Measuring the Pervasity of Antisemitism
Were the Nazis antisemites? Were the Germans of that time? Silly question, you might think: if the Nazis weren't antisemites, who ever was? If a sizable chunk of their society didn't hate Jews, who got rid of them all over Europe and sent them to the East to be killed? Who set up and ran the killing machine?
That's common sense, of course. Yet common sense isn't as common as we'd like. Over the decades there have been popular narratives of the Nazi era which earnestly claimed that the authentic Jew-haters were few and far between, and it was all sorts of other things that motivated people (if they even noticed what they were doing). Indeed, by the 1980s, the mainstream of historians of Nazism were busy downplaying the centrality of Jew hatred and playing up other things. Eventually some of them - most notably, a largish group of young German historians - re-examined the historical record and came back to report that Yes, hatred of the Jews had been pervasive and significant in the story of their persecution and mass murder. Till this very day, however, it's not hard to find well-intentioned folks who will earnestly tell you that No, it was man's inhumanity to man or some such fairy tale.
All of which is a long introduction to this link. Behind it you'll find a report by Julie Birchill about the ambiance of Jew Hatred in today's UK. Anyone can read the Guardian and see the antisemitism in it; what's harder to do is know if the haters there are representative fo anything. That's why reports from the field such as Burchill's are so important. These are not far out loonies, she's telling. Or perhaps they are, but there are lots of them.
(h/t Divest).
That's common sense, of course. Yet common sense isn't as common as we'd like. Over the decades there have been popular narratives of the Nazi era which earnestly claimed that the authentic Jew-haters were few and far between, and it was all sorts of other things that motivated people (if they even noticed what they were doing). Indeed, by the 1980s, the mainstream of historians of Nazism were busy downplaying the centrality of Jew hatred and playing up other things. Eventually some of them - most notably, a largish group of young German historians - re-examined the historical record and came back to report that Yes, hatred of the Jews had been pervasive and significant in the story of their persecution and mass murder. Till this very day, however, it's not hard to find well-intentioned folks who will earnestly tell you that No, it was man's inhumanity to man or some such fairy tale.
All of which is a long introduction to this link. Behind it you'll find a report by Julie Birchill about the ambiance of Jew Hatred in today's UK. Anyone can read the Guardian and see the antisemitism in it; what's harder to do is know if the haters there are representative fo anything. That's why reports from the field such as Burchill's are so important. These are not far out loonies, she's telling. Or perhaps they are, but there are lots of them.
(h/t Divest).
Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
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