I want to start here a serie of posts about anti-semitism. Anti-semitism is holding, spreading and acting on certain lies about Jews.

There is a difference between anti-semitism and a general prejudice based on belonging to a group. While usually prejudices tend to be either denigrating: “all Irish are lazy” (which, by the way, is a lie), or neutral “all Swedes are blond” (also not true), or even positive “all Italians can sing” (unfortunately, also not 100% true), antisemitic claims present Jews as dangerous and dehumanize them.

To begin with, one should consider how the antisemitic claims are applied.

Historically antisemitic claims arose in the time when Jews were defined only by religion (before 16’th century). So, the first “support” to antisemitic claims were speculations about Jewish holy texts and practices. As there is no support to those claims in actual sources, antisemitism was usually not supported by the educated people at that time.

In the end of 16’th century in Spain and later in Italy a major forceful conversion of Jews to Christianity took place. The newly converted Jews were though still considered with suspicion and were discriminated against on the basis of their ancestry. This most likely is an indication to the fact that at that time in Europe people started to identify themselves not only as adherents of a certain religion, but also as members of certain ethnic group. Antisemitic claims started to be applied also to the descendants of Jews, and were “supported” by newly invented “science of inheritance”. As those arguments are more difficult to verify they started to be more acceptable even to educated people. The gradual grow in both amount of people espousing antisemitic views and in severity of the views accepted, was what led to the Holocaust in 20’th century.

At the present time, after the creation of the state of Israel, along with the two old applications, the traditional antisemitic lies started to be applied to Israel as a state with the purpose to delegitimize the existence of Israel (more about this in the corresponding posts later).