Antisemitism
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At the beginning of the twentieth century, antisemitism was openly espoused everywhere in the Western world, even in the most respectable circles, to a degree that cannot easily be appreciated today. In consequence, Jews throughout Europe and the United States lived in a state of uncertainty, usually "tolerated" but seldom fully accepted. In the course of the following forty years, European and American Jewry would experience radically different fates. Nazi Germany would attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe, and would succeed in killing some six million of them. At the same time, American Jews would move more nearly into the mainstream of national life than perhaps any other Jewish community in the Western world. The following discussion will compare the dramatically divergent experiences and fates of the Jewish communities in Germany and the United States in the period from 1940 till the Second World War. Had someone living in the year 1900 been told that within half a century, a major European country would embark on a systematic effort to exterminate European Jewry, it is rather unlikely that the person who heard this grim prophesy would have guessed that the country would be Germany. The likeliest suspect at that time would have been Russia, where popular antisemitism was intense, and was reinforced by official Tsarist policy; it was the Tsarist secret police who forged the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the great source of twentieth-century Jewish-consp
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remain, but confined to ghettoes and restricted to certain (mostly unpopular) occupations--provided a source of communal tensions that kept antisemitism active. German townspeople had frequent contact with Jews, but in restrictive contexts that fed into stereotypes, and there was little personal contact. In such conditions, stereotyping and bigotry tended to be self-reinforcing.
Nevertheless, with the waning of religious zeal and the rise of the Enlightenment, the legal and social strictures against German Jews were gradually relaxed. In the Imperial Germany of 1900, an increasingly broad range of professions were open to Jews, and indeed they were important contributors to the cultural and scientific achievements in which all Germans took great pride. Antisemitism remained widespread, even pervasive (as it most of Europe) but in spite of an upsurge about in the last decade or two of the century, antisemitism gave every appearance of being in a longer-term decline, with German Jews on the verge of being accepted as good Germans. Above all, the "Jewish question" was simply not high on the agenda of public concern, as it was in contemporary France. While antisemitism was found on both the Right and elements of the Left, it
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Middle Ages, American Jews, Britons Americans, Klux Klan, German Jewry, German Jews, Germany United, Eastern Europe, Little Italies, Imperial Germany, american jews, western world, world war, twentieth century, german jews, american life, germany united, middle ages, german jewry, jewish community, jewish immigrant population, antisemitism western world,
Approximate Word count = 2190
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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