were tolerated until Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor, fueled anti-Jewish prejudice.
Christianity began its existence as a sect of Judaism rather than a separate religion. For Christians, Jesus was the Messiah, or son of God. For Jews, Jesus was a mortal man. This difference was reflected in the New Testament written in the first century A.D., a treatise interpreted as being a rejection of Judaism’s beliefs. By the second century, many Christians turned against Judaism even though it was Christianity’s parent religion. Early Christian thinkers accused Jews of being responsible for turning Jesus Christ, one of their own, over to Pontius Pilot and supported his crucifixion. This ‘God Murder’ is said to have condemned the Jews to wander the earth forever. In addition, Christians objected to the declaration made in the Torah as well as in rabbinical scripture that “Jews are a holy people whom God has chosen to be his treasured people from all the nations that are on the face of the earth.” This statement, understood to be blasphemous and arrogant, suggested that Jews considered themselves superior to those not Jewish. By the middle ages, persecution and harassment became the plight of Jews causing most of them to withdraw within themselves and avoid non-Jews. This only maximized their self-isolation interpreted by many to mean that Jews felt themselves superior to Christians.
Martin Luther tried to convert the Jews, but when they did not profess interest in his entreaties, he is quoted as saying, “Let the magistrates burn their synagogues and let whatever escapes be covered with sand and mud. Let them be forced to work, and if this avails nothing we will be compelled to expel them like dogs.”
In distant pre-scientific times, disastrous and unexpected events were considered to be the result of divine intervention, witchcraft, superstition, black magic, or Jews. Without scientific explanation available, Jews were often considered the cause of these unusual events and natural disasters, so they suffered the consequences including death in many instances. This fate alleviated as time brought scientific advances to the world, but enough anti-Semitism prevailed to curse Jews even to this day.
Long before Adolph Hitler and the Nazis arrived on the scene, anti-Jewish thinking was rampant not just in Germany but in most of Europe’s population. There was one branch of Judaism at that time, the orthodox, very separate and distinct from Christianity with entirely foreign religious dress and practices. Jews were an “ancient people” with a reverence for learning stretching back to even before the ancient Greek and Roman republics, and when they entered into Europe during the middle ages, the contrast between them and the Europeans was stark in all religious and cultural aspects.
Jews principally abided by the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) consisting of five books of Moses given to them by God on Mount Sinai. The Hebrew bible, also known as the Torah, is in the form of a scroll made from kosher animal parchment. Ancient tradition tells Jews that the Torah existed in Heaven before the world was created, but others have different interpretations making for fine philosophical arguments during Saturday morning Torah sessions with the rabbi and his parishioners. I say his, because female rabbis represent a modern day advance; there were none in ancient times.
Prior to and in the early 1800’s the orthodox Jews kept to themselves. Since Jews were viewed as foreigners by non-Jewish citizens, tensions prevailed. This made for a volatile mixture exacerbating anti-Semitism that would culminate in violence leading eventually to the Holocaust of World War II. As I write this book in the year 2017, anti-Semitism has continued increasing throughout the world.
By the mid nineteenth century the orthodoxy of the Jewish religion began to change in Europe. A reform and conservative form of Judaism evolved and much of Germany, especially Berlin, began to assimilate Jews into the culture so that the period around the late 1800’s and early nineteen hundreds began to be considered a “golden era” for German Jews. In 1900 there were approximately 587,000 Jews in Germany representing 1.04 percent of the German population.
Before the 1800’s, autocratic German leaders including the Prussian King subjected Jews to discriminatory laws such as excess taxes and limits on family size. Jews were prevented from holding political office and were restricted from certain professions. Other leaders, including Napoleon Bonaparte, completely emancipated Jews. As the world moved into a period of rapid industrialization during the 1800’s, conditions for Jews improved giving them more opportunity to make an impact in the major professions. Anti-Semitism did not die however, and as German unification expanded from its various nation states, and Theodor Herzl founded Zionism calling for the establishment of a Zionist State in Palestine, these dual effects strengthened long-lasting conspiracy theories involving a Jewish plot to control the world. The future would see this theory persist, become amplified and lead to disaster for Europe’s Jews.
Underpinning this development was the fact that Germany in the mid 1800’s was not a single nation, but was a patchwork of many kingdoms; a concept opposed by German nationalists who wanted one unified nation to compete on Europe’s stage with the likes of Russia, Great Britain, and France. Who better to blame for the nationalist’s failure to implement their goal than the Jews who were also trying to unify.
This Jewish unification was viewed by non-Jews as a world-wide Jewish conspiracy theory and it evolved not only in Germany, but also in France where anti-Jewish hatred mushroomed from all sides of the French political spectrum: religious Christian groups condemned Jews on religious grounds while Socialists condemned Jews for having a major impact on business and finance.
An example of the intensity of French anti-Semitism is the Dreyfus affair in 1894: a Jewish French military officer was accused falsely of bringing French military secrets to the Germans. After Dreyfus languished two years in prison on Devil’s Island, Emil Zola, a famous French writer, exposed the false charges and Dreyfus was released and returned to military service.
The worst anti-Semitism of the time, however, evolved in Russia. The Russian and Eastern European Jewish population of five million was the largest in Europe. Under Czar Alexander II, the Jews experienced freedoms that allowed many of them a comfortable middle-class life. Alexander’s reward for this compassionate accomplishment was his assassination. The new Czar, Alexander III, levied many restrictions on Jews; pogroms swept the country killing Jews in ever increasing numbers and resulted in a Jewish exodus. This was the time when my infant mother and four-year-old father and their parents fled to the United States.
The next Czar, Nicholas II, a rabid anti-Semite, enhanced Jewish restrictions in Russia. Nicholas and his entire family were eventually murdered by Socialist (Communist) revolutionaries in 1918. Following this Communist takeover, Russia and surrounding countries would become known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a collection of nations controlled by Russia. For the purpose of this book, I will use the word Russia when referring to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Nicholas’ secret police (Ochrana) developed their famous forgery, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, documenting the so-called ‘Jewish Conspiracy to rule the world,’ which Adolph Hitler would amplify years later. The Protocols have as their ancient origin the anti-Semitism engendered by the falsehood that Jews, by poisoning the wells, caused the plagues that decimated Western Europe in medieval times. Millions died, including Jews, many of whom were burned alive in their homes by the angry non-Jewish population. This was not the only libelous anti-Jewish assertion in the distant past. Word spread that Jews used the blood of Christian children to make their leavened bread (matzos) for the Passover Jewish holiday celebrating liberation from ancient Egyptian enslavement. These twin assertions made life for western European Jews impossible, thus forcing them to flee to Poland where a Polish King who happened to have a Jewish girlfriend welcomed them. This exodus explains the eventual major Jewish population increase in Poland setting the stage for a future German dictator (Adolph Hitler) to zero in and attempt to finish the job, left undone by his predecessors.
In the 1890’s, anti-Semitism was primarily a French and Eastern European phenomenon. The above mentioned Dreyfus affair and the well-known pogroms in Poland and Russia that prompted
