Hatred of Jews has been a perennial theme of propaganda in the West since 1500. Anti-Semitism has its roots in the Christian world of the Middle Ages, when Jews were a convenient “other” against whom a Christian “self” could be defined. The race politics of the Christian Gospels, crafted to blame Jews rather than Romans for the death of Jesus, remained a stumbling block in Jewish-Christian relations. Church doctrine vilified Jews for their failure to recognize the divinity of Christ and iconography associated the image of the Jew with that of Satan. Negative stereotypes of Jews were perpetuated outside the church at all levels of society by Christians suspicious of a different culture in their midst. Medieval legends told of Jews sacrificing Christian infants as part of their religion and blamed them for spreading the plague by poisoning wells. Christian Europe relied on Jews to fill the necessary (but taboo) role of lending money for profit, but this merely opened a further avenue for racial hatred. The stereotype of the greedy Jewish moneylender was used to justify the periodic expulsion of Jewish communities across Europe— especially when the king was indebted to the Jew. As non-Christians, Jews became a major target of the Spanish Inquisition. Despite progress during the eighteenth century, the nineteenth saw a resurgence of anti-Semitic propaganda, which was all the more virulent as a result of mass communication. The drive to escape Anti-Semitic prejudice and violence became a major impetus to Jewish migration to the New World and to the development of Zionism. In France a Jewish army officer named Alfred Dreyfus (1859—1935) was wrongly accused of spying simply because he was Jewish. In Russia the tsar’s secret police circulated a fake document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), which revived stories of a rabbinical conspiracy to take over the world.
Dust jacket of a book published in Munich in 1937, Kraefte hinter Roosevelt (The Power behind Roosevelt). The jacket includes a photomontage of American Jews, including New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia (whose mother was Jewish), seen licking hisfingers, behind Roosevelt;in the background the stars of the American flag have become Jewish stars.
Anti-Semitism provided a succinct, all-encompassing explanation for the social upheaval that resulted from the Russian Revolution and World War I. It married the socialist rhetoric of class warfare with the ethnic chauvinism of nationalism. Anti-Semitic nationalist parties flourished across eastern and central Europe. Anti-Semitism was a favorite theme of the rising German mob politician Adolf Hitler and was at the heart of his book Mein Kampf (1925). Hitler blamed the Jews for both bolshevism and global capitalism. After 1933 Hitler’s Nazi state institutionalized anti-Semitism. The ideas of anti-Semitic academics like Alfred Rosenberg (1893—1946) were taught in schools and figured in state-sponsored films like Jud Suss (1940). Such propaganda laid the foundations for the murder of approximately six million European Jews during World War II. Europe, however, had no monopoly on anti-Semitism. In the United States industrialist Henry Ford (1836—1947) distributed anti-Semitic propaganda, and claims of Jewish conspiracy surfaced in the sermons of the charismatic radio broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin (1891—1971). The psychological appeal of anti-Semitism was strong enough for the doctrines to survive the revelation of the Nazi Holocaust. Allusions to Jewish world conspiracies continue to figure in the rhetoric of extreme Arab nationalists and American neofascists, and anti-Semitic rhetoric can also be found in extremist politics across eastern Europe and Russia. The leading U.S. organization dedicated to exposing and refuting anti-Semitism (counterpropaganda) is the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL).
