoric fuelled the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s, developed strong anti-Semitic leanings and wrote an influential treatise titled On the Jews and Their Lies. This treatise advocated, among other measures, slave labour for the Jews and the destruction of their synagogues. Luther’s sentiments were instrumental in laying the basis for anti-Semitism in Germany for the next 400 years.

Following the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century, Jews began to enjoy greater levels of tolerance in French-governed societies, but were still marginalized in much of Europe, particularly Russia. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, antagonism towards Russian Jews reached new levels as pogroms (organized persecutory actions) broke out with increasing frequency. Attacks on Jews were encouraged by the tsar and in 1903, fifty people were killed in a sustained outbreak of violence in Kishinev. Two years later The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was published in Russia. This fictional work incited anti-Semitic hatred, claiming there was a Jewish conspiracy for world domination.

Germany became a unified nation in 1871 and less than 1 per cent of the newly united population was Jewish. Anti-Semitism was still a tangible force, though since Luther’s era its focus had shifted steadily from religion to race. The views of prevalent European philosophers, who wrote about racial inequality in the nineteenth century, were adopted by many Germans, who defined their own race in linguistic and cultural terms. Jews allegedly did not share these traits and were thus deemed alien and subordinate. It was this concentration on the supposed racial inferiority of the Jews that would develop further and culminate in the atrocities of the 1940s.