Anti-Semitism

The heyday of anti-Semitism, its ultimate climax, came with the rise of Nazism. Adolf Hitler and those who followed him were certain that they were engaged in a great and unavoidable task, the defense of European civilization against all forms of subversion by the Jews. Hitler's ultimate vision of the world was that it was poised on the verge of an ultimate war in which the Jews had to be destroyed. There was no longer any pretense that some Jews might be redeemable: this was now a war to the death. The results are well known. The overwhelming majority of the Jewish population of Europe, to the number of six million men, women, and children, were systematically murdered. The rest were saved only because Hitler and his allies lost the war. Nonetheless, the Nazis did not entirely lose their fierce war with the Jews.

The assault in the 1940s destroyed the most creative elements of the world Jewish community in the middle of the twentieth century. It changed the face of Europe, which was no longer a main center of Jewish life and creativity. More subtly, the emphasis within Jewish life has for the last half century been more on fighting off the attempt to destroy the Jews than it has centered on recreating the religious and cultural values that were destroyed. In the early twenty-first century those concerns were only beginning to be at the center of Jewish endeavors. Thus, Hitler's greatest success was to make of the Jews a people much more frightened for its future than it had been in the previous century.

After the victory in 1945 in World War II, Jews—and people of good will everywhere—thought that anti-Semitism would fade away. But anti-Semitism has not disappeared and in some parts of the world it is even more powerful than ever before. Society as a whole has not yet accepted the idea that those who will not play by its conventional rules are nonetheless entitled to a life of freedom and dignity. The question that was posed more than three thousand years ago, whether the Jews had a right to survive in a society that did not agree with the premises on which much of Jewish religion and culture is based, is still very much open. Will the societies that remember their pasts as Christians and Muslims make room for Jews? We cannot yet be sure.