Antisemitism (also spelled
Anti-Semitism or
anti-semitism) is
prejudice against,
hatred of, or
discrimination against
Jews as a national, ethnic,
religious or racial group.
[1][2] A person who holds such positions is called an "antisemite". As
Jews are an
ethnoreligious group, antisemitism is generally considered a form of racism.
[3]
While the conjunction of the
units anti,
Semite and
ism indicates antisemitism as being directed against all
Semitic people, the term was popularized in Germany in 1873 as a scientific-sounding term for
Judenhass ("Jew-hatred"),
[4] although it had been used for at least two decades prior,
[5] and that has been its normal use since then.
[6] For the purposes of a 2005 U.S. governmental report, antisemitism was considered "hatred toward Jews—individually and as a group—that can be attributed to the Jewish religion and/or ethnicity."
[7]
Antisemitism may be manifested in many ways, ranging from expressions of hatred of or discrimination against individual Jews to organized
violent attacks by mobs, state police, or even military attacks on entire Jewish communities. Although the term did not come into common usage until the 19th century, it is now also applied to historic anti-Jewish incidents. Notable instances of
persecutioninclude the
pogroms which preceded the First Crusade in 1096, the
expulsion from England in 1290, the
massacres of Spanish Jews in 1391, the persecutions of the
Spanish Inquisition, the
expulsion from Spain in 1492,
Cossack massacres in Ukraine of 1648–1657, various
pogroms in Imperial Russia between 1821 and 1906, the 1894–1906
Dreyfus affair in France, the
Holocaust in German-occupied Europe, official
Soviet anti-Jewish policies and Arab and Muslim involvement in the
Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries.