I. Ideological Roots: Antecedents & Context - Historical Antecedents & Preconditions
Historic Roots of Nazism

SG#3 Antisemitism up to 1914. Why the Jews?

Modern Antisemitism. The Jew & the Modern era

From religion to Biology - Continuity & Difference

Synopsis/Scope
Lecture 3. Bauer, Liberalism, Emancipation, and Antisemitism, 33-50, 57-60
Introduction to the Holocaust. http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/maps/

Objectives Students will be able to describe and explain

- the impact of the French and Industrial revolution
- antisemitism in the modern era, and compare it to religious traditional antisemitism.

I. Define/Identify

Enlightenment; swine; conversion. French & Industrial Revolution; Jewish emancipation; 2nd German Empire; Ahkenazi, traditional Christian anti-Judaism, modern antisemitism, Rothschild. Herbert Spencer, Social Darwinism, E. Drumont, A. Dreyfus. Hassidim. 1792 Pale of Settlement. pogrom, Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, Eastern European Jews.

II. Multiple-Choice Questions


1. Period in the 17th and 18th c., during which social thinkers believed they could apply the scientific method and use reason to logically explain human nature
a) the Middle Ages
b) the Enlightenment

2. In the 18th century, anti-Jewish caricatures associated Jews with
a) lion
b) swine

3. Till the early 19th c., the ‘passport’ to European culture and society of the Jewish elite was
a) conversion to Christianity
b) conversion to Islam

Industrial & French revolutions

4. The historical event that marked a turning point in the legal status of the Jews was ______________; during that era, in the 18th c.,‘Liberty, equality, and fraternity’ was affirmed in 1789, in the French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man.’
a) the French Revolution
b) the Black Plague

5. Political movement in the 19th c., that opposed autocratic powers of the throne, and supported equality, & individual rights
a) liberalism
b) despotism

6. The 1st country in which a decree in 1791, made Jews legally emancipated - free and equal citizen, was
a) England
) France

7. Jewish emancipation meant
a) the legal and civic equality of the Jews with other citizens
b) Jews as second class citizens

8. From the end of the 18th c., & 19th c., and following the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquests. _____
a) Jews gained legal equality in most European lands
b) Jews left the ghetto & participated in activities that had been closed to them
c) Jews became successful entrepreneurs, bankers, lawyers, journalist, scientists
d) all the above

9. Rapid industrialization, urbanization, and emancipation, gave rise to a
a) a Jewish population explosion
b) a Jewish poor working class in Eastern Europe - a Jewish proletariat
c) a Westernized Jewish assimilated middle class
d) all the above

10. In 1871, emancipation was confirmed, under Bismarck and Wilhelm I, with the establishment of the
a) First Empire
b) Second German Empire

11. German Jewish intellectual, founder of Jewish enlightenment in the 19th c. - movement to make Jews more aware of the world around them, and of the challenges of the times, and to bring the intellectual achievements of general civilization into Jewish life
a) Moses Mendelssohn
b) Dreyfus

12. In the 2nd half of the 19th c., extreme adherents of enlightenment in Germany, adapted Jewish religious traditions to German Protestant forms, and founded
a) Reform Judaism
b) Orthodox Judaism

13. Jewry in Central and Eastern Europe, who spoke Yiddish
a) Ashkenazi
b) Aramean
Modern Antisemitism

14. Traditional hatred of the Jews was based on Christian anti-Judaism, & stemmed from
a) an irrational fear and hatred of outsiders
b) the commonly accepted myth that Jews were eternally cursed for rejecting Christ
c) the belief that Jews deserved punishment for rejecting Jesus as the Messiah
d) all the above

15. Resentment and hatred was focused on the stereotype of the Jew possessed by the Devil and symbol of Satan, because Christians saw Jews as
a) murderers of Christ - the deicide accusation; having tails, and horns
b) using Christian children’s blood for religious ceremonies, & poisoning wells
c) a & b

16. Modern antisemitism has the following contributing factors
a) the 19th c. exclusive romantic movement emphasizing an exclusive nationalism
b) the class antagonism deriving from modern capitalism
c) Social Darwinism, and racial nationalism
d) all the above

17. A banker who served as a stereotype accusing Jews of initiating capitalism
a) Rothschild
b) Karl Marx

18. The scientific theory of the survival of the fittest in the universal struggle for existence
a) by Charles Darwin
b) by Karl Marx

19. People eager to apply science to society, using Darwin’s principles, created a tendency:
a) Social Darwinism
b) Socialism

20. In 1850, this English Social Darwinist, applied to human society Darwin’s principle of ‘natural selection, developed the theory of constant struggle between humans, and believed in establishing a society, in which the strongest would win -the weak, the poor were not worthy of survival; in 1864, he coined the expression ‘survival of the fittest’
a) Adam Smith
b) Herbert Spencer

21. In the late 19th c., Social Darwinism influenced
a) ideas of genetic determinism in social thought
b) theories that ranked races as superior or inferior, and inherited characteristics
c) the views about gender, based on innate differences between men & women
d) all the above

22. In 1860, following the fact that individual’s participation in Jewish community life was voluntary, because of emancipation, and because of renewed attacks on Jews, Jewish organizations such as the Alliance Israelite Universelle in France, was created
a) to fight anti-Jewish policies
b) in reaction to blood libel in Damascus in 1840, and the Mortara affair in 1858
c) to set up Francophone schools for Jews in the Middle East & French North Africa
d) all the above

23. In France, in 1886, he published one of the best-sellers of the 2nd half of the 19th c., Jewish France, which argued that the Jews had gained control of France, blamed the Jews for capitalism, attributed all the nation’s misfortunes to the Jews, & accused them of deicide
a) Emile Zola
b) Edouard Drumont

24. In 1894, Jewish officer in the French army falsely accused of treason
a) Dreyfus
b) Rothschild
Eastern Europe. Russia

25. In Poland, around the middle of the 18th c., in the context of of the Haidamak riots -attacks of Ukrainian peasants against Jews, and dozens of blood libels, a new mystical movement within Judaism with joyful worship, arose; founded by Israel Ba’al Shem Tov
a) Hassisdism
b) the Shabbatean movement

26. In the end of the 18th c., in Tsarist Russia, Jews lived confined in a former Polish area called
a) the Pale of Settlement
b) the Polish area

27. Under Tsar Nikolai I (1825-55), Jews were forced
a) to convert to Christianity
b) to join the army, and to serve in the army for 25 years

28. In 1881, following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II (1855-81), popular discontent of poor peasants and city dwellers led to violent attacks on the Jews, or
a) pogroms
b) ghettos

29. Under Nikolai II (1894-1917), mob attacks on Jews became official policy
a) to stop popular discontent and revolutionary propaganda
b) to stop their emancipation

30. Ritual murder accusations persisted in 1911 in Kiev, with
a) Mortara
b) the Beilis affair

31. Heartland of European Jewish life in the 20th century
a) Western Europe
b) Eastern Europe
Jewish Reactions Zionism & Palestine

32. Austrian Jewish journalist, who, horrified by the antisemitism he witnessed in Paris during the Dreyfus trial, founded Zionism - Jewish national movement, for a return to Zion, symbolic name to the historic homeland of the Jews
a) Barak
b) Herzl

33. In this book, published in 1896, the author argued that the creation of a Jewish state was the best solution to the Jewish question
a) Herzl’ Solution
b) The Jewish State


Copyright Fall 1999; Fall 2003 Edith Shaked

#