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Article: Anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism?(Faith matters)(Critical Essay)
- Article from:
- The Christian Century
- Article date:
- May 18, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 The Christian Century Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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WHEN PEOPLE SPEAK loosely of anti-Semitism, do they have in mind a religiously derived separation from Judaism on the part of Christians historically, or a pernicious racialist theory? Twentieth-century political theorist Hannah Arendt argued that these are two distinct theories. Anti-Semitism is a modern racialist theory that promotes the view that the Jewish people are what the National Socialists in Germany called "subhuman." The Nazis drew on all sorts of "scientific data" to back this up, and many top scholars in Germany signed on in this effort.
Anti-Judaism, by contrast, means "'against" or "rivaling" in the Latin sense of "anti." The anti-imperialist, ...