Holocaust and the Origins of Anti-Semitism, Essay Example

While many people living today believe that Holocaust is a 20^th Century development, it is important to note that the roots of anti-Jewish sentiments go back many centuries, and they were present within Ancient Greece, as well as in the ideologies related to Spanish Inquisition. The Jewish-Greek military conflict was ongoing in the 1^st Century, and the Jewish nation was not ready to accept the Hellenist culture and traditions, which created further problems in the first few centuries. In Alexandria, thousands of Jews were executed, based on cultural and religious differences. Gender bias, related to religious aspects to Jewish lifestyle, in particular circumcision and excluding non-Jews from celebrations were frowned upon by Greeks. The practice of Sabbath, a religious break day was looked at by Greek society as laziness and created negative bias and stereotypes against the Jewish.

The main reasons why the Spanish Inquisition held a hostile attitude towards Jewish people lie in Biblical texts’ word-for-word interpretation, and the fact that Jesus was not accepted as a Savior and Son of God by the Jews. The idea of communal sin assigned to the Jewish nation was indeed not Hitler’s idea, but was first invented by the Christian Church. For example, in England, several anti-Jewish riots broke out in the 12^th Century. While even during the Crusades many Jews were killed, as enemies of the Holy Roman Church, the targeted hostility against the Jewish community fully enfolded during the Spanish Inquisition. In Medieval Spain, Jews had to go into hiding, pray out of sight, and could not openly practice their traditions and religion. Jewish people in Spain were labeled as Marranos (pigs in Spanish), and were made to choose between torture and conversion to Christianity.

The above review of historical traits of anti-Jew sentiments has revealed that the Jewish nation became stigmatized well before Hitler’s Third Reich, and Anti-Semitism goes back more than two thousand years in history.