A HISTORY OF ANTI-SEMITISM

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THIS IMAGE?

WHAT IS ANTI-SEMITISM?

• Anti-Semitism is the term used to describe when people are prejudiced (or bias) against the Jews, just because they are Jewish.

Q. In this image, one group is being prejudiced to another. Can you identify them?

ANTI-SEMITISM EXISTED A LONG TIME BEFORE THE NAZIS

Source 1: A copy of a drawing by an Italian monk in AD 1023 of Jews holding their hands over their ears because they didn’t want to listen to the Christian gospel.

OTHER EXAMPLES OF ANTI-SEMITISMSource 2 – Melito, Bishop of Sardis (Asia Minor), second century AD

“You [all the Jews] killed the Lord in the middle of Jerusalem. Hear all generations of the people and see……The King of Israel was murdered by Jewish hands.

Source 3 – A German woodcut, 1493; illustrating the story of the murder of a young German boy, supposedly by Jews

Source 4 – ‘The greedy, money-grabbing Jew’, drawn in Manchester 1773

SUMMARY POINTS

Ancient Origins• Early ___________ teaching blamed the Jews for the

crucifixion of Christ • The Jewish communities in the Middle East were

_____________ after the fall of the_________ in Jerusalem in 70 AD. These communities were called the _________.

During the Middle Ages • Jews were often blamed as ___________ for local problems • New laws were developed in places like Britain to ban

Jewish people from owning land.• Lies like the _____ _________were developed to

_______Jews from the European communities Key Terms: Temple, Christian, expel, scapegoats, Blood Libel, scattered, diaspora

SUMMARY POINTS

• In modern times, Wilhelm Marr (1818 – 1904) was a German writer who helped extend anti-semitical ideas into the area of science.

• In his pamphlet The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism, 1879) he argued that Germans and Jews were caught in a longstanding conflict.

• Marr also argued that this conflict arose because the Jewish born Germans were a separate and different ‘race’ to full blooded Germans.

• Marr was influenced by a German professor, Ernst Haeckel, who argued that the Jews were an earlier, inferior form of the human species (Social Darwinism)

ACTIVITIES

1. Add the following terms to your glossary:Scapegoat, Blood Libel, diaspora, anti-Semitism, social Darwinism, Wilhelm Marr2. Describe three forms of anti-Semitism that occurred before the year 1900 AD3. Research into Social Darwinism. a) What are the central arguments of this theory? b) Who were its main proponents? c) Find some historical images that seek to

illustrate this theory