The Nazi slaughter of European Jews during World War II, commonly referred to as the Holocaust, occupies a special place in our history. The genocide of innocent people by one of the world’s most advanced nations is opposite of what we think about the human race, the human reason, and progress. It raises doubts about our ability to live together on the same planet with people of other cultures and persuasions.Before it happened, virtually no one thought such a slaughter likely or even possible. To be sure, for many centuries anti-Semitism had been widespread throughout Europe. Devout Christians had viewed the Jews as Christ killers and deliberate misbelievers, but conversion was considered the inevitable cure, however long it might be delayed. Following the Jew’s emancipation from discriminatory laws in the 19th century, the old religious anti-Semitism was joined by secular nationalism that challenged the Jews’ qualifications for membership in the nations in which they lived. Secular anti-Semites objected when the Jews newly freed from persecution, often tied their destinies to growing capitalist economies, to architecture, and the theater. As we have learned and talked about in class, their success in banking, business, politics, and culture made the Jews far more visible in society than what their small numbers were. Europeans who felt threatened by modernity, and especially those who lost status as the result of economic changes and the spread of democracy, sometimes blamed the Jews for problems.Political parties that supported anti-Semitism prior to about 1914, rarely won, but anti-Jewish attitudes became fairly commonplace in many European countries. From what I have learned about anti-Semitism before World War was it was more a war of words and a way to define one’s own national identity than a program for radial action. The most that I learned happened was those anti-Semitic minorities that t...
