AntiSemitism in the U.S - Essay Example

The Jews are clannish. They stick together and care little about others. The Jews are not to be trusted with money matters because they are too sharp in their business deals. The Jews are rich and greedy and want to dominate the world. They are not to be trusted politically. They are more loyal to themselves and their homeland, Israel than to the citizens of the country in which they live. These concepts are very harsh and hurtful towards the Jews and are often repeated and make anti-Semitism work.

It is interesting to note that all of these ideas were set in the time around the middle ages and the anti-Semites of the 1920's, 1930's and 1940's still followed these concepts. Thankfully, not everyone in the world shares these views. Psychologists, historians, and sociologists began to study the origins of anti-Semitism and were trying to find something universal about it in all its manifestations. The next, and perhaps final, step in understanding the essence of anti-Semitism comes in the form of a question that these people hedged around and exposed.

Is the hatred and rejection of Jews - known as Anti-Semitism since the last quarter of the nineteenth century - the same phenomenon throughout history in all its manifestations Or, perhaps, is this term simply an umbrella for all social, political, and psychological phenomena, which caught on thanks to terminological or ideological convenienceAfter the Holocaust, there emerged three basic approaches to dealing with anti Semitism's causes. One approach proposed that there was never a real problem between the major group of people in an area and the Jewish minority that it was just a deception exploited for the benefit, be it political of social, of those in power.

Proponents of this approach felt that there was no real problem, even in Germany, between Jews and non-Jews. The hatred of Jews due to a manipulation of historical prejudices and the focusing of peoples bitterness on an imagined enemy. Nostalgia and a desire to preserve and re-enforce the myth of German-Jewish coexistence tainted the formulation of this idea.Another way of investigating the origins of Jew hatred places significant portions of the blame for Anti-Semitism squarely upon shoulders of Jews, their leaders, their conduct, and their actions throughout history.

As this reasoning goes, at one point in the history of Europe Jews lost the ability to perform a meaningful social function, such as artisans and money lenders, and survived off of their wealth and status. This created a real conflict between Jews and the other social classes in Europe. Had the Jews and their leaders recognized this and done something about it, Jew hatred would not have manifested itself the in the way that that it did. Unfortunately, the prevailing opinions of the day in German society no doubt played a role in developing this approach towards anti-Semitism.

A third way of dealing with historically anti-semantic thoughts is completely different than the first two. It proposed that there was nothing really special about the modern manifestation of Anti-Semitism in the Holocaust. This should come as no surprise since it is a direct result of the hatred and destruction of the Jewish nation through out Gentile and Jewish history. Proof of this can be seen in the decline of Jews during the Christian period of the Roman Empire, then again in the Dark Ages during the Black Plague, and yet again in the Chmielnicki