Antisemitism

Antisemitism refers to hostility, prejudice, or discrimination directed against Jews as a group, expressed in belief, speech, images, and action. The word was popularized in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr, and it is now used for a long series of phenomena that differ in their justifications: religious accusations against Jews, racial theories of Jewish inferiority or conspiracy, and political myths that cast Jews as hidden enemies of nations or of humanity. Because these forms overlap and change over time, the term covers a wide range of historical situations, from medieval persecution in Christian Europe to the state-led genocide of the Holocaust and contemporary online hate.

Antisemitism matters for several reasons. Its history includes expulsions, massacres, and forced conversions, and in the twentieth century it became the ideological basis of the Nazi regime's policy of mass murder. Its persistence has made it a central concern of human rights law, educational programs, and monitoring bodies. It is also a field of active debate: scholars, governments, and advocacy groups disagree about how to define the term, how to measure its prevalence, and where the line lies between antisemitism and criticism of the state of israel.

This entry first addresses the definition and terminology, then traces the phenomenon from its roots in antiquity and the medieval period through the enlightenment and the rise of racial ideology. It then covers the Nazi period, the postwar and Cold War developments, the mechanisms by which antisemitic ideas spread, the legal and institutional responses, and the open questions in current research.

Definition and terminology

The coinage of the term

The term antisemitism was coined in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr, who used it for the anti-Jewish campaigns then under way in central Europe. Some sources date the pamphlet that introduced the idea to 1878, not 1879; the pamphlet was titled "The Victory of Judaism over Germandom". Marr's argument was that Jewish emancipation resulting from German liberalism had allowed the Jews to control German finance and industry. He also held that the conflict rested on the different qualities of the Jewish and German races, so it could not be resolved even by complete assimilation. In 1879 he founded the Antisemiten-Liga in Berlin, which is often described as the first German organization devoted specifically to this cause.

The "Semitic" element of the word is misleading. Semitic is a linguistic term for a family of languages, not a category of people. Marr nonetheless treated all Jews, regardless of their religious beliefs, as belonging to the "Semitic race." Marr himself used the word Semitismus interchangeably with Judentum, meaning both Jewry as a collective and the quality of being Jewish. The philologist Jonathan M. Hess has argued that the coiners meant the new term to set their own hostility apart from older forms of antagonism toward Jews and Judaism.

Religious prejudice and racial antisemitism

Historians disagree about how far back the term should be applied. Some scholars see a transition from anti-Judaism, motivated by the Jews' refusal to accept Christianity, to antisemitism, the hatred of Jews as a so-called race. On this reading, the change happened in the later nineteenth century, when antisemitism underwent a fundamental change in the way it was expressed across Europe. Others note that the word soon became a retrospective label. "Antisemitism" came into general use as a term denoting all forms of hostility toward Jews throughout history. Historians of Nazi-era antisemitism also debate continuity. Bauer's view is that Nazi antisemitism combined an older hatred of Jews with a new political motif, arising as nationalism turned into racism. This debate is taken up in the section on research and open questions.

The IHRA working definition

In May 2016 the plenary of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance adopted "the following non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism". The core text is short. It describes antisemitism as a particular perception of Jews that may be expressed as hatred toward them, and it states that its rhetorical and physical manifestations can target Jews or non-Jews, their property, Jewish community institutions, and religious facilities. The label "working" signals that the text is open to revision.

The definition is followed by an explanatory preamble and eleven examples. The preamble says the examples are meant to "guide IHRA in its work." It states that antisemitism may include targeting "the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity," but adds that criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. The examples are introduced as things that "could, taking into account the overall context," constitute antisemitism. Seven of the eleven concern Israel. They include denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, applying double standards by requiring of Israel a behavior not expected of any other democratic nation, using classic antisemitic symbols to characterize Israel or Israelis, and drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

Points of contention

Supporters of the definition, including the Brandeis Center in the United States, argue that its text protects political debate and helps separate criticism of Israel from antisemitism. Governments and institutions have adopted it to varying degrees. The United States' version is described as the IHRA/State Department definition. Advocacy material compiled by critics reports that in December 2019, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that drew on the definition to address campus critics of Israel. In the UK, the government has threatened to cut funding for educational institutions that do not adopt it.

Critics, including civil-liberties organizations, argue that the examples are applied to legitimate speech. In a 2024 letter, the American Civil Liberties Union said the definition "conflates protected political speech with unprotected discrimination." Human rights groups have made similar objections. In 2023 they warned that these disclaimers have failed to prevent the politically motivated instrumentalization of the IHRA definition against critics of Israel's human rights record. The lead author of the definition, Kenneth Stern, opposes its use on college campuses, arguing that it undermines the free-speech principles needed for critical thinking about both Israeli policy and antisemitism. University working groups have also tended to focus their concerns on the examples; one report noted that criticism of the definition is mainly focused on the examples given with it. Alternative texts, namely the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and the Nexus Document, have been proposed as substitutes.

Antiquity and the Roman world

Jewish communities were established across the eastern Mediterranean long before Rome became the dominant power there, and they were often most visible in cities. Alexandria, with its large Greek-speaking population, was the clearest case. Friction between Jewish residents and their Greek and Egyptian neighbours escalated into bloody clashes, and some accounts suggest the Roman governor tolerated them. The best-documented episode is the violence of 38 CE. When Herod Agrippa visited the city, the Greek population publicly mocked him, including by crowning a mentally disabled man and addressing him with the Syrian word for king. The prefect Aulus Avilius Flaccus then tried to placate both the Greek population and Caligula by having statues of the emperor placed in Jewish synagogues. The philosopher Philo, a Jewish eyewitness, described what followed: Jewish residents were confined to a small part of the city, and their homes were plundered. Historians still debate the causes of the riots, which remain the subject of extensive debate to this day.

Hostile writing about Jews in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds also has a long history. Among the earliest examples is the Egyptian priest Manetho, who described the departure of the Jews from Egypt as an expulsion of lepers. His themes were repeated and expanded by later authors, including the Alexandrian Apion, who claimed the Jews worshipped a donkey's head in the Jerusalem Temple, and who also spread a libel about the ritual kidnapping of Greek children. The Roman historian Tacitus drew on this tradition. He presented Jewish customs as proof of a people set apart: dietary laws, circumcision, the Sabbath, and the ban on marrying outside the faith were, in his view, what made Jews hate non-Jews. Most of these texts survive only in fragments or through other writers. The writings of Manetho are mainly preserved in Josephus' Against Apion, and Josephus wrote that work specifically to rebut these charges. Scholars disagree about whether these ancient texts should be called antisemitic at all, since the term carries modern connotations, and many prefer more neutral descriptions.

Rome's relations with Judaea turned into open war in 66 CE. In 66, the Roman governor of Judaea removed silver from the Jewish temple treasury in Jerusalem for taxes which the Jews allegedly had not paid, and this led to protests and a massacre of Jewish civilians. The revolt lasted until 73, when the fortress of Masada fell. Jerusalem was taken after a long siege, and after the Romans broke through its walls, they destroyed the temple of the Jews in a blazing inferno. The destruction of the Second Temple reshaped Jewish religious life, and the wider effects were demographic as well. The war accelerated the dispersal of Jews throughout the Roman Empire and beyond.

A second uprising followed in 132–135 CE. Emperor Hadrian's plans for Jerusalem, which included a new Roman colony named Aelia Capitolina and a temple to Jupiter on the Temple Mount, together with a ban on circumcision, helped provoke the revolt led by Simon bar Kokhba. The rebellion was initially successful but was crushed in 135 with the fall of Jerusalem and then Bethar. Afterwards, according to Christian sources, Jews were thenceforth forbidden to enter Jerusalem. The province was also renamed, and Judaea was renamed Palestine.

The place of Jews within the Roman order changed again after Christianity became the imperial religion in the late fourth century. Earlier Roman rulers had generally tolerated Jewish worship and communal life, but Christian emperors and church leaders gradually reduced that tolerance. Imperial laws restricted marriage between Jews and Christians, limited Jewish participation in public life, and were increasingly framed as measures against religious error. Some protections for synagogues and Jewish self-government nevertheless survived in many regions, so the change was uneven across the empire rather than a single rupture.

Christian anti-Judaism in the Middle Ages

Theological foundations: deicide and supersession

Medieval Christian hostility toward Jews rested on theology. The charge of deicide held that Jews as a collective bore responsibility for the death of Jesus. It was repeated in sermons, catechesis, and the liturgy of Holy Week, where the Passion narrative was read as an account of Jewish guilt. Preachers and polemicists often linked this charge to the claim that Jews remained blind to the truth of the New Testament. The doctrine of supersession (often called replacement theology) held that the Church had succeeded Israel as God's chosen people, so that Jewish law and covenant were superseded and Jewish survival was theologically anomalous. Together these ideas produced a teaching tradition in which Jews were portrayed as obstinate witnesses whose continued existence was tolerated but whose status was meant to remain subordinate. This framework shaped the anti-Jewish polemic in sermons, theological treatises, and Passion plays, and it provided the moral vocabulary through which later accusations were understood.

Legal restrictions

Church councils and secular rulers developed a set of restrictions that separated Jews from Christians and limited their economic and social position. The Third Lateran Council of 1179 pushed for the separation of Jews and Christians, and the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 went further. Its Canon 68 required Jews and Muslims to be distinguished from the Christian by a difference of dress. The canon's stated rationale was to prevent sexual relations between Christians and non-Christians, and it also barred Jews from appearing in public during the final days of Holy Week. England was among the first realms to enforce the requirement; local rulers there introduced a visible badge in the following years. Dress rules were later supplemented by rules requiring yellow badges or hats in various regions, and by restrictions on holding public office.

Economic exclusion was equally significant. Christian prohibitions on usury pushed Jews toward moneylending, which was then condemned in theology and simultaneously made them dependent on the protection of rulers, who often profited from their loans. Church and secular authorities barred Jews from most guilds and many professions, and restricted or prohibited their ownership of land. These disabilities made Jewish communities financially exposed, and debt cancellations or expulsions could be used to erase royal or noble obligations.

Blood libel and host desecration accusations

The blood libel, the false claim that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood in ritual, has its earliest recorded instance in England. In 1144 a boy named William was found dead outside Norwich. His death was unexplained, and there was no evidence linking Jews to this. However, around four years later, the monk Thomas of Monmouth visited Norwich. He soon claimed that the Jews of the town had tortured and killed William. The story was elaborated to portray the killing as a re-enactment of the Crucifixion, and William's grave became a pilgrimage site. Similar accusations spread through medieval Europe, often in periods of economic crisis or crusading fervor, and they repeatedly led to arrests, torture, and massacres of local Jewish communities.

Host desecration charges followed a parallel logic. They alleged that Jews had stolen or profaned the consecrated Eucharistic bread, and they were used to justify violence against entire communities. Such accusations, which reinforced the idea of Jews as enemies of Christ, were often investigated by ecclesiastical and secular courts that relied on confessions obtained under torture. Local authorities frequently used them as pretexts for expropriation of Jewish property and for pogroms.

Expulsions and the Black Death

From the late thirteenth century, rulers began expelling Jews from entire kingdoms, often after extracting taxes and seizing debts. England was the first major western kingdom to do so on a national scale, in 1290. France expelled Jews in 1306 under Philip IV and again in 1394 under Charles VI, with each expulsion followed by confiscations and periods of readmission. Many Jews moved east, to Poland and other regions, where communities were sometimes allowed to settle under protective charters.

The Black Death of 1348–1350 produced some of the worst massacres of the medieval period. Epidemic mortality generated panic, and rumors accused Jews of poisoning wells. Attacks broke out across the Holy Roman Empire and other regions, including in cities such as Strasbourg, where Jews were burned in 1349, and many other communities were destroyed or forced out. These events combined religious accusation, economic motives such as debt cancellation, and the search for scapegoats, and they left a legacy of depopulated Jewish communities and lasting suspicion in the affected areas.

Early modern Europe and the Enlightenment

The expulsion of Jews from Spain was the end point of a longer process. On 31 March 1492, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile, issued the Alhambra Decree, which gave unconverted Jews until the end of July to leave the kingdoms or accept baptism. The decree followed the fall of Granada in January 1492, when the monarchs moved from consolidating territory to enforcing religious uniformity. Many Jews had already converted under earlier waves of persecution. One estimate attributed to the historian Joseph Pérez puts the number of converts at 200,000 by that date. The Inquisition, active in Castile from 1478, targeted these converts, known as conversos, on the assumption that many still practised Judaism in private. Modern estimates of those expelled generally range from 40,000 to 200,000, although the figures remain debated.

The question of who counted as a true Christian soon became a matter of ancestry rather than belief. The first limpieza de sangre ("purity of blood") measure was the Sentencia-Estatuto adopted in Toledo in 1449, during a popular uprising under the leadership of Pedro Sarmiento against royal authority, and it was directed solely against the Toledan conversos. Such statutes spread through Spanish institutions. By the middle of the 16th century, proof of blood purity was necessary for gaining access to certain professions, public offices, university colleges, military and religious orders, convents, guilds, and so forth. A 1555 statute of Toledo Cathedral became the model for later ones, and its author argued that inherited Jewish descent carried a permanent moral defect. Protests came from some ecclesiastics, who objected that baptism was thereby made insufficient, but the statutes nonetheless proliferated. Blood purity was still a requirement for admission to the military academy until 1860, when it was legally abolished. Historians still debate whether these Iberian statutes anticipated modern racial thinking; the criteria were rooted in inherited ancestry, not in the practice of faith.

Martin Luther's views on Jews changed over the course of his career. In the early 1520s he adopted a conciliatory stance, and in his 1523 treatise That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew he urged kinder treatment of Jews. From the late 1530s, after his hopes for their conversion had faded, he turned to sharp polemic. His 1543 treatise On the Jews and Their Lies ran to about 65,000 words. In it he recommended that synagogues and schools be set on fire, prayer books destroyed, rabbis barred from preaching, and Jewish property confiscated, and he argued that Jews should be expelled or forced into labour. Later Protestant writers and German nationalists reprinted and cited the text, and an early twentieth-century English translation softened its explicit calls for violence, which scholars say created a space for 'civilised antisemitism' or 'acceptable prejudice'. Hitler was influenced by those who appropriated and reenergized Luther's anti-Jewish polemics. Catholic authorities did not speak with one voice. Papal policy alternated between protection and repression; the bull Cum nimis absurdum of 1555 imposed a ghetto and severe economic restrictions on the Jews of the Papal States.

Enlightenment writers often combined a demand for toleration with disparaging stereotypes. Voltaire condemned religious persecution, yet in his Philosophical Dictionary he mocked Jewish history and customs and portrayed Jews as a backward people. The more systematic argument for emancipation came from German writers. Christian Wilhelm von Dohm's 1781 treatise on the civic improvement of the Jews proposed granting them civil rights in return for their gradual moral and economic reform, and Moses Mendelssohn argued for religious freedom. The Habsburg Edict of Toleration of 1782 eased restrictions in the empire.

Emancipation proceeded unevenly. In France, the National Assembly granted citizenship to Sephardic Jews in 1790 and to all Jews in September 1791, and Napoleon's 1806 Great Sanhedrin and 1808 decrees imposed new restrictions on Jewish debt and commerce. Prussia's Edict of Emancipation of 1812 extended civil rights to most of its Jewish subjects, but the German Confederation's promise of 1815 to grant civil rights remained largely unfulfilled until 1871. Opposition was equally vocal. In 1815 the historian Christian Friedrich Rühs argued that Jews could not become German citizens without ceasing to be Jews, and Romantic nationalists framed Jews as foreign to the Christian German nation. The Hep-Hep riots of 1819, which broke out in several German cities, showed how such arguments could turn into street violence. Jewish emancipation thus became one of the principal arenas in which modern antisemitic arguments took shape.

Racial and political antisemitism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

From the last decades of the nineteenth century, a view developed that treated Jews as a biological group whose hereditary traits could not be changed by conversion or assimilation. This shift was tied to the growth of scientific-racism, which drew on anthropology, a loose reading of Darwinian evolution, and the philological category of a "Semitic race." Ernest Renan's writings on the "Semites" as a stagnant people were among the sources that made race a vocabulary for judging Jews. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that the racial variant is the discriminatory idea that Jews are a separate and inferior race, and that it grew out of the technological and scientific developments of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The term "antisemitism" itself, coined by Wilhelm Marr in 1879, already gestured toward this discourse. Racial thinking separated Jews from the nationalism of the modern nation-state: because Jewishness was defined by descent, baptism no longer offered a way out, which earlier religious hostility had at least theoretically allowed. Jewish writers also responded with their own racial studies, which shows how widely the premise was accepted.

Political antisemitism organised these ideas into parties and mass movements. In Germany, Adolf Stoecker's Christian Social Workers' Party (founded 1878) and the antisemitic deputies who entered the Reichstag in the 1890s combined anticapitalist rhetoric with attacks on Jewish influence. In Austria, Georg von Schönerer's pan-German movement mixed nationalism with antisemitism, and the Christian Social Party of karl-lueger (founded 1893) became the most successful example. Lueger fused economic grievances against big business and liberalism with religious and racial prejudice. He succeeded in forging a party which channeled social discontent, depicting capitalism and Marxism alike as products of the Jewish mind. Once in office as mayor of Vienna from 1897, his administration pursued discriminatory practices against Jews, mainly through not employing them in the city services and limiting their numbers in high school and the university. Historians still debate Lueger's personal convictions, while agreeing that his party's rhetoric had lasting effects; Adolf Hitler later cited his methods as a model.

The Dreyfus affair (1894–1906) showed how antisemitism could shape a national political crisis. In 1894, he was accused of selling military secrets to Germany, arrested, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. Much of the early publicity surrounding the case came from antisemitic groups who used Dreyfus to symbolize the supposed disloyalty of French Jews. Evidence pointing to another officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, emerged in 1896, but the army resisted reopening the case. The 1899 retrial again returned a guilty verdict before a pardon, and in 1906, Dreyfus was exonerated by a civilian court of appeals. The affair divided the Third Republic between defenders of the republic and anticlerical reformers on one side and a largely Catholic, pro-army camp on the other. For many historians it became a reference point for debating whether Jews could be fully French, and it contributed to the 1905 separation of church and state.

Antisemitic literature in this period also circulated across borders. The text known as protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion was first produced in Russia in the early twentieth century, presented as the minutes of a secret Jewish plan for world domination, and it drew heavily on earlier unrelated fiction and political satire. It was published in Russia in editions that were widely circulated, then reprinted and translated in Europe and the United States, where it fed conspiracy theories about Jewish control of finance and government. The Times of London exposed it as a plagiarised fabrication in 1921, and later court proceedings confirmed the forgery, but the text continued to circulate for decades.

Violence in the Russian Empire gave the period its most visible escalation. From the 1870s, pogroms – orchestrated violent attacks – were perpetrated against Jewish communities in the Russian Empire. Waves of pogroms followed the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 and continued until 1884, reinforced by restrictive legislation that confined Jews to designated areas. A second wave came in 1903–1906, with the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 and the widespread violence that followed the 1905 revolution. Many Jews responded by emigrating: well over a million left the empire in the decades before 1914, moving mainly to the United States, Western Europe, and Palestine, and carrying the experience of persecution with them.

The Nazi regime and the Holocaust

In Nazi Germany, antisemitism was a central element of official ideology, and the regime turned it into law. On 15 September 1935, during a special session of the Reichstag held at the Nuremberg Party rally, the regime enacted two measures. The Reich Citizenship Law limited full citizenship to people of "German or related blood" and reduced Jews to the status of state subjects. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour banned marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Germans, and it barred Jewish households from employing German women under 45. Jewishness was defined by ancestry rather than religious practice. A "full Jew" had three or four Jewish grandparents, and people with one or two were classed as Mischlinge, a category whose treatment was debated for years. A supplementary decree of November 1935 applied these definitions to officials and public life. Sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews, prosecuted as Rassenschande ("race defilement"), led to convictions and detention in concentration camps.

Persecution escalated through the late 1930s. Jews were pushed out of professions, subjected to boycotts, and forced to sell businesses and property at fractions of their value in a process known as "Aryanization". Emigration was encouraged but increasingly obstructed by confiscation of assets and restrictive visa policies. The turning point of this phase was the November Pogrom of 9–10 November 1938, known as Kristallnacht. Its pretext was the shooting of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris by Herschel Grynszpan, a young Polish-Jewish refugee. Across Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland, SA units, SS men, Hitler Youth and civilians attacked Jewish homes, shops and synagogues while police largely stood aside. Estimates of the death toll vary, with the Yad Vashem count of 91 murdered Jews being the commonly cited figure. Yad Vashem also reports more than 1,400 synagogues damaged or burned, and about 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Jewish communities were then forced to pay for the damage.

After the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Jews across occupied Poland were confined to ghettos, and in the Soviet territories invaded in 1941 mobile killing units shot hundreds of thousands of Jews. The decision to murder all European Jews was taken in 1941, but its coordination required the involvement of the wider state. The Wannsee Conference, held on 20 January 1942 in a villa in a Berlin suburb, was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office, and attended by about fifteen officials from ministries and agencies. Its purpose was to coordinate implementation rather than to take the decision, and the minutes replaced the earlier emigration plan with deportation "to the east". Deportations from across occupied Europe followed, and most victims were sent to killing centres such as Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka and Majdanek, as well as the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, where people were gassed on arrival or after selection for forced labour.

Approximately six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, roughly two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The killing depended on collaboration beyond the SS and German police. Local auxiliary police in parts of occupied Eastern Europe took part in shootings and roundups, and the Vichy regime in France arrested and deported foreign and French Jews. Governments and officials in allied states, including Hungary, Croatia, Romania and Slovakia, deported Jews or enacted their own discriminatory laws. Historians continue to study the degrees of coercion, initiative and complicity involved, which varied greatly by place and time.

After the war, the liberation of the camps in 1944–1945 revealed the scale of the crimes. Surviving Jews, many of whom had lost their families, were housed for years in displaced-persons camps in Germany, Austria and Italy, where they struggled with the question of emigration. Several Allied tribunals documented Nazi crimes, most prominently the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945–1946 and subsequent proceedings, including the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 and the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in the 1960s. The establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948 was shaped in large part by the destruction of European Jewry and the search for a refuge for survivors.

Postwar antisemitism and the Cold War

Soviet campaigns and the Doctors' Plot

Antisemitism did not disappear with the defeat of Nazi Germany. In the Soviet Union, Stalin's regime turned it into a campaign of state policy in the late 1940s. Jewish writers, artists, and officials were attacked under the label "rootless cosmopolitans," a code term that in practice meant "Jewish." In August 1952, a group of former members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was executed after a closed trial. In January 1953, Soviet newspapers announced the arrest of a group of Kremlin physicians, most of them Jewish, accused of poisoning Soviet leaders on behalf of Western intelligence and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. The Doctors' Plot was fabricated: the accused were tortured into confessions. Stalin died on 5 March 1953, and the new leadership abandoned the case. In April, Pravda admitted that the charges were false. Historians link the affair to the antisemitic campaign, but also to Stalin's struggle for control of the party and to plans against Soviet Jews whose scale remains debated.

Anti-Zionism as a vehicle for antisemitism

After the 1967 Six-Day War, the Soviet Union broke off diplomatic relations with Israel and launched a propaganda campaign against Zionism. Its content frequently reproduced older antisemitic motifs. The 1969 book Beware: Zionism by the Soviet specialist Yuri Ivanov, for example, was widely distributed and drew heavily on the imagery of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In Poland, the same war produced a sharper shift. Władysław Gomułka's June 1967 speech, which described Polish Jews as a "fifth column," turned an anti-Israeli propaganda line into an antisemitic one. Student protests in March 1968 were then blamed on "Zionists," which led to purges of Jewish officials and officers, especially in the army. Estimates of the number of Jews who left Poland in the following years vary, but they are generally put in the range of about 13,000.

Across the Eastern Bloc and in Western Europe, the Arab–Israeli wars of 1948, 1967, and 1973 kept the Middle East at the centre of public debate. In 1975 the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution equating Zionism with racism, which was revoked in 1991. The period also produced persistent disputes over where legitimate criticism of Israeli policy ends and antisemitism begins, a question that continues to shape the debates on definitions discussed elsewhere in this entry.

Holocaust denial and distortion

Holocaust denial emerged in the immediate postwar years, especially in France, where denialist writers questioned the reality of the murders. In Germany and Austria, authors sought to whitewash the Nazi regime and rehabilitate its leaders. In 1976, the American engineering professor Arthur Butz published The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, which argued that the technical limits of the equipment made mass gassings impossible; it was among the first denial texts to adopt the appearance of academic rigour. The Institute for Historical Review, founded in 1978, became the main publisher of such material in the United States. In 1977, David Irving published Hitler's War, which argued that Hitler had neither ordered nor condoned the extermination of the Jews. The English High Court later ruled, in a 2000 libel case brought by Irving against the historian Deborah Lipstadt, that Irving had misrepresented and distorted the evidence.

Legal responses varied. In Canada, the publisher Ernst Zündel was prosecuted in 1985 under a false-news provision, and the criminal law of several countries was later extended to cover denial directly. Germany made denial a criminal offence in 1994, and Austria applied its 1947 prohibition of Nazi activity to denial cases. In 1992 Canada's Supreme Court struck down the false-news provision as incompatible with freedom of expression. Since the 1980s, much denial has moved from academic-style publications to the internet. By the early twenty-first century, the Institute for Historical Review had declined, but websites, social media platforms, and anonymous forums became the main venues for denial and distortion. Many current texts shift from outright denial to claims that the Holocaust was exaggerated or that the evidence has been manipulated.

Public opinion and monitoring data since the late twentieth century

From the late twentieth century, Western governments, international bodies, and research organisations increasingly tried to measure antisemitism systematically. Their sources rest on different methods. Attitude surveys ask respondents whether they agree with specific stereotypes, so their results depend on question wording, sampling, and the countries covered. Police statistics record only offences reported and classified as hate crimes, and their trends can reflect changes in reporting and recording practices as much as in the offences themselves. Civil-society organisations compile incident reports, which are often more numerous but are not random samples. Because these sources use different definitions and coverage, their findings cannot be combined directly, and public debate often cites figures that measure different things. Analysts therefore treat trend claims with caution, especially when they rely on a single source.

Mechanisms: stereotypes, conspiracy theories, and transmission

Antisemitic thinking has relied on a small set of recurring images. The most durable is the figure of the wealthy, manipulative Jew, which joins claims about hoarded money to assumed control of banking, the press, and politics. Nazi propaganda compressed these motifs into a single package. The 1940 film Nazi Germany's Der ewige Jude, made under Joseph Goebbels's supervision, depicted Jews as greedy, deceptive, and economically domineering. One of its best-known sequences compared Jews to rats that carry disease, an image that echoed the scapegoating of Jews during the Black Death. Behind these stereotypes lies the broader narrative of a hidden world conspiracy, in which Jews are imagined as secretly steering governments, markets, and public opinion. That narrative is the core of the forged Protocols discussed elsewhere in this entry, and it continues to be recycled in new forms.

The stereotypes travel through several channels at once. Religious teaching is the oldest. Accusations of deicide and ritual murder, developed in medieval Christian Middle Ages polemic, provided templates that later writers could secularize and repurpose. Political movements then borrowed these images for nationalist, racial, and anti-liberal agendas. Today the same tropes appear across the political spectrum, including on the far right, in parts of the radical left where hostility to Israel shades into anti-Jewish imagery, and in Islamist propaganda. Cultural transmission, through folklore, caricature, popular literature, and everyday speech, has often kept these ideas alive even after overt political support has faded. Scholars generally agree that the continuity of these motifs is one reason antisemitism can be revived quickly during crises.

Older mass media were already powerful amplifiers. Pamphlets, newspapers, posters, and cartoons carried antisemitic caricatures into ordinary households, while radio and especially film added sound and moving images to the message. The Nazi Ministry of Propaganda explicitly used motion pictures for this purpose, and the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda exploited motion pictures as a medium to spread antisemitic messages. Later, digital platforms changed the scale and speed of transmission. Platforms that rank content by engagement can favour material that provokes strong reactions. Algorithms seem to have played a significant role in amplifying antisemitism, as they are designed to prioritize content based on user engagement. In one controlled test, three of four platforms recommended even more extreme, contemptuously antisemitic, and hateful content, although YouTube was the exception. A later study by the Combat Antisemitism Movement, an advocacy organization, reported that Instagram exposed simulated accounts to antisemitic material, and that users did not need to search for, engage with, or express interest in antisemitic content to be exposed to it. Anonymity and pseudonymous accounts further lower the social cost of posting such material, and coordinated networks can push it into mainstream feeds. Findings of this kind depend on the design of the test accounts and the platforms studied, so they indicate patterns rather than fixed rates.

Coded language is a central problem in this area. A dog whistle is generally understood as coded or suggestive language that is understood by a particular in-group while its meaning(s) remain opaque to the out-group. Online examples include numerical codes, euphemisms, and innocuous-looking words. For instance, gnomes served as coded references to Jewish people, and gnome hunting referred to hunting for Jews. The ambiguity can help content spread, since the coded meaning of gnome hunting allowed for its rapid growth, due to participation from TikTok users who were unaware of its violent, antisemitic connotations. Codes also have short lives: with time, their true meaning often becomes known, which pushes communities to invent new ones. Such language also offers plausible deniability to its users, which makes it hard to classify.

Monitoring bodies face difficulties that follow from this ambiguity. Automated systems are poorly suited to the task, since dog whistles famously evade toxicity and hate speech detection. Human analysts also disagree. Glossaries of dog whistles can misclassify ordinary uses, and researchers have noted that some terms defined as coded are, in many contexts, used in their plain sense. Monitoring of this kind also depends on access to platform data, which is limited and uneven. As a result, the boundary between overt hate, implicit antisemitism, and legitimate political criticism often has to be drawn case by case.

Legal, institutional, and educational responses

Many states have treated antisemitic incitement and the denial of the Holocaust as matters for criminal law, although the scope and justification of these laws remain disputed. Germany has the most extensive framework. Section 130 of the criminal code prohibits incitement to hatred and insults that attack human dignity on the basis of racial, national, religious or ethnic background. The provision dates to the code of 1871, when it targeted class-based agitation. After the 1950s scandals over the Nazi pasts of West German officials, it was amended to address neo-Nazi incitement. Holocaust denial was first treated in 1985 as an insult to the honour of German Jews. In 1994, after a federal appeals court overturned a sentence against a far-right politician who had called the gassing of Jews at Auschwitz a hoax, the law was expanded to make denial and trivialization of Nazi genocide an explicit offence, with a maximum of five years' imprisonment. Separate provisions in the code ban Nazi symbols and salutes.

France responded with the Gayssot Act of 13 July 1990. It made it an offence to contest the existence or scale of crimes against humanity as defined in the 1945 London Charter, the basis of the Nuremberg trials, and it prohibited discrimination on grounds of ethnicity, nation, race or religion. Sources differ on the penalties: some cite a one-year prison term and fines up to €45,000, while others cite five years. A 2024 bill approved by the National Assembly sought to extend these offences to non-public speech. Similar denial laws exist in roughly a dozen and a half European states, including Austria, Belgium, Poland and Spain, whereas in the United States Holocaust denial is generally protected speech. Enforcement raises recurring questions. Content posted abroad can be prosecuted where it is accessible, as in the 2007 conviction of Ernst Zündel for material published from North America, and critics argue that the boundary between denial and historical revisionism or political speech is hard to draw. Recent proposals in Germany to criminalize denial of Israel's right to exist illustrate how the same debate now extends into the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Supporters say the bill would not restrict criticism of Israeli government policy, but opponents question whether such a provision can be kept apart from political criticism.

At the international level, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 60/7 on 1 November 2005. It designated 27 January, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by Soviet forces in 1945, as an annual International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust. The resolution rejected any denial of the Holocaust, condemned religious intolerance and incitement, urged member states to develop education programmes, and created the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme. Several member states objected that the text did not mention other genocides, and that concern shaped the debate over its scope. Later UN initiatives include a 2022 General Assembly resolution (76/250) and an action plan on monitoring and responding to antisemitism.

Institutional responses have also taken the form of definitions and monitoring. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, an intergovernmental body, adopted a working definition of antisemitism in 2016 that is not legally binding but has been endorsed by many governments and public bodies, including the Council of the European Union in 2018. Within the European Union, the Fundamental Rights Agency conducts surveys of Jewish experiences and perceptions of antisemitism, the European Commission has had a dedicated coordinator on combating antisemitism since 2015, and an EU strategy on the subject was adopted in 2021. Many countries have national commissioners, commissions or coordinators, which collect reports, support education and memorial work, and advise governments. France's National Consultative Commission on Human Rights, which the Gayssot Act requires to publish an annual report on relations between ethnic groups, is one example. Civil-society organizations also document incidents, although their methods and categories differ from those of police and official statistics.

Holocaust education is the most widespread non-legal response. Curricula in many countries include the Holocaust, and museums and memorial sites such as Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Auschwitz Memorial run school programmes and teacher training. The United States Congress established national Days of Remembrance in 1979, and many European cities place Stolpersteine, memorial stones bearing the names of deported victims. Research on whether these programmes change attitudes is mixed. Studies more consistently show gains in historical knowledge than durable changes in prejudice, and the results appear to depend on pedagogy, the age of students and the way the material is framed. Evaluations of this kind remain difficult to generalize across countries and programmes.

Research, measurement, and open questions

Antisemitism is studied from several directions. Holocaust studies and Jewish studies supply most of the historical analysis, working from archives, testimony, and the texts of Christian, Islamic, and secular polemic. The history of prejudice traces how particular images were passed on and reshaped over centuries. Sociology and social-psychology contribute surveys, interviews, and experiments on how attitudes relate to political identity, religiosity, and conspiracist thinking, while psychology examines the cognitive processes behind stereotyping and motivated reasoning. Because the field spans history, theology, law, and the social sciences, researchers often disagree less about facts than about which evidence counts and which concepts apply.

Measurement is a central problem. Three main kinds of data are used: police-recorded hate crimes, victimization surveys, and incident reports compiled by civil-society organizations, alongside public opinion polls on attitudes. Each captures something different. Police figures depend on whether victims report incidents and whether officers record them with a motive label, so they undercount what victimization surveys try to estimate as the "dark figure" of unreported experience. Civil-society databases can be more sensitive but are shaped by who reports and how cases are classified. A 2017 rise in incidents logged by the Anti-Defamation League was partly traced to at least 163 of 1,986 recorded incidents, which were threats from a single young Israeli-American Jew and were later excluded as not antisemitic in motive. Victimization surveys have their own limits. The third european-union Fundamental Rights Agency survey of Jewish people, carried out in 2023 in 13 member states, used an opt-in online sample, and the samples underrepresented the youngest age group. Its headline findings were nonetheless striking: 96% of respondents reported encountering antisemitism online or offline in the previous year, and harassment rose from 31% in 2018 to 37% in 2023 (the fieldwork predated the events of October 2023).

Different instruments can also produce sharply different pictures of the same society. A Swedish-led project with about 9,000 respondents in Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States compared agreement with antisemitic statements with agreement with the same tropes when "Zionists" replaced "Jews," and argued that traditional indexes miss hostility expressed in anti-Zionist language. The same year, the ADL's Global 100 index ranked Sweden as the least antisemitic country surveyed, with 5% of respondents holding antisemitic views. Comparative surveys also show that question wording matters: a Norwegian–British comparison found that the more severe phrasing of anti-Israel items in the British survey may partly explain differences in endorsement. Population differences matter too; a 2024 American survey found that 72% of U.S. adults regarded antisemitism as a problem, compared with 93% of Jewish adults. A systematic review of hate-crime measurement found very few studies that systematically compare police, civil-society, and survey data, which leaves public debate often citing whichever figure best suits a argument.

Historiographical debates remain open. Scholars disagree about long-term continuity: whether medieval Christian accusations, nineteenth-century racial theories, and Nazi ideology form one continuous tradition, or whether each marks a qualitative break. Closely related is the relation between religious and racial antisemitism, which bears on whether the concept can be applied to earlier periods without distortion. Research on colonial and Nazi-era ideas outside Europe, including their circulation in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, is comparatively recent, and its evidence is uneven and debated. Some historians emphasize local agency and indigenous traditions, while others stress the transmission of European texts and propaganda.

The most contested question concerns definitions and their application. The State of Israel-related examples in the 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition are widely discussed. Supporters argue that these examples help identify forms of hostility that use political language, and several governments, universities, and institutions have adopted the definition as a guide; in 2025, Harvard agreed to adopt it as part of a settlement with federal lawsuits. Critics, including many civil-liberties and academic-freedom organizations, argue that the examples can be used to penalize criticism of Israeli policy, and they point to the text's own statement that criticism of Israel comparable to criticism of other states is not antisemitic. Organizations such as the ADL defend the definition as non-binding guidance that does not restrict speech. Disputes therefore turn on a practical question as much as a conceptual one: how to counter antisemitism without chilling legitimate debate about Palestine and Israeli policy, and how much weight context and intent should carry when an expression is classified.

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