Antisemitisim - A Very Short Introduction

Antisemitism is a hatred of Jews that has stretched across
millennia and across continents; or it is a relatively modern
political movement and ideology that arose in Central Europe in
the late 19th century and achieved its evil apogee in the Holocaust;
or it is the irrational, psychologically pathological version of an
ethnocentric and religiocentric anti-Judaism that originated in
Christianity’s conflict with its Jewish roots – and achieved its evil
apogee in the Holocaust; or it is a combination of all of these. It all
depends on how one defines the term. This book will focus on the
political movement and ideology: how it came about, how its
ideological claims became integrated into European andWestern
political, but also social, intellectual, and cultural, life, and how
the particular Central European context enabled it to lead into the
Holocaust.

Acknowledgements xi
List of illustrations xiii
1 What is antisemitism? 1
2 The burden of the past 11
3 The Chosen People 23
4 The culture of irrationalism 40
5 The perils of modernity 55
6 Concatenations 72
7 Consequences 86
8 After Auschwitz 98
References and further reading 120
Index 126