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Anti Semitism During The 19th Century

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Anti-Semitism has been one of the longest held prejudices in Europe, existing for some sixteen hundred years prior to the Anti-Semitic explosion of Nazism. The proliferation of Nazism in Germany, however, was not the commencement of what scholars deem “modern Anti-Semitism,” but rather its pinnacle. Modern Anti-Semitism, characterized by the declaration of “a program of action in regards to the Jews and not simply the harsh words or thoughts in their regard, ” which was typical of “traditional” Anti-Semitism, developed gradually over the course of the nineteenth century. In that century as the Industrial Revolution spread capitalism and liberalism to Central Europe, and as those two forces dominated the region following the revolutions of …show more content…

“Paradoxically, the progress of liberalism and assimilation made the status of the Jews more precarious ” as this two-fold association was utilized by Anti-Semitic reactionaries throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century to assert the conspiracy of Judenherrschaft (Jewish domination). Thus the origination of modern Anti-Semitism was a direct reaction to the assimilation and emancipation of Jews.
From the 1850’s through 1873 Europe enjoyed a period of unbroken economic prosperity previously unseen in its entire history which, in Germany, was compounded by the stimulation of industry in 1870 and by the five million francs it received in the form of reparations in 1871, both results of the Franco-Prussian War. Primarily due to the indemnity from France, the two year period between 1871 and 1873 saw “the establishment of economic enterprise on an unprecedented scale .” However, in May of 1873 capitalist expansion came to a halt as Europe witnessed its first serious economic crisis when the stock market in Vienna collapsed. Despite Germany’s booming economy, the country was not impervious to a foreign financial disaster in such a world as existed in the late nineteenth century, economically connected through capital and industry, and it also substantially felt the effects of the crisis. While the ideology of modern Anti-Semitism had already been formulated as early

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