Knowra Racial antisemitism Racial antisemitism Racial antisemitism defines Jews as a hereditary biological group whose supposed traits persist regardless of belief or religious practice. It recast hostility toward Jews in racial terms.
Scientific racism : The use of purported scientific methods to classify human groups and rank them by inherited traits. Racial antisemitism borrowed its language of biological hierarchy from this broader ideology.
Religious antisemitism : Hostility toward Jews grounded in religious beliefs, accusations, or efforts to suppress Judaism. Racial antisemitism differed by treating Jewishness as inherited and unchangeable.
Wilhelm Marr : A German journalist who popularized the term antisemitism in the 1870s and framed hostility toward Jews in racial terms. He presented anti-Jewish politics as a racial struggle rather than a religious dispute.
Nazi Germany : The German state under Nazi rule from 1933 to 1945, organized around dictatorship, racial ideology, and expansionism. Its government made racial antisemitism an organizing principle of law and administration.
Race : A socially and historically constructed system for classifying people through perceived ancestry and physical traits. The ideology depended on treating Jewish identity as an inherited racial category.
Antisemitism : Prejudice, hostility, or discrimination directed against Jews as Jews. Racial antisemitism is one historically specific form of anti-Jewish hostility.
Karl Lueger : An Austrian politician who used antisemitic rhetoric while serving as mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910. His political success showed how antisemitism could mobilize voters in mass politics.
Holocaust : The systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. Racial antisemitism helped justify the genocide by defining Jews as an inherited enemy.
Hereditary determinism : The belief that inherited traits largely determine an individual's characteristics or social destiny. It made Jewish ancestry, rather than religious practice, the supposed source of identity.
Gobineau : A French aristocrat whose 1853–1855 essay argued that racial mixing caused the decline of civilizations. His racial hierarchy helped popularize nineteenth-century theories of inherited human difference.
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