A Functionalist View Of the Holocaust

13 Pages 3282 Words

limate of where he lived, it is not such a surprising change. Anti-Semitism has a storied history in Germany. Many famous Germans were also notorious anti-Semites, which lends this particular form of discrimination a degree of intellectual legitimacy. The father of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, was an anti-Semite, as were other famous Germans like the composer Richard Wagner and philosopher Friederich Nietzsche.
However, this is not to say that anti-Semitism was exclusively a German phenomenon. Anti-Semitism has a very long history. In the middle ages, it was an uncontested part of Christian doctrine that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus Christ, an accusation which would cause untold trouble for the Jews as time progressed. In 1095, the year of the First Crusade, Jews throughout Europe were slaughtered as the Crusaders undertook their mission of liberating holy Christian lands. Martin Luther advocated the burning of synagogues, and denounced Jews as “a bloody and revengeful people.”
Many countries in Europe were profoundly anti-Semitic, with France actually being perhaps the worst. In 1853, a French Count, Joseph Gobineau penned his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Race. This work advanced the concept of the superiority of the Aryan race. It also decried the perversion of races that relinquished their ‘purity’ by intermarrying with lesser races. Wilhelm Marr, a German who is credited with coining the expression ‘anti-Semitism’, echoed this idea. In Marr’s 1873 The Victory of Judaism over Germanism, he wrote of the danger of assimilating Jews into the Aryan race. This notion would later form a part of Hitler’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which will be discussed later.
Marr’s work appeared during an already difficult time for Jews in Germany. Germany and Austria experienced a severe economic depression in the 1870’s, and many right-wing groups blamed this downturn on the Jews. Howeve...