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From a Nazi perspective, what you're saying makes little sense. It would be similar to "we should enlist Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh in the army, because
by arp242 3y ago
From a Nazi perspective, what you're saying makes little sense. It would be similar to "we should enlist Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh in the army, because they've shown to be excellent at bombing stuff". That would be silly because these people and the organisations they associate with are considered a corrupting influence. In the Nazi view, Jews consisted a corrupting influence.
"Hitler and his friends hated the Jews more than they wished for some positive outcome for Germany" really misunderstands the world-view of the Nazis, and what Hitler did and didn't believe.
Anti-Semitism came rolling out of 19th century racial science; many people self-described themselves as such. As in: "against the Semitic race" (as opposed to the Aryan race), in the same way someone might describe as "anti-" any number of things today.
A number of organisations in the late 19th century carried the label (e.g. Antisemitische Volkspartei in Germany, or Antisemitic League in France), and a number of elected candidates from other parties were explicitly and proudly self-described anti-Semitic.
From outside the Nazi world-view, it of course makes a lot more sense. A lot of the Nazi rhetoric isn't even internally consistent and it was all a load of bollocks. But I don't think you can so easily separate Nazi-ism and the second world war.
- greedo 3y agoAnti-Semitism as a 19th century development doesn't seem historically accurate. While anti-Semites in the 19th century glommed on to racial theories as backing for their hate, the origins of anti-Semitism are millennia old.
- arp242 3y agoIt's not; anti-Semitism as we know today is very much rooted in racial science (well, "science") of the 19th century. Before that it was an anti-religious thing: anti-Judaism, which was a markedly different and similar to Anti-Catholicism, anti-Protestantism, and things like that. Especially in the context of the Nazi ideology, this really matters. Recall that the Nazis killed more Slavs than Jews, who were also considered racially inferior, and the plan was to kill many more. Nazis treated the Danish, Dutch, French, English, etc. much better (no mass executions of prisoners of war, and the occupation of those countries was markedly different from the occupation of Slavic countries).
- bsder 3y agoUm, please explain The Merchant of Venice. c. 1600 in an England which basically had no Jews. Or the Edict of Explusion c. 1290. Or the Jews being under the direct whim and jurisdiction of the king. c. 1066 I can go further and further back ... Anti-semitism is old.
- arp242 3y agoAgain, anti-Judaism is not the same thing. This is just "normal" religious persecution that has been around since forever and that many (if not all) religious groups have experienced at some point or another. Does this matter? Well, in the context of discussing Nazi world-views it does. None of this is especially controversial among mainstream Jewish historians, as far as I know.
- reissbaker 3y agoI think you're trying to draw a hard line distinction where only a blurry evolution exists. While antisemitism in the 19th and 20th centuries had some unique characteristics that co-evolved with other forms of racism, antisemitism existed before the 19th century and there are clear evolutionary roots e.g. "Jewish badges" [1] that date back to the 1100s, which the famous "Jude" badge from the Nazi era was a continuation of. I don't know of many mainstream Jewish historians who would agree that antisemitism didn't exist prior to the 19th century. They would agree that racial antisemitism developed largely during the 19th century alongside pseudoscience about race in general, but that religious and economic antisemitism has existed for over a thousand years, and that the latter two also informed the development of the racial version. [2] For example, the Rhineland massacres in 1096 are generally considered to be antisemitic [3] and part of a sequence of historical mass murders of Jews that lead to the Holocaust, despite Europe not then having a clear concept of race. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_badge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_badge 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres
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- paganel 3y agoAnti-semitism wasn't a major factor in European history until the (second-ish part) of the 19th century, for the simple reason that the European Jewish population wasn't that big of a presence for hundreds of years. Once the Enlightenment and French Revolution happened and once the Jewish population started to get some rights (which gets us into the 19th century) then things changed. Yes, I do know about the very unfortunate anti-semitic acts carried out in German cities as part of the First Crusade, but that kind of proves my point, starting with the 1200s-1300s the Jewish population throughout (what would later be called Western) Europe stopped being a thing.
- WolfCop 3y agoYes, “very unfortunate”.
- seabass-labrax 3y agoI wouldn't agree with the assertion that it wasn't a major factor. The repeated violence against Jews and their expulsion from various areas is not a singular event, but forms a significant common thread across European history. It has happened so many times that the idea of persecuting Jews became a part of European culture, and thus gave the Nazis their inspiration for the Holocaust. The massacre at York in 1190 took the lives of about a hundred Jews, whilst the population of York at that time was somewhere around 7000. As a proportion of the population, that makes it as bloody, possibly considerably more so, than the Holocaust within their respective scopes. I would posit therefore that antisemitism was a very major factor, but the decentralised, often pastoral political geography of pre-industrial Europe makes it harder to see the extent of that antisemitism.
- paganel 3y agoI did include the caveat "starting with the 1200-1300s", and I did have the expulsion of the Jewish population from England in mind when writing that down. After that I wouldn't say that there were"repeated" violences against Jews (when it comes to Western Europe) for the simple reason that there were almost no Jews around against whom to have that violence anymore. All that changed starting with the 19th century.
- adastra22 3y agoIt’s true in a very strict sense: before the 19th century it was called Jew hatred. “Antisemitism” was an attempt to dress it up in a veneer of science.l, and that does date to the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
- woooooo 3y agoAs a modern, industrial phenomenon about specifically jews as an ethnicity its unique. People generically hated every religion that wasn't theirs for millenia. The idea of hating a Semitic race after God was pronounced dead is different.
- te_chris 3y agoNot to mention that Hitler took a lot of influence from Southern USA racists/Jim Crow. The idea of racial purity was thoroughly globalised by the time the Nazis took power.
- mrguyorama 3y agoAmerican's LOVED eugenics for giving them an excuse to keep believing what they already wanted to believe. Other southerners took the approach of letting their pastors tell them that "it was god's will that the negro serve us" and that keeping slaves was outright the morally upstanding thing to do with "savage races" We also used eugenics as a "science" to make laws that allowed us to non-consensually sterilize "lesser" people. We never actually dealt with this hateful undercurrent in our society. Large sections of america still believe in a hierarchical world order where their "type" of person is at the top and other "types" of people are less deserving. It has been holding us back and ruining our country for 250 years.