Our brains reveal our choices before we're even aware of them, study finds

by Lachlan Gilbert, University of New South Wales
Original link: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-03-brains-reveal-choices-aware.html?fbclid=IwAR26kamLC1X5fJZCIK5n_GD-2CmokH1Ovs8fC882wUOPcSH5SCn9mPXgM6o

A new UNSW study suggests we have less control over our personal choices than we think, and that unconscious brain activity determines our choices well before we are aware of them.

Published in Scientific Reports today, an experiment carried out in the Future Minds Lab at UNSW School of Psychology showed that free choices about what to think can be predicted from patterns of brain activity 11 seconds before people consciously chose what to think about.

The experiment consisted of asking people to freely choose between two visual patterns of red and green stripes – one of them running horizontally, the other vertically – before consciously imagining them while being observed in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.

The participants were also asked to rate how strongly they felt their visualisations of the patterns were after choosing them, again while researchers recorded their brain activity during the process.

Not only could the researchers predict which pattern they would choose, they could also predict how strongly the participants were to rate their visualisations. With the assistance of machine learning, the researchers were successful at making above-chance predictions of the participants' volitional choices at an average of 11 seconds before the thoughts became conscious.

The brain areas that revealed information about the future choices were located in executive areas of the brain – where our conscious decision-making is made – as well as visual and subcortical structures, suggesting an extended network of areas responsible for the birth of thoughts.

Lab director Professor Joel Pearson believes what could be happening in the brain is that we may have thoughts on 'standby' based on previous brain activity, which then influences the final decision without us being aware.

"We believe that when we are faced with the choice between two or more options of what to think about, non-conscious traces of the thoughts are there already, a bit like unconscious hallucinations," Professor Pearson says.

"As the decision of what to think about is made, executive areas of the brain choose the thought-trace which is stronger. In, other words, if any pre-existing brain activity matches one of your choices, then your brain will be more likely to pick that option as it gets boosted by the pre-existing brain activity.

"This would explain, for example, why thinking over and over about something leads to ever more thoughts about it, as it occurs in a positive feedback loop."

Interestingly, the subjective strength of the future thoughts was also dependent on activity housed in the early visual cortex, an area in the brain that receives visual information from the outside world. The researchers say this suggests that the current state of activity in perceptual areas (which are believed to change randomly) has an influence in how strongly we think about things.

These results raise questions about our sense of volition for our own private and personal mental visual images. This study is the first to capture the origins and content of involuntary visual thoughts and how they might bias subsequent voluntary conscious imagery.

The insight gained with this experiment may also have implications for mental disorders involving thought intrusions that use mental imagery, such as PTSD, the authors say.

However, the researchers caution against assuming that all choices are by nature predetermined by pre-existing brain activity.

"Our results cannot guarantee that all choices are preceded by involuntary images, but it shows that this mechanism exists, and it potentially biases our everyday choices," Professor Pearson says.

Bias against left-handed people

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bias based on handedness is bias or design that is usually unfavorable against people who are left-handed. Part of this is due to design in the world which is often right-hand biased. Handwriting is one of the biggest sources of actual disadvantage for left-handed people, other than for those forced to work with certain machinery. About ten percent of the world's population is left-handed, yet many common articles are designed for efficient use by right-handed people, and may be inconvenient, painful, or even dangerous for left-handed people to use. These may include school desks, kitchen implements, and tools ranging from simple scissors to hazardous machinery such as power saws.

 

Beyond being inherently disadvantaged by a right-handed bias in the design of tools, left-handed people have been subjected to deliberate discrimination and discouragement. In certain societies, they may be considered unlucky or even malicious by the right-handed majority. Many languages still contain references to left-handedness to convey awkwardness, dishonesty, stupidity, or other undesirable qualities. Even in relatively advanced societies, left-handed people were historically (and in some cases still are) forced as children to use their right hands for tasks which they would naturally perform with the left, such as eating or writing.

Favorable perceptions

Lloque Yupanqui, the third Sapa Inca, whose name means "the glorified lefthander"

 

Among Incas left-handers were called (and now are called among the indigenous peoples of the Andes) lloq'e (Quechua: lluq'i) which has positive value. Peoples of the Andes consider left-handers to possess special spiritual abilities, including magic and healing. 

The Third Sapa Inca—Lloque Yupanqui—was left-handed. His name, when translated from Quechua, means "the glorified lefthander."

In the Chinese language, the character for "left", 左, depicts a left hand attending to its work. In contrast, the character for "right", 右 (yòu), depicts a right hand in relation to the mouth, suggesting the act of eating.

In tantra Buddhism, the left hand represents wisdom.

In early Roman times, the left side retained a positive connotation, as the Augures proceeded from the eastern side. The negative meaning was subsequently borrowed into Latin from Greek, and ever since in all Roman languages. 

In Russian, "levsha" (lefty, lefthander) became a common noun for skilled craftsman, after the title character from "The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea" written in 1881 by Nikolai Leskov.

Unfavorable perceptions

The unfavorable associations and connotations of the use of the left hand among cultures are varied. In some areas, in order to preserve cleanliness where sanitation was an issue, the right hand, as the dominant hand of most individuals, was used for eating, handling food, and social interactions. The left hand would then be used for personal hygiene, specifically after urination and defecation. These rules were imposed on all, no matter their dominant hand. Through these practices, the left hand became known as the "unclean" hand. Currently, amongst Muslims and in some societies including Nepal and India it is still customary to use the left hand for cleaning oneself with water after defecating. The right hand is commonly known in contradistinction from the left, as the hand used for eating. In the film Lawrence of Arabia there is no insult taken when the guide offers his food to Lawrence and he takes it to his mouth with his left hand.

In many religions, including Christianity, the right hand of God is the favored hand. For example, Jesus sits at God's right side. God's left hand, however, is the hand of judgement. The Archangel Gabriel is sometimes called "God's left hand", sits at God's left side, and is one of six angels of death. Those who fall from favor with God are sent to left, as described in Matthew 25: 32–33, in which sheep represent the righteous and goats represent the fallen: "And he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats. And he shall set the sheep on his right, but the goats on his left." In 19th-century Europe, homosexuals were referred to as "left-handed". In Protestant-majority parts of the United Kingdom, Catholics were called "left-footers", and vice versa in Catholic-majority parts of Ireland and Irish America. Black magic is sometimes referred to as the "left-hand path", which is strongly associated with Satanism.

Various innocuous activities and experiences become rude or even signs of bad luck when the left hand becomes involved. In some parts of Scotland, it is considered bad luck to meet a left-handed person at the start of a journey. In Ghana, pointing, gesturing, giving or receiving items with the left hand is considered taboo or rude. A person giving directions will put their left hand behind them and even physically strain to point with their right hand if necessary. In some Asian countries, holding eating utensils in the left hand is considered impolite.

Forced use of the right hand

Due to cultural and social pressures, many left-handed children were encouraged or forced to write and perform other activities with their right hands. This conversion can cause multiple problems in the developing left-handed child, including learning disorders, dyslexia, stuttering and other speech disorders. Shifts from left- to right-handed are more likely to be successful than right to left, though neither have a high success rate to begin with. Successful shifters are more likely to become ambihanded than unsuccessful ones. Conversions can be successful with consistent daily practice in a variety of manual activities, but though activity in the non-dominant left-hemisphere of the brain will increase during tasks, so too will activity in the dominant right-hemisphere. Consistent left-handers have no higher activity in these task centers than converted left-handers, so it may be inferred that "attempts to switch handedness by educational training far from weakening the functional expression of lefthandedness in higher-order motor areas of the (dominant) right hemisphere in fact enhance it."

Many Asian countries encourage or force their children to become right-handed due to cultural perceptions of bad luck associated with the left hand. In India and Indonesia, it is considered rude to eat with the left hand. In a 2007 study in Taiwan, about 59.3% of children studied had been forced to convert from left-handedness to right-handedness. The study took into account economic status of the children's families and found that children whose parents had less education were more likely to be forced to convert. Even among children whose parents had higher levels of education, the conversion rate was 45.7%. Among naturally left-handed Japanese senior high school students, only 0.7% and 1.7% of individuals used their left hand for writing and eating, respectively, though young Japanese are more likely to convert to using chopsticks right-handed than forks or spoons (29.3% to 4.6%). The proportion of females subjected to forced conversion is significantly higher compared to males (95.1% to 81.0%).

Malawians cite their views that "the left hand is less skilled and less powerful than the right one" as main reasons for forcing left-handers to convert. Among students, teachers and parents, 75% said the left hand should not be used to perform habitual activities, and 87.6% of these believed left-handers should be forced to switch dominant hands. Parents and close relatives are most responsible for impressing these beliefs upon their children.

Rise in acceptance of left-handedness

On March 8, 1971, The Florence Times—Tri-Cities Daily reported that left-handed people "are becoming increasingly accepted and enabled to find their right (or left) place in the world." The Florence Times—Tri-Cities Daily also wrote "we still have a long way to go before the last vestiges of discrimination against left-handedness are uprooted, however." The frequency of left-handed writing in the United States, which was only 2.1 percent in 1932, had risen to over 11 percent by 1972. According to an article by The Washington Post from August 13, 1979, a psychologist from University of Chicago named Jerre Levy said: "In 1939, 2 percent of the population wrote with the left hand. By 1946, it was up to 7 1/2 percent. In 1968, 9 percent. By 1972, 12 percent. It's leveling off, and I expect the real number of left-handers will turn out to be about 14 percent." According to the article by The Washington Post from August 13, 1979, "a University of Michigan study points out that left-handers may not be taking over the world but...7 percent of the men and 6 percent of the women over 40 who were interviewed were lefties, but the percentages jumped to well above 10 percent in the 18-to-39 age group." According to the article by The Washington Post from August 13, 1979, Dr. Bernard McKenna of the National Education Association said: "There was recognition by medical authorities that left-handedness was normal and that tying the hand up in a child often caused stuttering." In Japan, Tokyo psychiatrist Soicki Hakozaki coped with such deep-seated discrimination against left-handed people that he wrote The World of Left-Handers. Hakozaki reported finding situations in which women were afraid their husbands would divorce them for being left-handed. According to the article by The Washington Post from August 13, 1979, an official at the Japanese Embassy said: "Before the war, there was discrimination against left-handers," said the official at the Japanese Embassy. "Children were not trained to use their left hand while eating or writing. I used to throw a baseball left-handed, but my grandparents wanted me to throw right-handed. I can throw either way. Today, in some local areas, discrimination may still remain, but on the whole, it seems to be over. There are many left-handers in Japan." In an article by The Washington Post from December 11, 1988, Richard M. Restak wrote that left-handedness became more accepted and people decided to leave southpaws alone and decided to quit working against left-handedness. In an article by The Gadsden Times from October 3, 1993, the newspaper mentioned a 5-year-old named Daniel, writing: "the advantage that little Daniel does have of going to school in the '90s is that he will be allowed to be left-hander. That wasn't always the case in years past." In a 1998 survey, 24 percent of younger-generation left-handed people reported some attempts to switch their handedness.

Equipment

Left-handed (left) and right-handed scissors

 

Kitchen knives: (1) symmetrical, (2) right-handed, (3) left-handed. Cross sections seen from the handle.

 

Because the vast majority of the world population is right-handed, most everyday items are mass-produced for ease of use with the right hand. Tools, game equipment, musical instruments and other items must be specially ordered for left-handed use, if they are even produced and are usually more expensive than their right-handed counterparts.

Household items

Right-handed tools can be difficult, uncomfortable, or dangerous for left-handed people to use.

Scissors

For example, (right-handed) scissors are arranged so that, in the right hand, fingers and thumb push the blades together laterally, creating the shearing action essential to scissors' utility. In the left hand, however, fingers and thumb tend to force right-handed blades apart, so that, rather than being sheared, the work-material is merely hacked, as by a knife, or slips between the blades uncut. Left-handers using right-handed scissors will often try to compensate by forcing the handles apart laterally, causing discomfort or injury to the first knuckle of the thumb.

In addition, a right-handed person using right-handed scissors can easily see the cutting line, but for a left-handed user the upper blade obscures the view.

Many scissors are offered as "ambidextrous" or "suitable for right- or left-handed use." Typically, these are merely right-handed scissors with modified handles to permit use in the left hand with less discomfort, but because the blades are still arranged for right-handed use, they still won't perform quite as well in the left hand.

Computer input devices

Input devices for computers can present obstacles to left-handed operation if intended for right-handed use. Some computer set-ups have the mouse placed on the right side of the keyboard and unable to be repositioned to the left. The mouse itself is also sometimes shaped to fit the right hand better. The functions of mouse buttons, even on mice shaped to fit both hands, default to right-hand use. On two-button mice, the left button —under the index finger of a right-handed person— is the primary button, while the right button performs secondary functions. The on-screen pointers themselves are also configured for right-handed people. Most desktop operating systems allow a user to reverse the functionality of mouse buttons to accommodate left-handed use, but left-handed cursors sometimes need to be specially downloaded. Trackballs and trackpads are often shaped for right-handed use. Even with the ability to change the functionality of buttons, these devices may be difficult for left-handed use. For a left handed person there are computer mice designed for left handed use, but they are a much smaller segment of the marketplace.

Video game controllers often have the action buttons on the right with the directional controls on the left. In first-person shooters, many games default to the right pointer-finger being used to fire, simulating a right-handed person pulling the trigger of the weapon. Certain systems' layouts, such as Nintendo's Wii U and 3DS, have games in which right-handed stylus use is assumed and can cause difficulty for left-handed players.

A right-handed trackball is difficult to use with the left hand.

Knives

While European-style kitchen knives are usually symmetrical, Japanese kitchen knives have the cutting edge ground asymmetrically, having the cutting edge closer to the user's body with ratios ranging from 70–30 for the average chef's knife, to 90–10 for professional sushi chef knives; left-handed models are rare, and usually must be specially ordered or custom made. On the other hand, the majority of "flat ground" general-purpose knives typically have the cutting edge on the right, as with a left-handed knife, for aesthetic reasons rather than practical.

Cameras

One of the few cameras ever produced for left-handers was the half-frame Yashica Samurai. Cameras predominantly have the hand grip, shutter release, film wind lever and commonly used selection buttons, switches and dials controlled by the right hand. Lens controls (where present) tend to be accessible by either hand. When an unskilled left-handed person uses a right-handed camera the hand control can be less steady and hence produce camera shake leading to poorer pictures at low shutter speeds.

Musical instruments

Left-handed adaptations have even bridged the world of music. Left-handed string instruments are produced, including guitars and violins. Inverted trumpets are made, too. Although the trumpet's valves are normally designed to be operated with the right hand, the prevailing belief is that left-handed trumpeters are not at a significant disadvantage. The French horn, for example, is played with the left hand, yet most horn players are right-handed. Left handed drummers also set up drum kits the exact opposite to conventional right-handed setup (i.e. hi-hat on the right, bass pedal under left foot, ride cymbal to the drummer's left, etc.).

Sports

A left-handed individual may be known as a southpaw, particularly in a sports context. It is widely accepted that the term originated in the United States, in the game of baseball. Ballparks are often designed so that batters are facing east, so that the afternoon or evening sun does not shine in their eyes. This means that left-handed pitchers are throwing with their south-side arm. The Oxford English Dictionary lists a non-baseball citation for "south paw", meaning a punch with the left hand, as early as 1848, just three years after the first organized baseball game, with the note "(orig. U.S., in Baseball)." A left-handed advantage in sports can be significant and even decisive, but this advantage usually results from a left-handed competitor's unshared familiarity with opposite-handed opponents. Baseball is an exception since batters, pitchers, and fielders in certain scenarios are physically advantaged or disadvantaged by their handedness. 

In baseball, due to the direction in which curveballs and sliders break, it is generally accepted that the pitcher has an advantage when his handedness is the same as the batter's, and the batter has an advantage when they are opposite. For this reason, many baseball teams include a left-handed specialist pitcher, who is brought into the game specifically to pitch to dangerous left-handed batters in crucial situations. A left-handed first baseman uses a more fluid motion to tag out a baserunner returning to first base during a pickoff attempt by the pitcher and has less difficulty avoiding baserunners while presenting their mitt as a target for other fielders to throw to. It is very uncommon to see a left-handed player playing any infield position other than pitcher or first basemen due to the counterclockwise flow of the game when throwing the ball around the bases. A fielder's handedness is either a physical advantage or hindrance for similar reasons throughout the infield positions, and left-handedness is not always the more desirable dexterousness. 

Left-handed bowlers are usually at an advantage during ten-pin bowling competition when hooking the ball into the pins from the left side of the lane. As there are fewer left-handed players, the lane's left side is not used as much, and thus the applied oil pattern does not change as quickly as it does for right-handed bowlers.

In boxing, someone who boxes left-handed is frequently referred to as southpaw. The term is also used to refer to a stance in which the boxer places the right foot in front of the left, so it is possible for a right-handed boxer to box with a southpaw stance. Most boxers, southpaw or otherwise, tend to train with sparring partners who adopt an orthodox stance which gives southpaws an advantage. Manny Pacquiao is an example of a southpaw (although he writes with his right hand). In the popular boxing film series Rocky, the main character Rocky Balboa is a southpaw. Southpaw is also a term in professional wrestling, often giving them the advantage. 

Fencing weapons feature left- and right-handed grips, and a left-handed fencer's stance is opposite that of a right-handed opponent. Although commonly asserted that left-handed fencers have an advantage over right-handed opponents because the line of defence favors their sword arm, this assertion describes both fencers in a mixed-handed duel, so neither competitor has a unique physical advantage. Thus the left-hander's advantage in fencing stems mostly from a right-hander's unfamiliarity with a left-handed stance.

The game of golf is most commonly played right-handed, and left-handed players typically must provide their own special golf clubs. The game can be played with both hands, provided the player has both left- and right-handed clubs, giving an advantage over one-handed players. Professional golfer Phil Mickelson plays left-handed though he is naturally right-handed.

In tennis, southpaws hold the racket in their left hand. Because of this, their grip of the handle is supposedly adjusted in a slightly different style from right-handed players. Some world champion left-handed tennis players include Jimmy Connors, Guillermo Vilas, John McEnroe, Martina Navratilova, Marcelo Ríos, Goran Ivanišević and Rafael Nadal. 

When playing volleyball, left-handed players are at an advantage when placed on the right wing to spike. This is because the ball does not travel over their head in order for them to hit the ball, and is therefore easier for a lefty to hit the ball. However, the reverse is true for the left wing. Right handed players are at an advantage on the left wing because the ball does not pass over their head while they are jumping to hit, therefore making it easier to contact the ball. 

Often the playing cards have their pips printed only in the upper left corner assuming holding them with right hand. Such design may be uncomfortable for left-handed people who may prefer all four corners of the card to be used.

Weapons

A US Navy SEALs left-handed shooter

 

The vast majority of firearms are designed for right-handed shooters, with the operating handle, magazine release, or safety mechanisms set up for manipulation by the right hand, and fired cartridge cases ejected to the right. Also, scopes and sights may be mounted in such a way as to require the shooter to place the rifle against the right shoulder. A left-handed shooter must either purchase a left-handed or ambidextrous firearm (which are manufactured in smaller numbers and are generally more expensive and/or harder to obtain), shoot a right-handed gun left-handed (which presents certain difficulties, such as the controls being improperly located for the left hand or hot shell cases being ejected towards the shooter's body, especially the eyes or down the collar or right sleeve), or learn to shoot right-handed (which may be less comfortable or "natural"). A related issue is ocular dominance, due to which left-handed people may wish to shoot right-handed, and vice versa. Ocular dominance plays more of a rule in shooting accuracy than does left versus right handiness. Therefore, ocular dominance will cause a preference on how a shooter chooses to hold a gun.

Some modern firearms are ambidextrous (e.g. the FN P90 and Heckler & Koch P7), or can be converted between right- and left-handed operation (e.g. the Heckler & Koch G36 and Steyr AUG). Bullpup rifles are particularly problematic for left-handers unless they can be reconfigured, since empty shells would be ejected straight into the shooter's face and cheek potentially causing injury, or otherwise designed from the ground up for ambidextrous use, often by way of complex ejection systems as seen on the FN F2000 and the Kel-Tec RFB. The British L85 Assault Rifle must be fired right-handed, placing left-handed soldiers at a disadvantage. In contrast, the Steyr AUG is of a modular design and the ejection port and extractor can be switched/replaced to suit the handedness of the soldier operating it. The M-16 and its variants have a fixed ejection port, but being a conventional (i.e. not bullpup) design the ejection port is forward of the operator and hence able to be fired either-handed. Circa 1985, with the introduction of the M16A2 version, a case deflector was incorporated adjacent to the ejector port to direct discarded shells in a more forward direction, making the rifle even more left hand operator friendly. The deflector is not always effective, however, as the ejected shell still stands a chance of hitting the left-handed shooter's cheek, especially in windy conditions. 

Lever action and pump action firearms present fewer difficulties for left-handers than bolt action weapons do. Many weapons with adjustable sights allow for left-handed use, but for a right eye dominant shooter it is necessary to adjust. In fact, most weapons adjust well enough that a weapon will not eject shells into a left-hander's eye.

Machinery

Power tools, machinery and other potentially dangerous equipment is typically manufactured with the right-handed user in mind. Common problems faced by left-handed operators include the inability to keep materials steady, and difficulty reaching the on/off switch, especially in emergency situations. Table saws, whose blades protrude from the top of a table and pose the risk of losing fingers or hands, have their cutting area on the right side. This makes it difficult for a left-handed operator to guide the material being cut, as it must be pushed to the right side to align with the fence to avoid kickback. On bandsaws, the blade teeth are on the left side of the blade, necessitating the material being cut to be pushed from the left side of the machine. However, at this angle, the casing of the machine containing the rest of the blade is on the operator's left side, making it extremely difficult to guide the wood with their left hand. 

Handheld circular saws are made almost exclusively for right-handers, with the motor and grip on the right side. If held in the left hand, it is impossible for the operator to see what they are cutting. Tool manufacturer Porter-Cable produces a left-handed circular saw that can be purchased relatively inexpensively.

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  Left-handed Remington 700 rifle action—note that the bolt handle is not visible from this side
  
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  A table saw. Notice how the cutting surface, fence, etc. are on the right side
  

Language

Historically, the left side, and subsequently left-handedness, was considered negative. The word "left" itself derives from the Anglo-Saxon word lyft, "weak". In Ancient Greek both words meaning "left" were euphemisms: the word ἀριστερός, aristerós (the standard word in Modern Greek as well) is derived from ἂριστος, áristos, "best", and the word εὺώνυμος, euōnymos, "of good name", is another euphemism used in lieu of "ill-named". The Latin adjective sinister/sinistra/sinistrum originally meant "left" but took on meanings of "evil" or "unlucky" by the Classical Latin era, and this double meaning survives in European derivatives of Latin, and in the English word "sinister". Alternatively, sinister comes from the Latin word sinus meaning "pocket": a traditional Roman toga had only one pocket, located on the left side. The right hand has historically been associated with skill: the Latin word for right-handed is dexter, as in "dexterity", meaning manual skill. Even the word "ambidexterity" reflects the bias. Its intended meaning is "skillful on both sides". However, since it keeps the Latin root dexter, which means "right", it ends up conveying the idea of being "right-handed on both sides". This bias is also apparent in the lesser-known antonym "ambisinistrous", which means "left-handed [i.e., clumsy] on both sides". In more technical contexts, "sinistral" may be used in place of "left-handed" and "sinistrality" in place of "left-handedness". In both Ancient Greek and Roman religion, auspices (usually the flight paths of birds, as observed by a bird-diviner, or augur) were thought to be unfavorable if appearing on the diviner's left-hand side and favorable if on the right: an ancient custom mentioned in Homer's Iliad and of apparently Middle Eastern origin (as attested in the Amarna correspondence, in which a king of Alashiya, i.e. Cyprus, requests an eagle-diviner from the Pharaoh of Egypt). 

Meanings gradually developed from use of these terms in the ancient languages. In many modern European languages, including English, the word for the direction "right" also means "correct" or "proper", and also stands for authority and justice. 

In Sanskrit, the word "वाम" (waama) stands for both "left" and "wicked." 

In most Slavic languages the root prav (right) is used in words carrying meanings of correctness or justice. In colloquial Russian the word левый (levyĭ) "left" means unofficial, counterfeit, strange. In Polish, the word prawo means "right" as well as "law", prawy means: lawful; the word lewy means "left" (opposite of right), and colloquially "illegal" (opposite of legal).

In French, droit(e) (cognate to English direct) means both "right" and "straight", as well as "law" and the legal sense of "right", while gauche means "left" and is also a synonym of maladroit, literally "not right", meaning "clumsy". Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and German have similar constructs. The Spanish term diestro and the Italian term destro mean both "right-handed" and "skillful". The contemporary Italian word sinistra has both meanings of sinister and left (the masculine adjective for sinister being sinistro), and maldestro means "clumsy". The Spanish siniestra has both, too, although the "left" meaning is less common and is usually expressed by izquierda, a Basque word that made its way into Portuguese as well. In some Spanish-speaking countries, to do something por izquierda means to engage in corrupt conduct or employ illegitimate means, whereas por derecha or a derechas means to do it the right (legitimate) way. Also, in Spanish, to tell someone "Eres tan zurdo" means that they are being clumsy, though the literal meaning is "You're so lefty." In Portuguese, the most common word for left-handed person, canhoto, was once used to identify the devil, and canhestro, a related word, means "clumsy"

.

In Romanian drept/dreaptă (coming from Latin directus) means both "right" and "straight". The word for "left" is stâng/stângă coming from Latin stancus (= stanticus) meaning "tired".

In German, recht means "right" in both the adjectival sense (correct) and the nominal (legal entitlement). The word for "left" is links, and is closely related to both link (underhand, questionable), and linkisch (clumsy).

The Dutch words for "left" (links, linker) and "right" (recht, rechts, rechter) have much the same meanings and connotations as in English. The adjective link means "cunning, shifty" or "risky". A linkerd is a "crafty devil". To look at someone over the left shoulder (iemand over de linkerschouder aanzien) is to regard him or her as insignificant.

In Irish, deas means "right side" and "nice". Ciotóg is the left hand and is related to ciotach meaning "awkward"; ciotógach (kyut-OH-goch) is the term for left-handed. In Welsh, the word chwith means "left", but can also mean "strange", "awkward", or "wrong". The Scots term for left-handedness is corrie fistit. The term can be used to convey clumsiness. 

In Finnish, the word oikea means both "right" (okay, correct) and "right" (the opposite of left). 

In Swedish, att göra något med vänsterhanden (literally "to do something with your left hand") means "to do something badly". In Swedish, vänster means "left". The term vänsterprassel means "infidelity", "adultery" and "cheating". From this term the verb vänstra is derived. 

In Hungarian, the word for right is jobb, which also means "better". The word for left is bal, which also means "bad". In Estonian, the word pahem stands for both "left" and "worse" and the word parem stands for both "right" and "better".

In Turkish, the word for right is sağ, which means "alive". The word for left is sol, which means "discolor", "die", "ill". 

In Chinese culture, the adjective "left" (Chinese character: 左, Mandarin: zuǒ) sometimes means "improper" or "out of accord". For instance, the phrase "left path" (左道, zuǒdào) stands for unorthodox or immoral means. 

In Korean, the word for right is oreun (오른), to be compared to the word meaning morally proper, orheun (옳은) which shares the same pronunciation.

In Hebrew, as well as in other ancient Semitic and Mesopotamian languages, the term "left" was a symbol of power or custody. There were also examples of left-handed assassins in the Old Testament (Ehud killing the Moabite king). The left hand symbolized the power to shame society, and was used as a metaphor for misfortune, natural evil, or punishment from the gods. This metaphor survived ancient culture and was integrated into mainstream Christianity by early Catholic theologians, such as Ambrose of Milan, to modern Protestant theologians, such as Karl Barth, to attribute natural evil to God in explaining God's omnipotence over the universe.

Expressions and colloquialisms

The left side is often associated with awkwardness and clumsiness. The Spanish expression "tener dos pies izquierdos", in English, the expression "to have two left feet", refers to clumsiness in the domains of football or dancing. A "left-handed compliment" is considered one that is unflattering or dismissive in meaning. The Polish expression "mieć dwie lewe ręce", Dutch "twee linkerhanden hebben", German "zwei linke Hände haben", the Bulgarian expression "dve levi ratse", French "avoir deux mains gauches", Hungarian kétbalkezes and Czech "Mít obě ruce levé" all mean "to have two left hands"—that one is clumsy or is a very poor handyman; the English equivalent is "to be all thumbs". Moreover, the German idiom "mit dem linken Fuß aufgestanden sein", the Spanish expression "levantarse con el pie izquierdo", the French expression "s'être levé du pied gauche" and the Hungarian expression "bal lábbal kelt fel" (literally, to get up with the left foot) mean to have a bad day and do everything wrong or unsuccessfully, related to the English expression "to get up on the wrong side of the bed". The Welsh phrase "tu chwith allan" (left side out) refers to an object being inside-out. In Russian, the use of the term nalyevo means "on the left", but can also connote taking bribes or "sneaky" behavior. Balszerencse (lit. "left luck") is Hungarian for "bad luck". 

There are many colloquial terms used to refer to a left-handed person, e.g. "southpaw" (USA). Some are just slang or jargon words, while other references may be offensive or demeaning, either in context or in origin. In some parts of the English-speaking world, "cack-handed" is slang for left-handed, and is also used to mean clumsy. The origin of this term is disputed, but some suggest it is derived from the Latin cacare, in reference to the habit of performing ablutions with the left hand, leaving the right hand "clean". However, other sources suggest that it is derived from the Old Norse word keikr, meaning "bent backwards". Australians frequently use "cacky-handed". A less common Australian slang word for a left-handed individual is the term Molly-Dooker, whose origins cannot be determined with certainty.

Handwriting

Left-handed people who speak Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hebrew or any other right-to-left script do not have the same difficulties with writing. The right-to-left nature of these languages prevents left-handers from running their hand on the ink as happens with left-to-right languages. Because writing when moving one's hand away from its side of the body can cause smudging if the outward side of the hand is allowed to drag across the writing, it is considered easier to write the Latin alphabet with the right hand than with the left. Furthermore, it is considered more difficult to write legible Chinese characters with the left hand than it is to write Latin letters, though difficulty is subjective and depends on the person in question.

Left-to-right alphabets can be written smudge-free and in proper "forward slant" with the left hand if the paper is turned 1/4 turn clockwise (90 degrees to the right), and the left hand is drawn toward the body on forward strokes, and left to right on upward strokes (as expressed in directionality of the text). It is also possible to do calligraphy in this posture with the left hand, but using right-handed pen nibs. Otherwise, left-handed pen nibs are required in order to get the thick-to-thin stroke shapes correct for most type faces, and the left-handed calligrapher is very likely to smudge the text. Left-handed pen nibs are not generally easy to find, and strokes may have to be done backwards from traditional right-handed calligraphic work rules to avoid nib jamming and splatter. Left-handed people have an advantage in learning 19th-century copperplate hands, which control line-width by pressure on the point.

Civic life

Schooling

As the majority of students in public schools are right-handed, most commonly used implements are designed for the right-handed, from pencil sharpeners to scissors to desks. The consequences to left-handed students can vary from decreased academic performance or physical ailments to nothing at all.

In many classrooms and lecture halls, desks are designed so that the writing surface is attached to the chair instead of separate from it. In this design, the desk is attached on the right side, offering an armrest for right-handed people to use while writing. In some of these desks, the writing surface does not extend fully to the left, necessitating a left-handed user to turn their body in order to write properly, sometimes causing back, neck and shoulder problems. This contorted posture may also cause the student to be accused of cheating. In some cases, however, large lecture halls will use left-handed desks on the left-most column of each section so that left-handed people can comfortably write without bumping against a neighbor. 

This right-handed bias is reflected in standardized tests as well. Multiple-choice tests tend to put the question on the left side of the page and the answers on the right side. If the answers must be filled in in a separate booklet, it can be awkward and uncomfortable for a left-handed student to line up the booklet with the answers. The time it takes to find a comfortable, convenient position cuts into test-taking time, resulting in rushed answers and unchecked work.

In Vietnam, schools officially require students to write with their right hands, and some teachers of Grade 1 (when writing is taught) would implement that rule by deducting points from tests written by the left hand. The Civic Education textbook for grade 6 mentions a student thanking her old teacher for helping her write with her right hand, and stopping her from using her left hand to write.

Employment

In research done on the relations of handedness and employment, researchers may start their experiments believing left-handers earn lower wages than their right-handed counterparts, due to effects like difficulty using right-handed tools and increased rate of illness among left-handed people. However, their findings are more complex. In studies in the United States and United Kingdom, it was found that left-handed men earn more than right-handed men; about 5% more in the UK. Conversely, left-handed women earn about 7.5% less than right-handed women.

Antisemitism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Antisemitism (also spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is hostility to, prejudice, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is generally considered to be a form of racism. It has also been characterized as a political ideology which serves as an organizing principle and unites disparate groups which are opposed to liberalism.

 

Antisemitism may be manifested in many ways, ranging from expressions of hatred of or discrimination against individual Jews to organized pogroms by mobs, state police, or even military attacks on entire Jewish communities. Although the term did not come into common usage until the 19th century, it is now also applied to historic anti-Jewish incidents. Notable instances of persecution include the Rhineland massacres preceding the First Crusade in 1096, the Edict of Expulsion from England in 1290, the massacres of Spanish Jews in 1391, the persecutions of the Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion from Spain in 1492, the Cossack massacres in Ukraine from 1648 to 1657, various anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire between 1821 and 1906, the 1894–1906 Dreyfus affair in France, the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe during World War II, Soviet anti-Jewish policies, and Arab and Muslim involvement in the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries.

The root word Semite gives the false impression that antisemitism is directed against all Semitic people, e.g., including Arabs and Assyrians. The compound word antisemite was popularized in Germany in 1879 as a scientific-sounding term for Judenhass ("Jew-hatred"), and this has been its common use since then.

Origin and usage in the context of xenophobia

Etymology

The origin of "antisemitic" terminologies is found in the responses of Moritz Steinschneider to the views of Ernest Renan. As Alex Bein writes: "The compound anti-Semitism appears to have been used first by Steinschneider, who challenged Renan on account of his 'anti-Semitic prejudices' [i.e., his derogation of the "Semites" as a race]." Avner Falk similarly writes: 'The German word antisemitisch was first used in 1860 by the Austrian Jewish scholar Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907) in the phrase antisemitische Vorurteile (antisemitic prejudices). Steinschneider used this phrase to characterise the French philosopher Ernest Renan's false ideas about how "Semitic races" were inferior to "Aryan races"'.

Pseudoscientific theories concerning race, civilization, and "progress" had become quite widespread in Europe in the second half of the 19th century, especially as Prussian nationalistic historian Heinrich von Treitschke did much to promote this form of racism. He coined the phrase "the Jews are our misfortune" which would later be widely used by Nazis. According to Avner Falk, Treitschke uses the term "Semitic" almost synonymously with "Jewish", in contrast to Renan's use of it to refer to a whole range of peoples, based generally on linguistic criteria.

According to Jonathan M. Hess, the term was originally used by its authors to "stress the radical difference between their own 'antisemitism' and earlier forms of antagonism toward Jews and Judaism."

Cover page of Marr's The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism, 1880 edition

 

In 1879 German journalist Wilhelm Marr published a pamphlet, Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum. Vom nicht confessionellen Standpunkt aus betrachtet (The Victory of the Jewish Spirit over the Germanic Spirit. Observed from a non-religious perspective) in which he used the word Semitismus interchangeably with the word Judentum to denote both "Jewry" (the Jews as a collective) and "jewishness" (the quality of being Jewish, or the Jewish spirit).

This use of Semitismus was followed by a coining of "Antisemitismus" which was used to indicate opposition to the Jews as a people and opposition to the Jewish spirit, which Marr interpreted as infiltrating German culture. His next pamphlet, Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums über das Judenthum (The Way to Victory of the Germanic Spirit over the Jewish Spirit, 1880), presents a development of Marr's ideas further and may present the first published use of the German word Antisemitismus, "antisemitism". 

The pamphlet became very popular, and in the same year he founded the Antisemiten-Liga (League of Antisemites), apparently named to follow the "Anti-Kanzler-Liga" (Anti-Chancellor League). The league was the first German organization committed specifically to combating the alleged threat to Germany and German culture posed by the Jews and their influence, and advocating their forced removal from the country.

So far as can be ascertained, the word was first widely printed in 1881, when Marr published Zwanglose Antisemitische Hefte, and Wilhelm Scherer used the term Antisemiten in the January issue of Neue Freie Presse. 

The Jewish Encyclopedia reports, "In February 1881, a correspondent of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums speaks of 'Anti-Semitism' as a designation which recently came into use ("Allg. Zeit. d. Jud." 1881, p. 138). On 19 July 1882, the editor says, 'This quite recent Anti-Semitism is hardly three years old.'"

The related term "philosemitism" was coined around 1885.

Usage

From the outset the term "anti-Semitism" bore special racial connotations and meant specifically prejudice against Jews. The term is confusing, for in modern usage 'Semitic' designates a language group, not a race. In this sense, the term is a misnomer, since there are many speakers of Semitic languages (e.g. Arabs, Ethiopians, and Assyrians) who are not the objects of antisemitic prejudices, while there are many Jews who do not speak Hebrew, a Semitic language. Though 'antisemitism' has been used to describe prejudice against people who speak other Semitic languages, the validity of such usage has been questioned.

The term may be spelled with or without a hyphen (antisemitism or anti-Semitism). Some scholars favor the unhyphenated form because, "If you use the hyphenated form, you consider the words 'Semitism', 'Semite', 'Semitic' as meaningful" whereas "in antisemitic parlance, 'Semites' really stands for Jews, just that." For example, Emil Fackenheim supported the unhyphenated spelling, in order to "[dispel] the notion that there is an entity 'Semitism' which 'anti-Semitism' opposes." Others endorsing an unhyphenated term for the same reason include Padraic O'Hare, professor of Religious and Theological Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations at Merrimack College; Yehuda Bauer, professor of Holocaust studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and James Carroll, historian and novelist. According to Carroll, who first cites O'Hare and Bauer on "the existence of something called 'Semitism'", "the hyphenated word thus reflects the bipolarity that is at the heart of the problem of antisemitism".

Objections to the usage of the term, such as the obsolete nature of the term Semitic as a racial term, have been raised since at least the 1930s.

Definition

Though the general definition of antisemitism is hostility or prejudice against Jews, and, according to Olaf Blaschke, has become an "umbrella term for negative stereotypes about Jews", a number of authorities have developed more formal definitions. 

Holocaust scholar and City University of New York professor Helen Fein defines it as "a persisting latent structure of hostile beliefs towards Jews as a collective manifested in individuals as attitudes, and in culture as myth, ideology, folklore and imagery, and in actions—social or legal discrimination, political mobilization against the Jews, and collective or state violence—which results in and/or is designed to distance, displace, or destroy Jews as Jews." 

Elaborating on Fein's definition, Dietz Bering of the University of Cologne writes that, to antisemites, "Jews are not only partially but totally bad by nature, that is, their bad traits are incorrigible. Because of this bad nature: (1) Jews have to be seen not as individuals but as a collective. (2) Jews remain essentially alien in the surrounding societies. (3) Jews bring disaster on their 'host societies' or on the whole world, they are doing it secretly, therefore the anti-Semites feel obliged to unmask the conspiratorial, bad Jewish character."

For Sonja Weinberg, as distinct from economic and religious anti-Judaism, antisemitism in its modern form shows conceptual innovation, a resort to 'science' to defend itself, new functional forms and organisational differences. It was anti-liberal, racialist and nationalist. It promoted the myth that Jews conspired to 'judaise' the world; it served to consolidate social identity; it channeled dissatisfactions among victims of the capitalist system; and it was used as a conservative cultural code to fight emancipation and liberalism.

Caricature by C.Léandre (France, 1898) showing Rothschild with the world in his hands

 

Bernard Lewis defines antisemitism as a special case of prejudice, hatred, or persecution directed against people who are in some way different from the rest. According to Lewis, antisemitism is marked by two distinct features: Jews are judged according to a standard different from that applied to others, and they are accused of "cosmic evil." Thus, "it is perfectly possible to hate and even to persecute Jews without necessarily being anti-Semitic" unless this hatred or persecution displays one of the two features specific to antisemitism.

There have been a number of efforts by international and governmental bodies to define antisemitism formally. The United States Department of State states that "while there is no universally accepted definition, there is a generally clear understanding of what the term encompasses." For the purposes of its 2005 Report on Global Anti-Semitism, the term was considered to mean "hatred toward Jews—individually and as a group—that can be attributed to the Jewish religion and/or ethnicity."

In 2005, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (now Fundamental Rights Agency), then an agency of the European Union, developed a more detailed working definition, which states: "Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities." It also adds that "such manifestations could also target the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity," but that "criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic." It provides contemporary examples of ways in which antisemitism may manifest itself, including: promoting the harming of Jews in the name of an ideology or religion; promoting negative stereotypes of Jews; holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of an individual Jewish person or group; denying the Holocaust or accusing Jews or Israel of exaggerating it; and accusing Jews of dual loyalty or a greater allegiance to Israel than their own country. It also lists ways in which attacking Israel could be antisemitic, and states that denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor, can be a manifestation of antisemitism—as can applying double standards by requiring of Israel a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation, or holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the State of Israel. Late in 2013, the definition was removed from the website of the Fundamental Rights Agency. A spokesperson said that it had never been regarded as official and that the agency did not intend to develop its own definition. However, despite its disappearance from the website of the Fundamental Rights Agency, the definition has gained widespread international use. The definition has been adopted by the European Parliament Working Group on Antisemitism, in 2010 it was adopted by the United States Department of State, in 2014 it was adopted in the Operational Hate Crime Guidance of the UK College of Policing and was also adopted by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, and in 2016 it was adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, making it the most widely adopted definition of antisemitism around the world.

1889 Paris, France elections poster for self-described "candidat antisémite" Adolphe Willette: "The Jews are a different race, hostile to our own... Judaism, there is the enemy!" (see file for complete translation)

Evolution of usage

In 1879, Wilhelm Marr founded the Antisemiten-Liga (Anti-Semitic League). Identification with antisemitism and as an antisemite was politically advantageous in Europe during the late 19th century. For example, Karl Lueger, the popular mayor of fin de siècle Vienna, skillfully exploited antisemitism as a way of channeling public discontent to his political advantage. In its 1910 obituary of Lueger, The New York Times notes that Lueger was "Chairman of the Christian Social Union of the Parliament and of the Anti-Semitic Union of the Diet of Lower Austria. In 1895 A. C. Cuza organized the Alliance Anti-semitique Universelle in Bucharest. In the period before World War II, when animosity towards Jews was far more commonplace, it was not uncommon for a person, an organization, or a political party to self-identify as an antisemite or antisemitic. 

The early Zionist pioneer Leon Pinsker, a professional physician, preferred the clinical-sounding term Judeophobia to antisemitism, which he regarded as a misnomer. The word Judeophobia first appeared in his pamphlet "Auto-Emancipation", published anonymously in German in September 1882, where it was described as an irrational fear or hatred of Jews. According to Pinsker, this irrational fear was an inherited predisposition.

Judeophobia is a form of demonopathy, with the distinction that the Jewish ghost has become known to the whole race of mankind, not merely to certain races.... Judeophobia is a psychic disorder. As a psychic disorder it is hereditary, and as a disease transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable.... Thus have Judaism and Jew-hatred passed through history for centuries as inseparable companions.... Having analyzed Judeophobia as an hereditary form of demonopathy, peculiar to the human race, and represented Jew-hatred as based upon an inherited aberration of the human mind, we must draw the important conclusion, that we must give up contending against these hostile impulses, just as we give up contending against every other inherited predisposition.

In the aftermath of the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, German propaganda minister Goebbels announced: "The German people is anti-Semitic. It has no desire to have its rights restricted or to be provoked in the future by parasites of the Jewish race."

After the 1945 victory of the Allies over Nazi Germany, and particularly after the full extent of the Nazi genocide against the Jews became known, the term "anti-Semitism" acquired pejorative connotations. This marked a full circle shift in usage, from an era just decades earlier when "Jew" was used as a pejorative term. Yehuda Bauer wrote in 1984: "There are no anti-Semites in the world ... Nobody says, 'I am anti-Semitic.' You cannot, after Hitler. The word has gone out of fashion."

Manifestations

Jews (identified by the mandatory Jewish badge and Jewish hat) being burned.

 

Antisemitism manifests itself in a variety of ways. René König mentions social antisemitism, economic antisemitism, religious antisemitism, and political antisemitism as examples. König points out that these different forms demonstrate that the "origins of anti-Semitic prejudices are rooted in different historical periods." König asserts that differences in the chronology of different antisemitic prejudices and the irregular distribution of such prejudices over different segments of the population create "serious difficulties in the definition of the different kinds of anti-Semitism." These difficulties may contribute to the existence of different taxonomies that have been developed to categorize the forms of antisemitism. The forms identified are substantially the same; it is primarily the number of forms and their definitions that differ. Bernard Lazare identifies three forms of antisemitism: Christian antisemitism, economic antisemitism, and ethnologic antisemitism. William Brustein names four categories: religious, racial, economic and political. The Roman Catholic historian Edward Flannery distinguished four varieties of antisemitism:

• political and economic antisemitism, giving as examples Cicero and Charles Lindbergh;
• theological or religious antisemitism, sometimes known as anti-Judaism;
• nationalistic antisemitism, citing Voltaire and other Enlightenment thinkers, who attacked Jews for supposedly having certain characteristics, such as greed and arrogance, and for observing customs such as kashrut and Shabbat;
• and racial antisemitism, with its extreme form resulting in the Holocaust by the Nazis.

Louis Harap separates "economic antisemitism" and merges "political" and "nationalistic" antisemitism into "ideological antisemitism". Harap also adds a category of "social antisemitism".

• religious (Jew as Christ-killer),
• economic (Jew as banker, usurer, money-obsessed),
• social (Jew as social inferior, "pushy," vulgar, therefore excluded from personal contact),
• racist (Jews as an inferior "race"),
• ideological (Jews regarded as subversive or revolutionary),
• cultural (Jews regarded as undermining the moral and structural fiber of civilization).

Gustavo Perednik has argued that what he terms "Judeophobia" has a number of unique traits which set it apart from other forms of racism, including permanence, depth, obsessiveness, irrationality, endurance, ubiquity, and danger. He also wrote in his book The Judeophobia that "The Jews were accused by the nationalists of being the creators of Communism; by the Communists of ruling Capitalism. If they live in non-Jewish countries, they are accused of double-loyalties; if they live in the Jewish country, of being racists. When they spend their money, they are reproached for being ostentatious; when they don't spend their money, of being avaricious. They are called rootless cosmopolitans or hardened chauvinists. If they assimilate, they are accused of being fifth-columnists, if they don't, of shutting themselves away."

Harvard professor Ruth Wisse has argued that antisemitism is a political ideology that authoritarians use to consolidate power by unifying disparate groups. One example she gives is the alleged antisemitism within the United Nations, which, in this view, functioned during the Cold War as a coalition-building technique between Soviet and Arab states, but now serves the same purpose among states opposed to the type of human-rights ideology for which the UN was created. She also cites as an example the formation of the Arab League.

Cultural antisemitism

Louis Harap defines cultural antisemitism as "that species of anti-Semitism that charges the Jews with corrupting a given culture and attempting to supplant or succeeding in supplanting the preferred culture with a uniform, crude, "Jewish" culture. Similarly, Eric Kandel characterizes cultural antisemitism as being based on the idea of "Jewishness" as a "religious or cultural tradition that is acquired through learning, through distinctive traditions and education." According to Kandel, this form of antisemitism views Jews as possessing "unattractive psychological and social characteristics that are acquired through acculturation." Niewyk and Nicosia characterize cultural antisemitism as focusing on and condemning "the Jews' aloofness from the societies in which they live." An important feature of cultural antisemitism is that it considers the negative attributes of Judaism to be redeemable by education or by religious conversion.

Religious antisemitism

Execution of Mariana de Carabajal (converted Jew), accused of a relapse into Judaism, Mexico City, 1601

 

Religious antisemitism, also known as anti-Judaism, is antipathy towards Jews because of their perceived religious beliefs. In theory, antisemitism and attacks against individual Jews would stop if Jews stopped practicing Judaism or changed their public faith, especially by conversion to the official or right religion. However, in some cases discrimination continues after conversion, as in the case of Christianized Marranos or Iberian Jews in the late 15th century and 16th century who were suspected of secretly practising Judaism or Jewish customs.

Although the origins of antisemitism are rooted in the Judeo-Christian conflict, other forms of antisemitism have developed in modern times. Frederick Schweitzer asserts that, "most scholars ignore the Christian foundation on which the modern antisemitic edifice rests and invoke political antisemitism, cultural antisemitism, racism or racial antisemitism, economic antisemitism and the like." William Nichols draws a distinction between religious antisemitism and modern antisemitism based on racial or ethnic grounds: "The dividing line was the possibility of effective conversion [...] a Jew ceased to be a Jew upon baptism." From the perspective of racial antisemitism, however, "the assimilated Jew was still a Jew, even after baptism.[...] From the Enlightenment onward, it is no longer possible to draw clear lines of distinction between religious and racial forms of hostility towards Jews[...] Once Jews have been emancipated and secular thinking makes its appearance, without leaving behind the old Christian hostility towards Jews, the new term antisemitism becomes almost unavoidable, even before explicitly racist doctrines appear." 

Some Christians such as the Catholic priest Ernest Jouin, who published the first French translation of the Protocols, combined religious and racial antisemitism, as in his statement that "From the triple viewpoint of race, of nationality, and of religion, the Jew has become the enemy of humanity." The virulent antisemitism of Édouard Drumont, one of the most widely read Catholic writers in France during the Dreyfus Affair, likewise combined religious and racial antisemitism.

Economic antisemitism

The underlying premise of economic antisemitism is that Jews perform harmful economic activities or that economic activities become harmful when they are performed by Jews.

Linking Jews and money underpins the most damaging and lasting Antisemitic canards. Antisemites claim that Jews control the world finances, a theory promoted in the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and later repeated by Henry Ford and his Dearborn Independent. In the modern era, such myths continue to be spread in books such as The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews published by the Nation of Islam, and on the internet. Derek Penslar writes that there are two components to the financial canards:

a) Jews are savages that "are temperamentally incapable of performing honest labor"

b) Jews are "leaders of a financial cabal seeking world domination"

Abraham Foxman describes six facets of the financial canards:

1. All Jews are wealthy
2. Jews are stingy and greedy
3. Powerful Jews control the business world
4. Jewish religion emphasizes profit and materialism
5. It is okay for Jews to cheat non-Jews
6. Jews use their power to benefit "their own kind"

Gerald Krefetz summarizes the myth as "[Jews] control the banks, the money supply, the economy, and businesses—of the community, of the country, of the world". Krefetz gives, as illustrations, many slurs and proverbs (in several different languages) which suggest that Jews are stingy, or greedy, or miserly, or aggressive bargainers. During the nineteenth century, Jews were described as "scurrilous, stupid, and tight-fisted", but after the Jewish Emancipation and the rise of Jews to the middle- or upper-class in Europe were portrayed as "clever, devious, and manipulative financiers out to dominate [world finances]".

Léon Poliakov asserts that economic antisemitism is not a distinct form of antisemitism, but merely a manifestation of theologic antisemitism (because, without the theological causes of the economic antisemitism, there would be no economic antisemitism). In opposition to this view, Derek Penslar contends that in the modern era, the economic antisemitism is "distinct and nearly constant" but theological antisemitism is "often subdued".

An academic study by Francesco D'Acunto, Marcel Prokopczuk, and Michael Weber showed that people who live in areas of Germany that contain the most brutal history of antisemitic persecution are more likely to be distrustful of finance in general. Therefore, they tended to invest less money in the stock market and make poor financial decisions. The study concluded "that the persecution of minorities reduces not only the long-term wealth of the persecuted, but of the persecutors as well."

Racial antisemitism

Jewish Soviet soldier taken prisoner by the German Army, August 1941. At least 50,000 Jewish soldiers were shot after selection.

 

Racial antisemitism is prejudice against Jews as a racial/ethnic group, rather than Judaism as a religion.

Racial antisemitism is the idea that the Jews are a distinct and inferior race compared to their host nations. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, it gained mainstream acceptance as part of the eugenics movement, which categorized non-Europeans as inferior. It more specifically claimed that Northern Europeans, or "Aryans", were superior. Racial antisemites saw the Jews as part of a Semitic race and emphasized their non-European origins and culture. They saw Jews as beyond redemption even if they converted to the majority religion.

Racial antisemitism replaced the hatred of Judaism with the hatred of Jews as a group. In the context of the Industrial Revolution, following the Jewish Emancipation, Jews rapidly urbanized and experienced a period of greater social mobility. With the decreasing role of religion in public life tempering religious antisemitism, a combination of growing nationalism, the rise of eugenics, and resentment at the socio-economic success of the Jews led to the newer, and more virulent, racist antisemitism.

According to William Nichols, religious antisemitism may be distinguished from modern antisemitism based on racial or ethnic grounds. "The dividing line was the possibility of effective conversion... a Jew ceased to be a Jew upon baptism." However, with racial antisemitism, "Now the assimilated Jew was still a Jew, even after baptism.... From the Enlightenment onward, it is no longer possible to draw clear lines of distinction between religious and racial forms of hostility towards Jews... Once Jews have been emancipated and secular thinking makes its appearance, without leaving behind the old Christian hostility towards Jews, the new term antisemitism becomes almost unavoidable, even before explicitly racist doctrines appear."

In the early 19th century, a number of laws enabling emancipation of the Jews were enacted in Western European countries. The old laws restricting them to ghettos, as well as the many laws that limited their property rights, rights of worship and occupation, were rescinded. Despite this, traditional discrimination and hostility to Jews on religious grounds persisted and was supplemented by racial antisemitism, encouraged by the work of racial theorists such as Joseph Arthur de Gobineau and particularly his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Race of 1853–5. Nationalist agendas based on ethnicity, known as ethnonationalism, usually excluded the Jews from the national community as an alien race. Allied to this were theories of Social Darwinism, which stressed a putative conflict between higher and lower races of human beings. Such theories, usually posited by northern Europeans, advocated the superiority of white Aryans to Semitic Jews.

Political antisemitism

"The whole problem of the Jews exists only in nation states, for here their energy and higher intelligence, their accumulated capital of spirit and will, gathered from generation to generation through a long schooling in suffering, must become so preponderant as to arouse mass envy and hatred. In almost all contemporary nations, therefore – in direct proportion to the degree to which they act up nationalistially – the literary obscenity of leading the Jews to slaughter as scapegoats of every conceivable public and internal misfortune is spreading."

— Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886, [MA 1 475]

William Brustein defines political antisemitism as hostility toward Jews based on the belief that Jews seek national and/or world power." Yisrael Gutman characterizes political antisemitism as tending to "lay responsibility on the Jews for defeats and political economic crises" while seeking to "exploit opposition and resistance to Jewish influence as elements in political party platforms."

According to Viktor Karády, political antisemitism became widespread after the legal emancipation of the Jews and sought to reverse some of the consequences of that emancipation. 

Conspiracy theories

Holocaust denial and Jewish conspiracy theories are also considered forms of antisemitism. Zoological conspiracy theories have been propagated by Arab media and Arabic language websites, alleging a "Zionist plot" behind the use of animals to attack civilians or to conduct espionage.

New antisemitism

A sign held at a protest in Edinburgh, Scotland on January 10, 2009

Starting in the 1990s, some scholars have advanced the concept of new antisemitism, coming simultaneously from the left, the right, and radical Islam, which tends to focus on opposition to the creation of a Jewish homeland in the State of Israel, and they argue that the language of anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel are used to attack Jews more broadly. In this view, the proponents of the new concept believe that criticisms of Israel and Zionism are often disproportionate in degree and unique in kind, and they attribute this to antisemitism. Jewish scholar Gustavo Perednik posited in 2004 that anti-Zionism in itself represents a form of discrimination against Jews, in that it singles out Jewish national aspirations as an illegitimate and racist endeavor, and "proposes actions that would result in the death of millions of Jews". It is asserted that the new antisemitism deploys traditional antisemitic motifs, including older motifs such as the blood libel.

Critics of the concept view it as trivializing the meaning of antisemitism, and as exploiting antisemitism in order to silence debate and to deflect attention from legitimate criticism of the State of Israel, and, by associating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, misused to taint anyone opposed to Israeli actions and policies.

Indology

German indologists arbitrarily identified "layers" in the Mahabharata and Bhagavad Gita with the objective of fueling European antisemitism via the Indo-Aryan migration theory. This identification required equating Brahmins with Jews, resulting in anti-Brahmanism.

History

The massacre of the Banu Qurayza, a Jewish tribe in Medina, 627

Many authors see the roots of modern antisemitism in both pagan antiquity and early Christianity. Jerome Chanes identifies six stages in the historical development of antisemitism:

1. Pre-Christian anti-Judaism in ancient Greece and Rome which was primarily ethnic in nature
2. Christian antisemitism in antiquity and the Middle Ages which was religious in nature and has extended into modern times
3. Traditional Muslim antisemitism which was—at least, in its classical form—nuanced in that Jews were a protected class
4. Political, social and economic antisemitism of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Europe which laid the groundwork for racial antisemitism
5. Racial antisemitism that arose in the 19th century and culminated in Nazism in the 20th century
6. Contemporary antisemitism which has been labeled by some as the New Antisemitism

Chanes suggests that these six stages could be merged into three categories: "ancient antisemitism, which was primarily ethnic in nature; Christian antisemitism, which was religious; and the racial antisemitism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."

Ancient world

The first clear examples of anti-Jewish sentiment can be traced to the 3rd century BCE to Alexandria, the home to the largest Jewish diaspora community in the world at the time and where the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, was produced. Manetho, an Egyptian priest and historian of that era, wrote scathingly of the Jews. His themes are repeated in the works of Chaeremon, Lysimachus, Poseidonius, Apollonius Molon, and in Apion and Tacitus. Agatharchides of Cnidus ridiculed the practices of the Jews and the "absurdity of their Law", making a mocking reference to how Ptolemy Lagus was able to invade Jerusalem in 320 BCE because its inhabitants were observing the Shabbat. One of the earliest anti-Jewish edicts, promulgated by Antiochus IV Epiphanes in about 170–167 BCE, sparked a revolt of the Maccabees in Judea.

In view of Manetho's anti-Jewish writings, antisemitism may have originated in Egypt and been spread by "the Greek retelling of Ancient Egyptian prejudices". The ancient Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria describes an attack on Jews in Alexandria in 38 CE in which thousands of Jews died. The violence in Alexandria may have been caused by the Jews being portrayed as misanthropes. Tcherikover argues that the reason for hatred of Jews in the Hellenistic period was their separateness in the Greek cities, the poleis. Bohak has argued, however, that early animosity against the Jews cannot be regarded as being anti-Judaic or antisemitic unless it arose from attitudes that were held against the Jews alone, and that many Greeks showed animosity toward any group they regarded as barbarians. Statements exhibiting prejudice against Jews and their religion can be found in the works of many pagan Greek and Roman writers. Edward Flannery writes that it was the Jews' refusal to accept Greek religious and social standards that marked them out. Hecataetus of Abdera, a Greek historian of the early third century BCE, wrote that Moses "in remembrance of the exile of his people, instituted for them a misanthropic and inhospitable way of life." Manetho, an Egyptian historian, wrote that the Jews were expelled Egyptian lepers who had been taught by Moses "not to adore the gods." Edward Flannery describes antisemitism in ancient times as essentially "cultural, taking the shape of a national xenophobia played out in political settings."

There are examples of Hellenistic rulers desecrating the Temple and banning Jewish religious practices, such as circumcision, Shabbat observance, study of Jewish religious books, etc. Examples may also be found in anti-Jewish riots in Alexandria in the 3rd century BCE.

The Jewish diaspora on the Nile island Elephantine, which was founded by mercenaries, experienced the destruction of its temple in 410 BCE.

Relationships between the Jewish people and the occupying Roman Empire were at times antagonistic and resulted in several rebellions. According to Suetonius, the emperor Tiberius expelled from Rome Jews who had gone to live there. The 18th-century English historian Edward Gibbon identified a more tolerant period in Roman-Jewish relations beginning in about 160 CE. However, when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire, the state's attitude towards the Jews gradually worsened. 

James Carroll asserted: "Jews accounted for 10% of the total population of the Roman Empire. By that ratio, if other factors such as pogroms and conversions had not intervened, there would be 200 million Jews in the world today, instead of something like 13 million."

Persecutions during the Middle Ages

In the late 6th century CE, the newly Catholicised Visigothic kingdom in Hispania issued a series of anti-Jewish edicts which forbad Jews from marrying Christians, practicing circumcision, and observing Jewish holy days. Continuing throughout the 7th century, both Visigothic kings and the Church were active in creating social aggression and towards Jews with "civic and ecclesiastic punishments", ranging between forced conversion, slavery, exile and death.

From the 9th century, the medieval Islamic world classified Jews and Christians as dhimmis, and allowed Jews to practice their religion more freely than they could do in medieval Christian Europe. Under Islamic rule, there was a Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain that lasted until at least the 11th century. It ended when several Muslim pogroms against Jews took place on the Iberian Peninsula, including those that occurred in Córdoba in 1011 and in Granada in 1066. Several decrees ordering the destruction of synagogues were also enacted in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Yemen from the 11th century. In addition, Jews were forced to convert to Islam or face death in some parts of Yemen, Morocco and Baghdad several times between the 12th and 18th centuries. The Almohads, who had taken control of the Almoravids' Maghribi and Andalusian territories by 1147, were far more fundamentalist in outlook compared to their predecessors, and they treated the dhimmis harshly. Faced with the choice of either death or conversion, many Jews and Christians emigrated. Some, such as the family of Maimonides, fled east to more tolerant Muslim lands, while some others went northward to settle in the growing Christian kingdoms.

During the Middle Ages in Europe there was persecution against Jews in many places, with blood libels, expulsions, forced conversions and massacres. A main justification of prejudice against Jews in Europe was religious. 

The persecution hit its first peak during the Crusades. In the First Crusade (1096) hundreds or even thousands of Jews were killed as the crusaders arrived. This was the first major outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in Christian Europe outside Spain and was cited by Zionists in the 19th century as indicating the need for a state of Israel.

In the Second Crusade (1147) the Jews in Germany were subject to several massacres. The Jews were also subjected to attacks by the Shepherds' Crusades of 1251 and 1320, as well as Rintfleisch knights in 1298. The Crusades were followed by expulsions, including, in 1290, the banishing of all English Jews; in 1394, the expulsion of 100,000 Jews in France; and in 1421, the expulsion of thousands from Austria. Many of the expelled Jews fled to Poland. In medieval and Renaissance Europe, a major contributor to the deepening of antisemitic sentiment and legal action among the Christian populations was the popular preaching of the zealous reform religious orders, the Franciscans (especially Bernardino of Feltre) and Dominicans (especially Vincent Ferrer), who combed Europe and promoted antisemitism through their often fiery, emotional appeals.

As the Black Death epidemics devastated Europe in the mid-14th century, causing the death of a large part of the population, Jews were used as scapegoats. Rumors spread that they caused the disease by deliberately poisoning wells. Hundreds of Jewish communities were destroyed in numerous persecutions. Although Pope Clement VI tried to protect them by issuing two papal bulls in 1348, the first on 6 July and an additional one several months later, 900 Jews were burned alive in Strasbourg, where the plague had not yet affected the city.

17th century

During the mid-to-late 17th century the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was devastated by several conflicts, in which the Commonwealth lost over a third of its population (over 3 million people), and Jewish losses were counted in the hundreds of thousands. The first of these conflicts was the Khmelnytsky Uprising, when Bohdan Khmelnytsky's supporters massacred tens of thousands of Jews in the eastern and southern areas he controlled (today's Ukraine). The precise number of dead may never be known, but the decrease of the Jewish population during that period is estimated at 100,000 to 200,000, which also includes emigration, deaths from diseases and captivity in the Ottoman Empire, called jasyr.

European immigrants to the United States brought antisemitism to the country as early as the 17th century. Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, implemented plans to prevent Jews from settling in the city. During the Colonial Era, the American government limited the political and economic rights of Jews. It was not until the American Revolutionary War that Jews gained legal rights, including the right to vote. However, even at their peak, the restrictions on Jews in the United States were never as stringent as they had been in Europe.

In the Zaydi imamate of Yemen, Jews were also singled out for discrimination in the 17th century, which culminated in the general expulsion of all Jews from places in Yemen to the arid coastal plain of Tihamah and which became known as the Mawza Exile.

Enlightenment

In 1744, Frederick II of Prussia limited the number of Jews allowed to live in Breslau to only ten so-called "protected" Jewish families and encouraged a similar practice in other Prussian cities. In 1750 he issued the Revidiertes General Privilegium und Reglement vor die Judenschaft: the "protected" Jews had an alternative to "either abstain from marriage or leave Berlin" (quoting Simon Dubnow). In the same year, Archduchess of Austria Maria Theresa ordered Jews out of Bohemia but soon reversed her position, on the condition that Jews pay for their readmission every ten years. This extortion was known as malke-geld (queen's money). In 1752 she introduced the law limiting each Jewish family to one son. In 1782, Joseph II abolished most of these persecution practices in his Toleranzpatent, on the condition that Yiddish and Hebrew were eliminated from public records and that judicial autonomy was annulled. Moses Mendelssohn wrote that "Such a tolerance... is even more dangerous play in tolerance than open persecution."

Voltaire

According to Arnold Ages, Voltaire's "Lettres philosophiques, Dictionnaire philosophique, and Candide, to name but a few of his better known works, are saturated with comments on Jews and Judaism and the vast majority are negative". Paul H. Meyer adds: "There is no question but that Voltaire, particularly in his latter years, nursed a violent hatred of the Jews and it is equally certain that his animosity...did have a considerable impact on public opinion in France." Thirty of the 118 articles in Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique concerned Jews and described them in consistently negative ways.

Louis de Bonald and the Catholic Counter-Revolution

The counter-revolutionary Catholic royalist Louis de Bonald stands out among the earliest figures to explicitly call for the reversal of Jewish emancipation in the wake of the French Revolution. Bonald's attacks on the Jews are likely to have influenced Napoleon's decision to limit the civil rights of Alsatian Jews. Bonald's article Sur les juifs (1806) was one of the most venomous screeds of its era and furnished a paradigm which combined anti-liberalism, a defense of a rural society, traditional Christian antisemitism, and the identification of Jews with bankers and finance capital, which would in turn influence many subsequent right-wing reactionaries such as Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux, Charles Maurras, and Édouard Drumont, nationalists such as Maurice Barrès and Paolo Orano, and antisemitic socialists such as Alphonse Toussenel. Bonald furthermore declared that the Jews were an "alien" people, a "state within a state", and should be forced to wear a distinctive mark to more easily identify and discriminate against them.

Under the French Second Empire, the popular counter-revolutionary Catholic journalist Louis Veuillot propagated Bonald's arguments against the Jewish "financial aristocracy" along with vicious attacks against the Talmud and the Jews as a "deicidal people" driven by hatred to "enslave" Christians. Between 1882 and 1886 alone, French priests published twenty antisemitic books blaming France's ills on the Jews and urging the government to consign them back to the ghettos, expel them, or hang them from the gallows. Gougenot des Mousseaux's Le Juif, le judaïsme et la judaïsation des peuples chrétiens (1869) has been called a "Bible of modern antisemitism" and was translated into German by Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg.

Imperial Russia

Thousands of Jews were slaughtered by Cossack Haidamaks in the 1768 massacre of Uman in the Kingdom of Poland. In 1772, the empress of Russia Catherine II forced the Jews into the Pale of Settlement – which was located primarily in present-day Poland, Ukraine and Belarus – and to stay in their shtetls and forbade them from returning to the towns that they occupied before the partition of Poland. From 1804, Jews were banned from their villages, and began to stream into the towns. A decree by emperor Nicholas I of Russia in 1827 conscripted Jews under 18 years of age into the cantonist schools for a 25-year military service in order to promote baptism. Policy towards Jews was liberalised somewhat under Czar Alexander II (r. 1855–1881). However, his assassination in 1881 served as a pretext for further repression such as the May Laws of 1882. Konstantin Pobedonostsev, nicknamed the "black czar" and tutor to the czarevitch, later crowned Czar Nicholas II, declared that "One third of the Jews must die, one third must emigrate, and one third be converted to Christianity".

Islamic antisemitism in the 19th century

Historian Martin Gilbert writes that it was in the 19th century that the position of Jews worsened in Muslim countries. Benny Morris writes that one symbol of Jewish degradation was the phenomenon of stone-throwing at Jews by Muslim children. Morris quotes a 19th-century traveler: "I have seen a little fellow of six years old, with a troop of fat toddlers of only three and four, teaching [them] to throw stones at a Jew, and one little urchin would, with the greatest coolness, waddle up to the man and literally spit upon his Jewish gaberdine. To all this the Jew is obliged to submit; it would be more than his life was worth to offer to strike a Mahommedan."

In the middle of the 19th century, J. J. Benjamin wrote about the life of Persian Jews, describing conditions and beliefs that went back to the 16th century: "…they are obliged to live in a separate part of town… Under the pretext of their being unclean, they are treated with the greatest severity and should they enter a street, inhabited by Mussulmans, they are pelted by the boys and mobs with stones and dirt…."

In Jerusalem at least, conditions for some Jews improved. Moses Montefiore, on his seventh visit in 1875, noted that fine new buildings had sprung up and; 'surely we're approaching the time to witness God's hallowed promise unto Zion.' Muslim and Christian Arabs participated in Purim and Passover; Arabs called the Sephardis 'Jews, sons of Arabs'; the Ulema and the Rabbis offered joint prayers for rain in time of drought.

At the time of the Dreyfus trial in France, 'Muslim comments usually favoured the persecuted Jew against his Christian persecutors'.

Secular or racial antisemitism

Title page of the second edition of Das Judenthum in der Musik, published in 1869

 

Anti-Semitic agitators in Paris burn an effigy of Mathieu Dreyfus during the Dreyfus affair

In 1850 the German composer Richard Wagner – who has been called "the inventor of modern antisemitism" – published Das Judenthum in der Musik (roughly "Jewishness in Music") under a pseudonym in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. The essay began as an attack on Jewish composers, particularly Wagner's contemporaries, and rivals, Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer, but expanded to accuse Jews of being a harmful and alien element in German culture, who corrupted morals and were, in fact, parasites incapable of creating truly "German" art. The crux was the manipulation and control by the Jews of the money economy:

According to the present constitution of this world, the Jew in truth is already more than emancipated: he rules, and will rule, so long as Money remains the power before which all our doings and our dealings lose their force.

Although originally published anonymously, when the essay was republished 19 years later, in 1869, the concept of the corrupting Jew had become so widely held that Wagner's name was affixed to it.

Antisemitism can also be found in many of the Grimms' Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, published from 1812 to 1857. It is mainly characterized by Jews being the villain of a story, such as in "The Good Bargain" ("Der gute Handel") and "The Jew Among Thorns" ("Der Jude im Dorn"). 

The middle 19th century saw continued official harassment of the Jews, especially in Eastern Europe under Czarist influence. For example, in 1846, 80 Jews approached the governor in Warsaw to retain the right to wear their traditional dress, but were immediately rebuffed by having their hair and beards forcefully cut, at their own expense.

In America, even such influential figures as Walt Whitman tolerated bigotry toward the Jews. During his time as editor of the Brooklyn Eagle (1846–1848), the newspaper published historical sketches casting Jews in a bad light.

The Dreyfus Affair was an infamous antisemitic event of the late 19th century and early 20th century. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery captain in the French Army, was accused in 1894 of passing secrets to the Germans. As a result of these charges, Dreyfus was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. The actual spy, Marie Charles Esterhazy, was acquitted. The event caused great uproar among the French, with the public choosing sides on the issue of whether Dreyfus was actually guilty or not. Émile Zola accused the army of corrupting the French justice system. However, general consensus held that Dreyfus was guilty: 80% of the press in France condemned him. This attitude among the majority of the French population reveals the underlying antisemitism of the time period.

Adolf Stoecker (1835–1909), the Lutheran court chaplain to Kaiser Wilhelm I, founded in 1878 an antisemitic, anti-liberal political party called the Christian Social Party. This party always remained small, and its support dwindled after Stoecker's death, with most of its members eventually joining larger conservative groups such as the German National People's Party.

Some scholars view Karl Marx's essay On The Jewish Question as antisemitic, and argue that he often used antisemitic epithets in his published and private writings. These scholars argue that Marx equated Judaism with capitalism in his essay, helping to spread that idea. Some further argue that the essay influenced National Socialist, as well as Soviet and Arab antisemites. Marx himself had Jewish ancestry, and Albert Lindemann and Hyam Maccoby have suggested that he was embarrassed by it. Others argue that Marx consistently supported Prussian Jewish communities' struggles to achieve equal political rights. These scholars argue that "On the Jewish Question" is a critique of Bruno Bauer's arguments that Jews must convert to Christianity before being emancipated, and is more generally a critique of liberal rights discourses and capitalism. Iain Hamphsher-Monk wrote that "This work [On The Jewish Question] has been cited as evidence for Marx's supposed anti-semitism, but only the most superficial reading of it could sustain such an interpretation." David McLellan and Francis Wheen argue that readers should interpret On the Jewish Question in the deeper context of Marx's debates with Bruno Bauer, author of The Jewish Question, about Jewish emancipation in Germany. Wheen says that "Those critics, who see this as a foretaste of 'Mein Kampf', overlook one, essential point: in spite of the clumsy phraseology and crude stereotyping, the essay was actually written as a defense of the Jews. It was a retort to Bruno Bauer, who had argued that Jews should not be granted full civic rights and freedoms unless they were baptised as Christians". According to McLellan, Marx used the word Judentum colloquially, as meaning commerce, arguing that Germans must be emancipated from the capitalist mode of production not Judaism or Jews in particular. McLellan concludes that readers should interpret the essay's second half as "an extended pun at Bauer's expense".

20th century

The victims of a 1905 pogrom in Yekaterinoslav

 

Between 1900 and 1924, approximately 1.75 million Jews migrated to America, the bulk from Eastern Europe. Before 1900 American Jews had always amounted to less than 1% of America's total population, but by 1930 Jews formed about 3.5%. This increase, combined with the upward social mobility of some Jews, contributed to a resurgence of antisemitism. In the first half of the 20th century, in the US, Jews were discriminated against in employment, access to residential and resort areas, membership in clubs and organizations, and in tightened quotas on Jewish enrolment and teaching positions in colleges and universities. The lynching of Leo Frank by a mob of prominent citizens in Marietta, Georgia in 1915 turned the spotlight on antisemitism in the United States. The case was also used to build support for the renewal of the Ku Klux Klan which had been inactive since 1870.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Beilis Trial in Russia represented modern incidents of blood-libels in Europe. During the Russian Civil War, close to 50,000 Jews were killed in pogroms.

Public reading of the antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer, Worms, Germany, 1935

 

Antisemitism in America reached its peak during the interwar period. The pioneer automobile manufacturer Henry Ford propagated antisemitic ideas in his newspaper The Dearborn Independent (published by Ford from 1919 to 1927). The radio speeches of Father Coughlin in the late 1930s attacked Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and promoted the notion of a Jewish financial conspiracy. Some prominent politicians shared such views: Louis T. McFadden, Chairman of the United States House Committee on Banking and Currency, blamed Jews for Roosevelt's decision to abandon the gold standard, and claimed that "in the United States today, the Gentiles have the slips of paper while the Jews have the lawful money".

In the early 1940s the aviator Charles Lindbergh and many prominent Americans led The America First Committee in opposing any involvement in the war against Fascism. During his July 1936 visit to Nazi Germany, a few weeks before the 1936 Summer Olympics, Lindbergh wrote letters saying that there was "more intelligent leadership in Germany than is generally recognized". The German American Bund held parades in New York City during the late 1930s, where members wore Nazi uniforms and raised flags featuring swastikas alongside American flags. 

Sometimes race riots, as in Detroit in 1943, targeted Jewish businesses for looting and burning.

A wagon piled high with corpses outside the crematorium at the recently liberated Buchenwald concentration camp, 1945

 

1941 decree of Boris III of Bulgaria for approval of the antisemitic Law for protection of the nation

 

In Germany, Nazism led Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, who came to power on 30 January 1933 shortly afterwards instituted repressive legislation which denied the Jews basic civil rights. In September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws prohibited sexual relations and marriages between "Aryans" and Jews as Rassenschande ("race disgrace") and stripped all German Jews, even quarter- and half-Jews, of their citizenship, (their official title became "subjects of the state"). It instituted a pogrom on the night of 9–10 November 1938, dubbed Kristallnacht, in which Jews were killed, their property destroyed and their synagogues torched. Antisemitic laws, agitation and propaganda were extended to German-occupied Europe in the wake of conquest, often building on local antisemitic traditions. In the east the Third Reich forced Jews into ghettos in Warsaw, in Kraków, in Lvov, in Lublin and in Radom. After the beginning of the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1941 a campaign of mass murder, conducted by the Einsatzgruppen, culminated from 1942 to 1945 in systematic genocide: the Holocaust. Eleven million Jews were targeted for extermination by the Nazis, and some six million were eventually killed.

Antisemitism was commonly used as an instrument for settling personal conflicts in the Soviet Union, starting with the conflict between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky and continuing through numerous conspiracy-theories spread by official propaganda. Antisemitism in the USSR reached new heights after 1948 during the campaign against the "rootless cosmopolitan" (euphemism for "Jew") in which numerous Yiddish-language poets, writers, painters and sculptors were killed or arrested. This culminated in the so-called Doctors' Plot (1952–1953). Similar antisemitic propaganda in Poland resulted in the flight of Polish Jewish survivors from the country.

After the war, the Kielce pogrom and the "March 1968 events" in communist Poland represented further incidents of antisemitism in Europe. The anti-Jewish violence in postwar Poland has a common theme of blood libel rumours.

21st-century European antisemitism

Physical assaults against Jews in those countries included beatings, stabbings and other violence, which increased markedly, sometimes resulting in serious injury and death. A 2015 report by the US State Department on religious freedom declared that "European anti-Israel sentiment crossed the line into anti-Semitism."

This rise in antisemitic attacks is associated with both the Muslim anti-Semitism and the rise of far-right political parties as a result of the economic crisis of 2008. This rise in the support for far right ideas in western and eastern Europe has resulted in the increase of antisemitic acts, mostly attacks on Jewish memorials, synagogues and cemeteries but also a number of physical attacks against Jews.

In Eastern Europe the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the instability of the new states has brought the rise of nationalist movements and the accusation against Jews for the economic crisis, taking over the local economy and bribing the government alongside with traditional and religious motives for antisemitism such as blood libels. Most of the antisemitic incidents are against Jewish cemeteries and building (community centers and synagogues). Nevertheless, there were several violent attacks against Jews in Moscow in 2006 when a neo-Nazi stabbed 9 people at the Bolshaya Bronnaya Synagogue, the failed bomb attack on the same synagogue in 1999, the threats against Jewish pilgrims in Uman, Ukraine and the attack against a menorah by extremist Christian organization in Moldova in 2009.

Europeans are concerned about antisemitism because, historically, societies with a large degree of anti-Semitism are self-destructive. Furthermore, the Jews of Europe have generally aligned themselves with Europe's democratic elite, a class whose future is uncertain according to the Economist Intelligence Unit.

21st-century Arab antisemitism

Displaced Iraqi Jews arrive in Israel in 1951 during the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries

 

Robert Bernstein, founder of Human Rights Watch, says that antisemitism is "deeply ingrained and institutionalized" in "Arab nations in modern times."

In a 2011 survey by the Pew Research Center, all of the Muslim-majority Middle Eastern countries polled held few positive opinions of Jews. In the questionnaire, only 2% of Egyptians, 3% of Lebanese Muslims, and 2% of Jordanians reported having a positive view of Jews. Muslim-majority countries outside the Middle East similarly had few who held positive views of Jews, with 4% of Turks and 9% of Indonesians viewing Jews favorably.

According to a 2011 exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, United States, some of the dialogue from Middle East media and commentators about Jews bear a striking resemblance to Nazi propaganda. According to Josef Joffe of Newsweek, "anti-Semitism—the real stuff, not just bad-mouthing particular Israeli policies—is as much part of Arab life today as the hijab or the hookah. Whereas this darkest of creeds is no longer tolerated in polite society in the West, in the Arab world, Jew hatred remains culturally endemic."

Muslim clerics in the Middle East have frequently referred to Jews as descendants of apes and pigs, which are conventional epithets for Jews and Christians.

According to professor Robert Wistrich, director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA), the calls for the destruction of Israel by Iran or by Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, or the Muslim Brotherhood, represent a contemporary mode of genocidal antisemitism.

Causes

Antisemitism has been explained in terms of racism, xenophobia, projected guilt, displaced aggression, and the search for a scapegoat. Some explanations assign partial blame to the perception of Jewish people as unsociable. Such a perception may have arisen by many Jews having strictly kept to their own communities, with their own practices and laws.

It has also been suggested that parts of antisemitism arose from a perception of Jewish people as greedy (as often used in stereotypes of Jews), and this perception has probably evolved in Europe during Medieval times where a large portion of money lending was operated by Jews. Factors contributing to this situation included that Jews were restricted from other professions, while the Christian Church declared for their followers that money lending constituted immoral "usury".

Current situation

A March 2008 report by the U.S. State Department found that there was an increase in antisemitism across the world, and that both old and new expressions of antisemitism persist. A 2012 report by the U.S. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor also noted a continued global increase in antisemitism, and found that Holocaust denial and opposition to Israeli policy at times was used to promote or justify blatant antisemitism. In 2014, the ADL conducted a study titled "Global 100: An Index of Anti-Semitism", which also reported high antisemitism figures around the world and, among other findings, that as many as "27% of people who have never met a Jew nevertheless harbor strong prejudices against him".

Algeria

Almost all Jews in Algeria left upon independence in 1962. Algeria's 140,000 Jews had French citizenship since 1870 (briefly revoked by Vichy France in 1940), and they mainly went to France, with some going to Israel.

Egypt

In Egypt, Dar al-Fadhilah published a translation of Henry Ford's antisemitic treatise, The International Jew, complete with distinctly antisemitic imagery on the cover.

On 5 May 2001, after Shimon Peres visited Egypt, the Egyptian al-Akhbar internet paper said that "lies and deceit are not foreign to Jews[...]. For this reason, Allah changed their shape and made them into monkeys and pigs."

In July 2012, Egypt's Al Nahar channel fooled actors into thinking they were on an Israeli television show and filmed their reactions to being told it was an Israeli television show. In response, some of the actors launched into antisemitic rants or dialogue, and many became violent. Actress Mayer El Beblawi said that "Allah did not curse the worm and moth as much as he cursed the Jews" while actor Mahmoud Abdel Ghaffar launched into a violent rage and said, "You brought me someone who looks like a Jew... I hate the Jews to death" after finding out it was a prank.

Libya

Libya had once one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, dating back to 300 BCE. Despite the repression of Jews in the late 1930, as a result of the pro-Nazi Fascist Italian regime, Jews were third of the population of Libya till 1941. In 1942 the Nazi German troops occupied the Jewish quarter of Benghazi, plundering shops and deporting more than 2,000 Jews across the desert. Sent to work in labor camps, more than one-fifth of this group of Jews perished. A series of pogroms started in November 1945, while more than 140 Jews were killed in Tripoli and most synagogues in the city looted. Upon Libya's independence in 1951, most of the Jewish community emigrated from Libya. After the Suez Crisis in 1956, another series of pogroms forced all but about 100 Jews to flee. When Muammar al-Gaddafi came to power in 1969, all remaining Jewish property was confiscated and all debts to Jews cancelled.

Morocco

Jewish communities, in Islamic times often living in ghettos known as mellah, have existed in Morocco for at least 2,000 years. Intermittent large scale massacres (such as that of 6,000 Jews in Fez in 1033, over 100,000 Jews in Fez and Marrakesh in 1146 and again in Marrakesh in 1232) were accompanied by systematic discrimination through the years. In 1875, 20 Jews were killed by a mob in Demnat, Morocco; elsewhere in Morocco, Jews were attacked and killed in the streets in broad daylight. While the pro-Nazi Vichy regime during World War II passed discriminatory laws against Jews, King Muhammad prevented deportation of Jews to death camps (although Jews with French, as opposed to Moroccan, citizenship, being directly subject to Vichy law, were still deported.) In 1948, approximately 265,000 Jews lived in Morocco. Between 5,000 and 8,000 live there now. In June 1948, soon after Israel was established and in the midst of the first Arab-Israeli war, riots against Jews broke out in Oujda and Djerada, killing 44 Jews. In 1948-9, 18,000 Jews left the country for Israel. After this, Jewish emigration continued (to Israel and elsewhere), but slowed to a few thousand a year. Through the early fifties, Zionist organizations encouraged emigration, particularly in the poorer south of the country, seeing Moroccan Jews as valuable contributors to the Jewish State: In 1955, Morocco attained independence and emigration to Israel has increased further until 1956 then it was prohibited until 1963, then resumed. By 1967, only 60,000 Jews remained in Morocco. The Six-Day War in 1967 led to increased Arab-Jewish tensions worldwide, including Morocco. By 1971, the Jewish population was down to 35,000; however, most of this wave of emigration went to Europe and North America rather than Israel.

South Africa

Antisemitism has been present in history of South Africa since Europeans first set foot ashore on the Cape Peninsula. In the years 1652–1795 Jews were not allowed to settle at the Cape. An 1868 Act would sanction religious discrimination. Antisemitism reached its apotheosis in the years leading up to World War II. Inspired by the rise of national socialism in Germany the Ossewabrandwag (OB) – whose membership accounted for almost 25% of the 1940 Afrikaner population – and the National Party faction New Order would champion a more programmatic solution to the 'Jewish problem'.

Tunisia

Jews have lived in Tunisia for at least 2,300 years. In the 13th century, Jews were expelled from their homes in Kairouan and were ultimately restricted to ghettos, known as hara. Forced to wear distinctive clothing, several Jews earned high positions in the Tunisian government. Several prominent international traders were Tunisian Jews. From 1855 to 1864, Muhammad Bey relaxed dhimmi laws, but reinstated them in the face of anti-Jewish riots that continued at least until 1869. Tunisia, as the only Middle Eastern country under direct Nazi control during World War II, was also the site of racist antisemitic measures activities such as the yellow star, prison camps, deportations, and other persecution. In 1948, approximately 105,000 Jews lived in Tunisia. Only about 1,500 remain there today. Following Tunisia's independence from France in 1956, a number of anti-Jewish policies led to emigration, of which half went to Israel and the other half to France. After attacks in 1967, Jewish emigration both to Israel and France accelerated. There were also attacks in 1982, 1985, and most recently in 2002 when a suicide bombing in Djerba took 21 lives (most of them German tourists) near the local synagogue, in a terrorist attack claimed by Al-Qaeda. 

In modern-day Tunisia, there have been many instances of antisemitic acts and statements. Since the government is not quick to condemn them, antisemitism spreads throughout Tunisian society. Following the Ben Ali regime, there have been an increasing number of public offenses against Jews in Tunisia. For example, in February 2012, when Egyptian cleric Wagdi Ghanaim entered Tunisia, he was welcomed by Islamists who chanted "Death to the Jews" as a sign of their support. The following month, during protests in Tunis, a Salafi sheikh told young Tunisians to gather and learn to kill Jews.

In the past, The Tunisian government has made efforts to block Jews from entering high positions, and some moderate members have tried to cover up the more extremist antisemitic efforts by appointing Jews to governmental positions, however, it is known that Muslim clerics believe that if the Muslim Brotherhood leads the regime, that will enhance their hatred towards Jews. In response to the prevalent antisemitism, the Tunisian government has publicly protected the dwindling population and its marks of Jewish culture, for example, synagogues, and advised them to settle in Djerba, a French tourist attraction.

Asia

Iran

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former president of Iran, has frequently been accused of denying the Holocaust. 

In July 2012, the winner of Iran's first annual International Wall Street Downfall Cartoon Festival, jointly sponsored by the semi-state-run Iranian media outlet Fars News, was an antisemitic cartoon depicting Jews praying before the New York Stock Exchange, which is made to look like the Western Wall. Other cartoons in the contest were antisemitic as well. The national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, condemned the cartoon, stating that "Here's the anti-Semitic notion of Jews and their love for money, the canard that Jews 'control' Wall Street, and a cynical perversion of the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism," and "Once again Iran takes the prize for promoting antisemitism."

Japan

The Japanese first learned about antisemitism in 1918, during the cooperation of the Imperial Japanese Army with the White movement in Siberia. White Army soldiers had been issued copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and "The Protocols continue to be used as evidence of Jewish conspiracies even though they are widely acknowledged to be a forgery. During World War II, Nazi Germany encouraged Japan to adopt antisemitic policies. In the post-war period, extremist groups and ideologues have promoted conspiracy theories.

Lebanon

In 2004, Al-Manar, a media network affiliated with Hezbollah, aired a drama series, The Diaspora, which observers allege is based on historical antisemitic allegations. BBC correspondents who have watched the program says it quotes extensively from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Malaysia

Although Malaysia presently has no substantial Jewish population, the country has reportedly become an example of a phenomenon called "antisemitism without Jews."

In his treatise on Malay identity, "The Malay Dilemma," which was published in 1970, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad wrote: "The Jews are not only hooked-nosed... but understand money instinctively.... Jewish stinginess and financial wizardry gained them the economic control of Europe and provoked antisemitism which waxed and waned throughout Europe through the ages."

The Malay-language Utusan Malaysia daily stated in an editorial that Malaysians "cannot allow anyone, especially the Jews, to interfere secretly in this country's business... When the drums are pounded hard in the name of human rights, the pro-Jewish people will have their best opportunity to interfere in any Islamic country," the newspaper said. "We might not realize that the enthusiasm to support actions such as demonstrations will cause us to help foreign groups succeed in their mission of controlling this country." Prime Minister Najib Razak's office subsequently issued a statement late Monday saying Utusan's claim did "not reflect the views of the government."

Palestine

Haj Amin al-Husseini is a central figure of Palestinian nationalism in Mandatory Palestine. He took refuge and collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II. He met Adolf Hitler in December 1941. Scholarly opinion is divided on the Mufti's antisemitsm, with many scholars viewing him as a staunch antisemite while some deny the appropriateness of the term, or argue that he became antisemitic.

 

In March 2011, the Israeli government issued a paper claiming that "Anti-Israel and anti-Semitic messages are heard regularly in the government and private media and in the mosques and are taught in school books," to the extent that they are "an integral part of the fabric of life inside the PA." In August 2012, Israeli Strategic Affairs Ministry director-general Yossi Kuperwasser stated that Palestinian incitement to antisemitism is "going on all the time" and that it is "worrying and disturbing." At an institutional level, he said the PA has been promoting three key messages to the Palestinian people that constitute incitement: "that the Palestinians would eventually be the sole sovereign on all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea; that Jews, especially those who live in Israel, were not really human beings but rather 'the scum of mankind'; and that all tools were legitimate in the struggle against Israel and the Jews." In August 2014, the Hamas' spokesman in Doha said on live television that Jews use blood to make matzos.

Pakistan

The U.S. State Department's first Report on Global Anti-Semitism mentioned a strong feeling of antisemitism in Pakistan. In Pakistan, a country without Jewish communities, antisemitic sentiment fanned by antisemitic articles in the press is widespread.

In Pakistan, Jews are often regarded as miserly. After Israel's independence in 1948, violent incidents occurred against Pakistan's small Jewish community of about 2,000 Bene Israel Jews. The Magain Shalome Synagogue in Karachi was attacked, as were individual Jews. The persecution of Jews resulted in their exodus via India to Israel, the UK, Canada and other countries. The Peshawar Jewish community ceased to exist although a small community reportedly still exists in Karachi. 

A substantial number of people in Pakistan believe that the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York were a secret Jewish conspiracy organized by Israel's MOSSAD, as were the 7 July 2005 London bombings, allegedly perpetrated by Jews in order to discredit Muslims. Pakistani political commentator Zaid Hamid claimed that Indian Jews perpetrated the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Such allegations echo traditional antisemitic theories. The Jewish religious movement of Chabad Lubavich had a mission house in Mumbai, India that was attacked in the 2008 Mumbai attacks, perpetrated by militants connected to Pakistan led by Ajmal Kasab, a Pakistani national. Antisemitic intents were evident from the testimonies of Kasab following his arrest and trial.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi textbooks vilify Jews, call Jews apes; demand that students avoid and not befriend Jews; claim that Jews worship the devil; and encourage Muslims to engage in Jihad to vanquish Jews. Saudi Arabian government officials and state religious leaders often promote the idea that Jews are conspiring to take over the entire world; as proof of their claims they publish and frequently cite The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as factual.

In 2004, the official Saudi Arabia tourism website said that Jews and holders of Israeli passports would not be issued visas to enter the country. After an uproar, the restriction against Jews was removed from the website although the ban against Israeli passport-holders remained. In late 2014, a Saudi newspaper reported that foreign workers of most religions, including Judaism, were welcome in the kingdom, but Israeli citizens were not.

Turkey

In 2003, the Neve Shalom Synagogue was targeted in a car bombing, killing 21 Turkish Muslims and 6 Jews.

In June 2011, the Economist suggested that "The best way for Turks to promote democracy would be to vote against the ruling party". Not long after, the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said that "The International media, as they are supported by Israel, would not be happy with the continuation of the AKP government". The Hurriyet Daily News quoted Erdoğan at the time as claiming "The Economist is part of an Israeli conspiracy that aims to topple the Turkish government". Moreover, during Erdogan's tenure, Hitler's Mein Kampf has once again become a best selling book in Turkey. Prime Minister Erdogan called antisemitism a "crime against humanity." He also said that "as a minority, they're our citizens. Both their security and the right to observe their faith are under our guarantee."

Europe

Antisemitic graffiti equating Judaism with Nazism and money, found in Madrid.

According to a 2004 report from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, antisemitism had increased significantly in Europe since 2000, with significant increases in verbal attacks against Jews and vandalism such as graffiti, fire bombings of Jewish schools, desecration of synagogues and cemeteries. Germany, France, Britain, and Russia are the countries with the highest rate of antisemitic incidents in Europe. The Netherlands and Sweden have also consistently had high rates of antisemitic attacks since 2000.

Some claim that recent European antisemitic violence can actually be seen as a spillover from the long running Arab-Israeli conflict since the majority of the perpetrators are from the large Muslim immigrant communities in European cities. However, compared to France, the United Kingdom and much of the rest of Europe, in Germany Arab and pro-Palestinian groups are involved in only a small percentage of antisemitic incidents. According to The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, most of the more extreme attacks on Jewish sites and physical attacks on Jews in Europe come from militant Islamic and Muslim groups, and most Jews tend to be assaulted in countries where groups of young Muslim immigrants reside.

On 1 January 2006, Britain's chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, warned that what he called a "tsunami of antisemitism" was spreading globally. In an interview with BBC Radio 4, Sacks said: "A number of my rabbinical colleagues throughout Europe have been assaulted and attacked on the streets. We've had synagogues desecrated. We've had Jewish schools burnt to the ground—not here but in France. People are attempting to silence and even ban Jewish societies on campuses on the grounds that Jews must support the state of Israel, therefore they should be banned, which is quite extraordinary because... British Jews see themselves as British citizens. So it's that kind of feeling that you don't know what's going to happen next that's making... some European Jewish communities uncomfortable."

Following an escalation in antisemitism in 2012, which included the deadly shooting of three children at a Jewish school in France, the European Jewish Congress demanded in July a more proactive response. EJC President Moshe Kantor explained, "We call on authorities to take a more proactive approach so there would be no reason for statements of regret and denunciation. All these smaller attacks remind me of smaller tremors before a massive earthquake. The Jewish community cannot afford to be subject to an earthquake and the authorities cannot say that the writing was not on the wall." He added that European countries should take legislative efforts to ban any form of incitement, as well as to equip the authorities with the necessary tools to confront any attempt to expand terrorist and violent activities against Jewish communities in Europe.

France

France is home to the continent's largest Jewish community (about 600,000). Jewish leaders decry an intensifying antisemitism in France, mainly among Muslims of Arab or African heritage, but also growing among Caribbean islanders from former French colonies. Former Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy denounced the killing of Ilan Halimi on 13 February 2006 as an antisemitic crime. 

Jewish philanthropist Baron Eric de Rothschild suggests that the extent of antisemitism in France has been exaggerated. In an interview with The Jerusalem Post he says that "the one thing you can't say is that France is an anti-Semitic country."

Mourning flags of the European Union, France and Midi-Pyrénées on the Capitole de Toulouse after the antisemitic attacks.

 

In March 2012, Mohammed Merah opened fire at a Jewish school in Toulouse, killing a teacher and three children. An 8-year-old girl was shot in the head at point blank range. President Nicolas Sarkozy said that it was "obvious" it was an antisemitic attack and that, "I want to say to all the leaders of the Jewish community, how close we feel to them. All of France is by their side." The Israeli Prime Minister condemned the "despicable anti-Semitic" murders. After a 32-hour siege and standoff with the police outside his house, and a French raid, Merah jumped off a balcony and was shot in the head and killed. Merah told police during the standoff that he intended to keep on attacking, and he loved death the way the police loved life. He also claimed connections with al-Qaeda.

4 months later, in July 2012, a French Jewish teenager wearing a "distinctive religious symbol" was the victim of a violent antisemitic attack on a train travelling between Toulouse and Lyon. The teen was first verbally harassed and later beaten up by two assailants. Richard Prasquier from the French Jewish umbrella group, CRIF, called the attack "another development in the worrying trend of anti-Semitism in our country."

Another incident in July 2012 dealt with the vandalism of the synagogue of Noisy-le-Grand of the Seine-Saint-Denis district in Paris. The synagogue was vandalized three times in a ten-day period. Prayer books and shawls were thrown on the floor, windows were shattered, drawers were ransacked, and walls, tables, clocks, and floors were vandalized. The authorities were alerted of the incidents by the Bureau National de Vigilance Contre L'Antisémtisme (BNVCA), a French antisemitism watchdog group, which called for more measures to be taken to prevent future hate crimes. BNVCA President Sammy Ghozlan stated that, "Despite the measures taken, things persist, and I think that we need additional legislation, because the Jewish community is annoyed."

In August 2012, Abraham Cooper, the dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, met French Interior Minister Manuel Valls and reported that antisemitic attacks against French Jews increased by 40% since Merah's shooting spree in Toulouse. Cooper pressed Valls to take extra measures to secure the safety of French Jews, as well as to discuss strategies to foil an increasing trend of lone-wolf terrorists on the Internet.

Germany

Wolfgang Schäuble, the Interior Minister of Germany in 2006, pointed out the official policy of Germany: "We will not tolerate any form of extremism, xenophobia or anti-Semitism." Although the number of extreme right-wing groups and organisations grew from 141 (2001) to 182 (2006), especially in the formerly communist East Germany, Germany's measures against right-wing groups and antisemitism are effective, despite Germany having the highest rates of antisemitic acts in Europe. According to the annual reports of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution the overall number of far-right extremists in Germany dropped during the last years from 49,700 (2001), 45,000 (2002), 41,500 (2003), 40,700 (2004), 39,000 (2005), to 38,600 in 2006. Germany provided several million euros to fund "nationwide programs aimed at fighting far-right extremism, including teams of traveling consultants, and victims' groups."

In July 2012, two women were assaulted in Germany, sprayed with tear gas, and were shown a "Hitler salute," apparently because of a Star of David necklace that they wore.

In late August 2012, Berlin police investigated an attack on a 53-year-old rabbi and his 6-year-old daughter, allegedly by four Arab teens, after which the rabbi needed treatment for head wounds at a hospital. The police classified the attack as a hate crime. Jüdische Allgemeine reported that the rabbi was wearing a kippah and was approached by one of the teens, who asked the rabbi if he was Jewish. The teen then attacked the rabbi while yelling antisemitic comments, and threatened to kill the rabbi's daughter. Berlin's mayor condemned the attack, saying that "Berlin is an international city in which intolerance, xenophobia and anti-Semitism are not being tolerated. Police will undertake all efforts to find and arrest the perpetrators."

In October 2012, various historians, including Dr. Julius H. Schoeps, a prominent German-Jewish historian and a member of the German Interior Ministry's commission to combat antisemitism, charged the majority of Bundestag deputies with failing to understand antisemitism and the imperativeness of periodic legislative reports on German antisemitism. Schoeps cited various antisemitic statements by German parliament members as well. The report in question determined that 15% of Germans are antisemitic while over 20% espouse "latent anti-Semitism," but the report has been criticized for downplaying the sharpness of antisemitism in Germany, as well as for failing to examine anti-Israel media coverage in Germany.

Greece

Antisemitism in Greece manifests itself in religious, political and media discourse. The recent Greek government-debt crisis has facilitated the rise of far right groups in Greece, most notably the formerly obscure Golden Dawn. Jews have lived in Greece since antiquity, but the largest community of around 20,000 Sephardic Jews settled in Thessalonica after an invitation from the Ottoman Sultan in the 15th century. After Thessalonica was annexed to Greece in 1913, the Greek government recognized Jews as Greek citizens with full rights and attributed Judaism the status of a recognized and protected religion. Currently in Greece, Jewish communities representing the 5,000 Greek Jews are legal entities under public law. According to the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) report of 2015, the "ADL Global 100", a report of the status of antisemitism in 100 countries around the world, 69% of the adult population in Greece harbor antisemitic attitudes and 85% think that "Jews have too much power in the business world". In March 2015, a survey about the Greeks' perceptions of the holocaust was published. Its findings showed that less than 60 percent of the respondents think that holocaust teaching should be included in the curriculum.

Hungary

Members of the New Hungarian Guard stand at a Jobbik rally against a gathering of the World Jewish Congress in Budapest, 4 May 2013

 

In the 21st century, antisemitism in Hungary has evolved and received an institutional framework, while verbal and physical aggression against Jews has escalated, creating a great difference between its earlier manifestations in the 1990s and recent developments. One of the major representatives of this institutionalized antisemitic ideology is the popular Hungarian party Jobbik, which received 17 percent of the vote in the April 2010 national election. The far-right subculture, which ranges from nationalist shops to radical-nationalist and neo-Nazi festivals and events, plays a major role in the institutionalization of Hungarian antisemitism in the 21st century. The contemporary antisemitic rhetoric has been updated and expanded, but is still based on the old antisemitic notions. The traditional accusations and motifs include such phrases as Jewish occupation, international Jewish conspiracy, Jewish responsibility for the Treaty of Trianon, Judeo-Bolshevism, as well as blood libels against Jews. Nevertheless, the past few years have seen the reemergence of the blood libel and an increase in Holocaust relativization and denial, while the monetary crisis has revived references to the "Jewish banker class".

Italy

The ongoing political conflict between Israel and Palestine has played an important role in the development and expression of antisemitism in the 21st century, and in Italy as well. The Second Intifada, which began in late September 2000, has set in motion unexpected mechanisms, whereby traditional anti-Jewish prejudices were mixed with politically based stereotypes. In this belief system, Israeli Jews were charged with full responsibility for the fate of the peace process and with the conflict presented as embodying the struggle between good (the Palestinians) and evil (the Israeli Jews).

Netherlands

The Netherlands has the second highest incidence of antisemitic incidents in the European Union. However, it is difficult to obtain exact figures because the specific groups against whom attacks are made are not specifically identified in police reports, and analyses of police data for antisemitism therefore relies on key-word searches, e.g. "Jew" or "Israel". According to Centre for Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI), a pro-Israel lobby group in the Netherlands, the number of antisemitic incidents reported in the whole of the Netherlands was 108 in 2008, 93 in 2009, and 124 in 2010. Some two thirds of this are acts of aggression. There are approximately 52 000 Dutch Jews. According to the NRC Handelsblad newspaper, the number of antisemitic incidents in Amsterdam was 14 in 2008 and 30 in 2009. In 2010, Raphaël Evers, an orthodox rabbi in Amsterdam, told the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten that Jews can no longer be safe in the city anymore due to the risk of violent assaults. "We Jews no longer feel at home here in the Netherlands. Many people talk about moving to Israel," he said.

According to the Anne Frank Foundation, antisemitism in the Netherlands in 2011 was roughly at the same level as in 2010. Actual antisemitic incidents increased from 19 in 2010 to 30 in 2011. Verbal antisemitic incidents dropped slightly from 1173 in 2010 to 1098 in 2011. This accounts for 75%–80% of all verbal racist incidents in the Netherlands. Antisemitism is more prevalent in the age group 23–27 years, which is a younger group than that of racist incidents in general.

Norway

In 2010, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation after one year of research, revealed that antisemitism was common among some 8th, 9th, and 10th graders in Oslo's schools. Teachers at schools with large numbers of Muslims revealed that Muslim students often "praise or admire Adolf Hitler for his killing of Jews", that "Jew-hate is legitimate within vast groups of Muslim students" and that "Muslims laugh or command [teachers] to stop when trying to educate about the Holocaust". Additionally, "while some students might protest when some express support for terrorism, none object when students express hate of Jews", saying that it says in "the Quran that you shall kill Jews, all true Muslims hate Jews". Most of these students were said to be born and raised in Norway. One Jewish father also stated that his child had been taken by a Muslim mob after school (though the child managed to escape), reportedly "to be taken out to the forest and hung because he was a Jew".

Norwegian Education Minister Kristin Halvorsen referred to the antisemitism reported in this study as being "completely unacceptable." The head of a local Islamic council joined Jewish leaders and Halvorsen in denouncing such antisemitism.

In October 2012, the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe issued a report regarding antisemitism in Norway, criticizing Norway for an increase in antisemitism in the country and blaming Norwegian officials for failing to address antisemitism."

Poland

The University of Warsaw's study in 2016 found that 37% of surveyed Poles expressed negative attitudes towards Jews (up from 32% in 2015); 56% said that they wouldn't accept a Jew in their family (up from 46%); and 32% wouldn't want Jewish neighbors (up from 27%).

In November 2015, following Antoni Macierewicz's (Law and Justice party) designation as Minister of National Defence, he faced allegations of antisemitism and protests by the Anti Defamation League.

In February 2018, the Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki stated that "there were Jewish perpetrators" of the Holocaust, "not only German perpetrators." Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, condemned Morawiecki's words: "This is nothing short of an attempt to falsify history, that is one of the very worst forms of anti-Semitism and Holocaust obfuscation." Israeli politician Yair Lapid, head of the centrist Yesh Atid party, said Morawiecki's remark is "anti-Semitism of the oldest kind."

Russia

Since the early 2000s, levels of antisemitism in Russia have been low, and steadily decreasing. President of the Russian Jewish Congress attributes this in part to the vanished state sponsorship of antisemitism. At the same time experts warn that worsening economic conditions may lead to the surge of xenophobia and antisemitism in particular.

Still, since the mid-2000s incorporation of antisemitic discourse into the platforms and speeches of nationalist political movements in Russia has been reported by human rights monitors in Russia as well as in the press. A number of prominent modern Russian politicians are known for their antisemitic views.

Sweden

After Germany and Austria, Sweden has the highest rate of antisemitic incidents in Europe, though the Netherlands has reported a higher rate of antisemitism in some years. A government study in 2006 estimated that 15% of Swedes agree with the statement: "The Jews have too much influence in the world today". 5% of the total adult population and 39% of adult Muslims "harbour systematic antisemitic views". The former prime minister Göran Persson described these results as "surprising and terrifying". However, the rabbi of Stockholm's Orthodox Jewish community, Meir Horden, said that "It's not true to say that the Swedes are anti-Semitic. Some of them are hostile to Israel because they support the weak side, which they perceive the Palestinians to be."

In 2009, a synagogue that served the Jewish community in Malmö was set ablaze. Jewish cemeteries were repeatedly desecrated, worshippers were abused while returning home from prayer, and masked men mockingly chanted "Hitler" in the streets. As a result of security concerns, Malmö's synagogue has guards and rocket-proof glass in the windows, and the Jewish kindergarten can only be reached through thick steel security doors.

In early 2010, the Swedish publication The Local published series of articles about the growing antisemitism in Malmö, Sweden. In 2009, the Malmö police received reports of 79 antisemitic incidents, which was twice the number of the previous year (2008). Fredrik Sieradzki, spokesman for the Malmö Jewish community, estimated that the already small Jewish population is shrinking by 5% a year. "Malmö is a place to move away from," he said, citing antisemitism as the primary reason. In March 2010, Fredrik Sieradzk told Die Presse, an Austrian Internet publication, that Jews are being "harassed and physically attacked" by "people from the Middle East," although he added that only a small number of Malmö's 40,000 Muslims "exhibit hatred of Jews." In October 2010, The Forward reported on the current state of Jews and the level of antisemitism in Sweden. Henrik Bachner, a writer and professor of history at the University of Lund, claimed that members of the Swedish Parliament have attended anti-Israel rallies where the Israeli flag was burned while the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah were waved, and the rhetoric was often antisemitic—not just anti-Israel. Judith Popinski, an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor, stated that she is no longer invited to schools that have a large Muslim presence to tell her story of surviving the Holocaust. In December 2010, the Jewish human rights organization Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a travel advisory concerning Sweden, advising Jews to express "extreme caution" when visiting the southern parts of the country due to an alleged increase in verbal and physical harassment of Jewish citizens in the city of Malmö. Ilmar Reepalu, the mayor of Malmö for over 15 years, has been accused of failing to protect the Jewish community in Malmö, causing 30 Jewish families to leave the city in 2010, and more preparing to leave, which has left the possibility that Malmö's Jewish community will disappear soon. Critics of Reepalu say that his statements, such as antisemitism in Malmö actually being an "understandable" consequence of Israeli policy in the Middle East, have encouraged young Muslims to abuse and harass the Jewish community. In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph in February 2010, Reepalu said, "There haven't been any attacks on Jewish people, and if Jews from the city want to move to Israel that is not a matter for Malmö," which renewed concerns about Reepalu.

Ukraine

Antisemithic graffiti in Lviv; Yids will not reside in Lviv, 2007

 

Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of the far-right Svoboda party, whose members hold senior positions in Ukraine's government, urged his party to fight "the Moscow-Jewish mafia ruling Ukraine." The Algemeiner Journal reported: "Svoboda supporters include among their heroes leaders of pro-Nazi World War II organizations known for their atrocities against Jews and Poles, such as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), and the 14th Waffen-SS Galicia Division."

According to The Simon Wiesenthal Center (in January 2011) "Ukraine has, to the best of our knowledge, never conducted a single investigation of a local Nazi war criminal, let alone prosecuted a Holocaust perpetrator."

According to Der Spiegel, Dmytro Yarosh, leader of the far-right Right Sector, wrote: "I wonder how it came to pass that most of the billionaires in Ukraine are Jews?" Late February 2014 Yarosh pledged during a meeting with Israel's ambassador in Kiev to fight all forms of racism. Right Sector's leader for West Ukraine, Oleksandr Muzychko, has talked about fighting "communists, Jews and Russians for as long as blood flows in my veins." Muzychko was shot dead on 24 March 2014. An official inquiry concluded he had shot himself in the heart at the end of a chase with the Ukrainian police.

In April 2014, Donetsk Chief Rabbi Pinchas Vishedski said that "Anti-Semitic incidents in the Russian-speaking east were rare, unlike in Kiev and western Ukraine." In an April 2014 article about anti-Jewish violence in Ukraine in Haaretz no incidents outside this "Russian-speaking east" were mentioned.

According to the Israel's Ambassador to Ukraine, the antisemitism occurs here much less frequently than in other European countries, and has more a hooligan's nature rather than a system.

United Kingdom

In 2017 an Institute for Jewish Policy Research survey found that the levels of antisemitism in Great Britain were among the lowest in the world, with 2.4% expressing multiple antisemitic attitudes, and about 70% having a favourable opinion of Jews. However, only 17% had a favourable opinion of Israel, with 33% holding an unfavourable view.

In 2017, a report by the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) found that the previous year, 2016, had been the worst on record for antisemitic hate crime in the UK. Prior to that, 2015 had been the worst year on record, and 2014 was the worst year on record before that. The report found that in 2016, antisemitic crime rose by 15% compared to 2015, or 45% compared to 2014. It also found that 1 in 10 antisemitic crimes was violent. Despite rising levels of antisemitic crime, the report said there had been a decrease in the charging of antisemitic crime. In the report's foreword, the CAA's Chairman wrote: "Britain has the political will to fight antisemitism and strong laws with which to do it, but those responsible for tackling the rapidly growing racist targeting of British Jews are failing to enforce the law. There is a very real danger of Jewish citizens emigrating, as has happened elsewhere in Europe unless there is radical change."

Every year since 2015, the CAA has commissioned polling by YouGov concerning the attitude of the British public toward British Jews. In 2017, their polling found that 36% of British adults believed at least one of the antisemitic statements pollsters had shown them to be true, a reduction from 39% in 2016 and 45% in 2015. Additionally, the polling revealed widespread fear amongst British Jews, with almost 1 in 3 saying that they had considered emigrating in the last two years due to antisemitism, and 37% saying that they concealed their Judaism in public. The report gave various indications as to the cause of the fears, with British Jews identifying Islamist antisemitism, far-left antisemitism and far-right antisemitism as their main concerns, in that order. 78% of British Jews saying that they had witnessed antisemitism disguised as a political comment about Israel, 76% thoughts that political developments were contributing antisemitism, and 52% felt that the Crown Prosecution Service was not doing enough.

In 2005, a group of British Members of Parliament set up an inquiry into antisemitism, which published its findings in 2006. Its report stated that "until recently, the prevailing opinion both within the Jewish community and beyond [had been] that antisemitism had receded to the point that it existed only on the margins of society." It found a reversal of this progress since 2000. The inquiry was reconstituted following a surge in antisemitic incidents in Britain during the summer of 2014, and the new inquiry published its report in 2015, making recommendations for reducing antisemitism.

In 2016, the Home Affairs Select Committee held an inquiry into the rise of antisemitism in the UK. The inquiry called David Cameron, Tim Farron, Angus Robertson, Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone and others to give evidence.

North America

Canada

Although antisemitism in Canada is less prevalent than in many other countries, there have been recent incidents. For example, a 2004 study identified 24 incidents of antisemitism between 14 March and 14 July 2004 in Newfoundland, Montreal, Quebec City, Ottawa, the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), and some smaller Ontario communities. The incidents included vandalism and other attacks on four synagogues, six cemeteries, four schools, and a number of businesses and private residences.

United States

In November 2005, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights examined antisemitism on college campuses. It reported that "incidents of threatened bodily injury, physical intimidation or property damage are now rare", but antisemitism still occurs on many campuses and is a "serious problem." The Commission recommended that the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights protect college students from antisemitism through vigorous enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and further recommended that Congress clarify that Title VI applies to discrimination against Jewish students.

On 19 September 2006, Yale University founded the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism (YIISA), the first North American university-based center for study of the subject, as part of its Institution for Social and Policy Studies. Director Charles Small of the Center cited the increase in antisemitism worldwide in recent years as generating a "need to understand the current manifestation of this disease". In June 2011, Yale voted to close this initiative. After carrying out a routine review, the faculty review committee said that the initiative had not met its research and teaching standards. Donald Green, then head of Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies, the body under whose aegis the antisemitism initiative was run, said that it had not had many papers published in the relevant leading journals or attracted many students. As with other programs that had been in a similar situation, the initiative had therefore been cancelled. This decision has been criticized by figures such as former U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Staff Director Kenneth L. Marcus, who is now the director of the Initiative to Combat Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israelism in America's Educational Systems at the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, and Deborah Lipstadt, who described the decision as "weird" and "strange." Antony Lerman has supported Yale's decision, describing the YIISA as a politicized initiative that was devoted to the promotion of Israel rather than to serious research on antisemitism.

A 2007 survey by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) concluded that 15% of Americans hold antisemitic views, which was in-line with the average of the previous ten years, but a decline from the 29% of the early sixties. The survey concluded that education was a strong predictor, "with most educated Americans being remarkably free of prejudicial views." The belief that Jews have too much power was considered a common antisemitic view by the ADL. Other views indicating antisemitism, according to the survey, include the view that Jews are more loyal to Israel than America, and that they are responsible for the death of Jesus of Nazareth. The survey found that antisemitic Americans are likely to be intolerant generally, e.g. regarding immigration and free-speech. The 2007 survey also found that 29% of foreign-born Hispanics and 32% of African-Americans hold strong antisemitic beliefs, three times more than the 10% for whites.

A 2009 study published in Boston Review found that nearly 25% of non-Jewish Americans blamed Jews for the financial crisis of 2008–2009, with a higher percentage among Democrats than Republicans. 32% of Democrats blamed Jews for the financial crisis, versus 18% for Republicans.

In August 2012, the California state assembly approved a non-binding resolution that "encourages university leaders to combat a wide array of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel actions," although the resolution "is purely symbolic and does not carry policy implications."

In April 2017, Politico Magazine published an article purporting to show links between U.S. President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Jewish outreach organization Chabad-Lubavitch. The article was widely condemned, with the head of the Anti-Defamation League Jonathan Greenblatt saying that it "evokes age-old myths about Jews".

In November 2017, Jonathan Greenblatt, national director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, stated in an interview, "While anti-Semitic attitudes have remained consistent at 14%... anti-Semitic incidents have been on the rise. In 2016 we saw a 34% increase over the prior year in acts of harassment, vandalism, or violence directed at Jewish individuals and institutions. During the first three quarters of 2017, there was a 67% increase over the same period in 2016. We've seen double the number of incidents in K-12 schools, and almost a 60% increase on college campuses."

On October 29, 2018, an antisemitic terrorist attacked the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

South America

Venezuela

Antisemitic graffiti in Venezuela, alongside a hammer and sickle

In a 2009 news story, Michael Rowan and Douglas E. Schoen wrote, "In an infamous Christmas Eve speech several years ago, Chávez said the Jews killed Christ and have been gobbling up wealth and causing poverty and injustice worldwide ever since." Hugo Chávez stated that "[t]he world is for all of us, then, but it so happens that a minority, the descendants of the same ones that crucified Christ, the descendants of the same ones that kicked Bolívar out of here and also crucified him in their own way over there in Santa Marta, in Colombia. A minority has taken possession of all of the wealth of the world."

In February 2012, opposition candidate for the 2012 Venezuelan presidential election Henrique Capriles was subject to what foreign journalists characterized as vicious attacks by state-run media sources. The Wall Street Journal said that Capriles "was vilified in a campaign in Venezuela's state-run media, which insinuated he was, among other things, a homosexual and a Zionist agent". A 13 February 2012 opinion article in the state-owned Radio Nacional de Venezuela, titled "The Enemy is Zionism" attacked Capriles' Jewish ancestry and linked him with Jewish national groups because of a meeting he had held with local Jewish leaders, saying, "This is our enemy, the Zionism that Capriles today represents... Zionism, along with capitalism, are responsible for 90% of world poverty and imperialist wars."