The word ‘Jew’ (plural ‘Jews’) refers to an adherent of Judaism and serves as both a religious and secular endonym. It goes back to the Hebrew word ‘Yehudi’, denoting the inhabitants of the historical territory of Judea on the east coast of the Mediterranean. Another word for Jews that is still sometimes used today, which emerged in Napoleonic France at the beginning of the 19th century, is ‘Israelites’. According to halacha, Jewish law, anyone who has a Jewish mother belongs to Judaism. Another way of saying this is that the affiliation is passed on ‘matrilineally’. It is also possible to convert to Judaism.
Historically, the endonym ‘Jew’ has repeatedly been used by antisemites in a negative, disparaging sense. A prominent example of this defamatory use is the phrase ‘The Jews are our misfortune’, which the historian Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896) coined in his essay ‘Unsere Aussichten’ [Our Prospects] (1879), with which he triggered the Berlin antisemitism controversy in the German Empire and which later became the slogan of the inflammatory antisemitic newspaper ‘Der Stürmer’ [The Attacker], published by the National Socialists. Inherent in antisemitic ideas about ‘Jews’, as outlined below for the period between 1933 and 1945, is that they disregard the actual self-perceptions and customary practices of Jewish people.
The National Socialist Construction of ‘Jews’
The central element of National Socialist ideology was an aggressive hostility towards Jews, which went hand in hand with paranoid ideas of Jewish power and threat. As early as 1920, the party programme of the NSDAP included the antisemitic proposition that Jews were neither ‘citizens’ nor ‘nationals’ and should be subject to special legislation. At the same time, there was considerable controversy within the National Socialist movement as to who should be considered a ‘Jew’. Representatives of contagionist antisemitism assumed, for example, that ‘Aryan’ sexual partners of Jews were ‘contaminated’ and therefore could no longer produce ‘Aryan’ children even with non-Jewish partners. In contrast, there were antisemitic approaches that rested on the view of experts in ‘hereditary biology’ that the idea of ‘contamination’ was untenable, and which focused on developing a definition of ‘Jews’ that could realistically be operationalised for the purposes of state administration and control.
Jews were systematically disenfranchised and persecuted from 1933 onwards in Germany and later in the National Socialist sphere of influence in Europe. Jewishness was defined in racial terms, becoming an alien categorisation that was imposed on those affected.
The Definition of ‘Jews’ in the Wake of the Nuremberg Laws
With the ‘Nuremberg Laws’ of 15 September 1935, the ‘Reich Citizenship Law’ and the ‘Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour’, Jews were no longer considered Germans with all the rights associated with this. The ‘Reich Citizenship Law’ created two new categories: ‘Reich citizens’, i.e. ‘nationals of German or related blood’ who were ‘holders of full political rights’, and mere ‘nationals’. Jews fell into the latter category and became second-class citizens. The ‘Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour’ (also known as the ‘Blood Protection Law’) prohibited marriages and extramarital sexual relationships between Jews and non-Jews.1Jews were also no longer allowed to employ non-Jewish women under the age of 45 in their household. Jews were also banned from using the Reich flag and the swastika flag and from displaying the colour combination black, white and red.
The first executive order implementing the ‘Reich Citizenship Law’, issued on 14 November 1935, also defined in racial terms who was to be considered a ‘Jew’—and who was considered a ‘Mischling’: ‘§ 2 […] (2) A Jewish Mischling is anyone who is descended from one or two racially fully Jewish grandparents […]. § Section 5 (1) A person is Jewish if he or she is descended from at least three fully Jewish grandparents. […] (2) A person of mixed race who is a citizen and is descended from two fully Jewish grandparents is also deemed to be a Jew if a) he belonged to the Jewish religious community at the time the law was enacted or is accepted into it thereafter, b) he was married to a Jew at the time the law was enacted or marries a Jew thereafter, c) he comes from a marriage with a Jew […] which was entered into after the entry into force of the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour […], d) who is the product of extramarital intercourse with a Jew […] and who is born out of wedlock after 31 July 1936.’2“DOK. 210 – Die erste Verordnung zum Reichsbürgergesetz vom 14. November definiert den Begriff ‚Jude‘.” In Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945 (Volume 1), 521–523. The Nuremberg Laws had dramatic consequences for the Jewish population of Germany, as they laid the foundation for their complete disenfranchisement and expropriation.3See the source edition VEJ: “DOK. 213 – Reisebericht vom 29. November 1935 über die dramatische Lage der jüdischen Bevölkerung nach dem Erlass der Nürnberger Gesetze.” In Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945 (Volume 1), 527–534.
In fascist Italy, belonging to the Jewish community was defined in racial terms in November 1938, in legislation that was accompanied by a number of other antisemitic laws and decrees. During World War II, racial laws were also passed in other countries allied with Germany: In the Independent State of Croatia, a law was passed in 1941 that defined Jews with the intention of persecuting them; similarly, in Bulgaria and Slovakia in 1941, laws and ordinances determined who was considered Jewish and subject to anti-Jewish measures.
In Germany , Jews in Germany were forced to use ‘Sara’ or ‘Israel’ as their middle names on official documents from mid-August 1938. Starting on 19 September 1941, they were subject to compulsory identification from the age of 6 and had to wear a yellow star (‘Judenstern’). The Protestant literary scholar and linguist Victor Klemperer (1881–1960) was persecuted because of his Jewish origins but survived the National Socialist era in Dresden largely because he had been married to the ‘Aryan’ German Eva Schlemmer (1882–1951) since 1906. He described 19 September 1941 as the ‘most difficult day for the Jews in the twelve years of hell’4Klemperer, LTI, 204.: ‘[…] now, thanks to that mark, I was immediately recognisable to everyone , rendered at once isolated and fair game […]’5Ibid, 206.. In the German-occupied and annexed countries of Europe, markings other than a star were used. In German-occupied Poland, the General Government, Jews over the age of twelve were forced to wear a white armband with a blue Star of David from 1 December 1939.
Shoah
Around six million Jews lost their lives in the Shoah—many in ghettos, concentration camps and extermination camps and many more in mass shootings. They were murdered by starvation, disease and in round-ups, by multiple forms of violence, systematic gassing in camps, in shootings in forests, on the outskirts of cities and in cemeteries, through forced labour and pogroms, in medical experiments and during deportations. The aim of the systematic National Socialist murder policy in the German sphere of influence in Europe was the complete eradication of Judaism and the Jews. The states allied with Germany pursued their own anti-Jewish policies with varying intensity.
Antisemitic and Antigypsyist Persecution 1933–1945
The persecution and murder of Jews between 1933 and 1945 took place in parallel to the National Socialist persecution and murder of Sinti and Roma. They were racially categorised in a similar way, and crimes affecting both persecuted groups, such as mass shootings, sometimes took place at identical crime scenes and were carried out by identical perpetrators. The Nuremberg Laws also applied to Sinti and Roma, meaning that they also lost their political rights and were banned from marrying ‘Aryan’ Germans. In his study ‘Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust’, Ari Joskowicz (born 1975) pointed out the manifold connections, including spatial ones, between antisemitic and antigypsyist persecution in the period from 1933 to 1945. There are numerous testimonies of victims of antisemitic persecution in which the genocide of the Sinti and Roma is touched upon. These include, for example, the diaries of Abraham Sutzkever (1913–2010) and Adam Czerniaków (1880–1942).
Judaism in the Present
Around 15 million Jews live around the world today. These include Mizrahim from the Middle East, Asia and Africa, as well as Sephardic Jews, i.e. the descendants of those who were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the 15th century and settled in Northwest Africa, for example. Ashkenazim are central, northern and eastern European Jews, many of whom fled to the USA and South America in the course of Nazi persecution, for example, or live in Europe or Israel today.
There is a great diversity of Jewish voices, perspectives and life plans. Accordingly, there are also debates about the principle of matrilineality and how to deal with it. Members of liberal and reform Judaism and members of conservative and orthodox Judaism hold different positions on this issue. Irrespective of this, there are occasional cases of appropriation of Jewish identity in which individuals claim to be Jewish without having converted or having Jewish ancestors.
Jews continue to be confronted with antisemitism. This is also intertwined with other ideologies, such as anti-feminism and racism, so that Jews can be affected by multiple forms of discrimination. The experiences of antisemitism and racism of Black Jews and Jewish immigrants who came to Germany from the countries of the former Soviet Union come to mind here. Vivien Laumann and Judith Coffey have drawn attention to the fact that Jews today are often not given consideration in non-Jewish spaces and are confronted with stereotypes.
The endonym ‘Jew’ continues to be appropriated by non-Jews and used with hostile, derogatory intent. It features in school playgrounds and on social media as a term of abuse and insult irrespective of whether the person targeted is Jewish. A popular variant of antisemitic agitation can also be found in the defamatory use of the political self-description ‘Zionist’ as a synonym for all Jews.
It is important to emphasise that antisemitism and the use of the endonym ‘Jew’ as an insult in this context never have anything to do with the people who see themselves as Jews. Antisemitism says nothing about Jewish life, Jewish experiences, religion or tradition. In each case, it is an expression of the state of mind of the wider society.
