164 Chapter 7
KEY CONCEPT ANTI-SEMITISM
their refusal to acknowledge him as the Son of God. Economic anti-Semitism developed from the Middle Ages onwards, expressing a distaste for the Jews as moneylenders and traders. The nineteenth century saw the birth of racial anti- Semitism in the works of Richard Wagner and H. S. Chamberlain, who condemned the Jewish peoples as fundamentally evil and destructive. Such ideas provided the ideological basis for German Nazism and found their most grotesque expression in the Holocaust.
By tradition, Semites are descendants of Shem, son of Noah, and include most of the peoples of the Middle East. Anti-Semitism refers specifically to prejudice against or hatred towards the Jews. In its earliest systematic form, anti- Semitism had a religious character, reflecting the hostility of Christians towards the Jews, based on their complicity in the murder of Jesus and
The doctrine of racial anti-Semitism entered Germany through Gobineau’s writing and took the form of Aryanism, a belief in the biological superiority of the Aryan peoples. These ideas were taken up by the composer Richard Wagner and his UK-born son-in- law, H. S. Chamberlain, whose writings had an enormous impact on Hitler and the Nazis. Chamberlain defined the highest race more narrowly as the ‘Teutons’, clearly understood to mean the German peoples. All cultural development was ascribed to the German way of life, while Jewish people were described as ‘physically, spiritually and morally degenerate’. Chamberlain presented history as a confrontation between the Teutons and the Jews, and therefore prepared the ground for Nazi race theory, which portrayed Jewish people as a universal scapegoat for all of Germany’s misfortunes. The Nazis blamed the Jews for Germany’s defeat in 1918; they were responsible for its humiliation at Versailles; they were behind the financial power of the banks and big business that enslaved the lower middle classes; and their influence was exerted through the working-class movement and the threat of social revolution. In Hitler’s view, the Jews were responsible for an international conspiracy of capitalists and communists, whose prime objective was to weaken and overthrow the German nation.
KEY FIGURE
HOUSTON STEWART CHAMBERLAIN (1855–1929) A British-born German writer, Chamberlain played a major role in popularizing racial theories, having a major impact on Hitler and the Nazis. In Foundations of the Nineteenth Century ([1899] 1913), largely based on the writings of Gobineau, Chamberlain used the term ‘Aryan race’ to describe almost all the peoples of Europe, but portrayed the ‘Nordic’ or ‘Teutonic’ peoples (by which he meant the Germans) as its supreme element, with the Jewish people being their implacable enemy.
ullstein bild Dtl./ullstein bild/Getty Images
Nazism, or national socialism, portrayed the world in pseudo-religious, pseudo-scientific terms as a struggle for dominance between the Germans and the Jews, representing, respectively, the forces of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Hitler himself divided the races of the world into three categories: z z The first, the Aryans, were the Herrenvolk , the ‘master race’; Hitler described the Aryans as the ‘founders of culture’ and literally believed them to be responsible for all creativity, whether in art, music, literature, philosophy or political thought.
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