from the enlightenment to the state of israel 445
rabbis appointed by the lay Jewish leadership to this position have
retained considerable prestige within the wider English public down to
the present. It would be wrong to assume that there was no anti-
semitism in nineteenth-century England, but there was remarkably little
hostility on grounds of his origins to Benjamin Disraeli when he became
prime minister despite his open pride in his Jewish background, and the
cultural hostility which can be discerned in literary depictions of Jews
from Shakespeare onwards, and in such social slights as exclusion from
golf clubs or antisemitic jokes, cannot compare to the discrimination
being suffered by Jews in much of mainland Europe in this period.^8
The most destructive expression of such discrimination was to be
suffered by the Jews of Germany in the twentieth century, when resent-
ment at the travails of the nation after war had ended in 1918 and the
political chaos of the early 1930s encouraged popular credence of Nazi
claims that the Jews were to blame. German Jews were removed from
public positions, and deprived of civic rights, at astonishing speed after
the rise of Hitler to power in 1933, and with minimal opposition by the
general population. What distinguished this form of antisemitism from
all previous kinds was not only its virulence, expressed in rhetoric about
the extermination of disease which turned out to be intended all too
literally, but a racial rather than religious definition of Jewishness, so
that anyone of Jewish descent (defined as at least three Jewish grand-
parents) was treated as Jewish regardless of religious affiliation. The
theoretical origins of racial antisemitism lay in the scientific theories of
race and eugenics popular in Europe and the United States in the late
nineteenth century. Jews came to be seen as part of an inferior Semitic
race which posed a threat to Aryans because of the increased racial inter-
mingling enabled by Jewish civic emancipation in many European
countries. With the rise of nationalism politicians adopted antisemitic
slogans and policies to demonstrate their patriotic fervour across Europe
and even in the United States. But it was only in Germany that the rheto-
ric led the state to embark on the physical extermination of the Jews.
For many of the countries of Europe in which the Holocaust occurred
between 1939 and 1945, it took decades to acknowledge the signifi-
cance for wider society of the disappearance of complete populations of
Jews. More recently the enormity of what happened has been more
widely appreciated, especially in Germany, with numerous museums of
Jewish culture, intensive education and huge efforts devoted to research-
ing the phenomenon of antisemitism.
In recent times the attitude to Jews of liberal Germans, as of many