The Probert Encyclopaedia of General Information

ANTI-SEMITISM

Anti-Semitism, hostility to the Jews (Semites), has long been actively exhibited in severities and attacks of various kinds. A movement of the late 19th century manifested in various countries, especially Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Romania, and France. It may have been attributed to different motives in different countries, but on the whole owed its origin less to the fact of the Jews being a 'peculiar people' by race and religion, than to the comparatively high position won by them in the financial and political worlds.

In Western Russia there was a great outburst against the Jews in 1881, in which men, women, and children were slaughtered. The Russian government, by its anti-Jewish policy, may be said to have sanctioned this murderous outbreak, which was followed by harsh laws and actual persecutions, though afterwards there was a mitigation of the severity shown towards the Jews. Yet in 1903 the world was startled by a terrible massacre of Jews at Kishinef, in Bessarabia, connived at by the authorities on the spot; and towards the end of 1905, in connection with the Russian revolutionary movement, there were dreadful massacres of Jews in Odessa, Kishinef, and other towns, the authorities being similarly involved. In Russia, hatred of the Jews was party due to the position they occupied throughout the country as money-lenders.

In Rumania their position resembled what it was elsewhere in mediaeval times, and was less favourable than it was even under the Turks. In Germany, even before Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party the movement was worked chiefly by politicians for their own ends, though the racial and religious question also had some influence; and among the ignorant the .belief that the Jews murder Christian children for ritual purposes was revived, as also in Austria-Hungary. In Austria-Hungary the movement was partly political, partly social and economic, partly religious.

In France anti-Semitism was employed chiefly as a weapon by monarchists and clericals as against republicanism, and by the socialists as against capitalism, racial antipathy having also its influence in the movements. In Britain, anti-Semitism was much less severe, owing to there having been a very large influx of Jews from the Continent, forming part of Britian's immigration policy.

Anti-Semitism hit a climax in the 1930's with Adolf Hitler and the German Nazi Party with the wholesale slaughter of Jews throughout Europe, which provided an excuse for other world powers to oppose Germany's expansion through war - though economic reasons seem much more likely - and culminated in the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, subsequently named Israel, following the end of the Second World War.
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