Antisemitism - Forms

Forms

It is often emphasized that there are different forms of antisemitism. René König mentions social antisemitism, economic antisemitism, religious antisemitism, and political antisemitism as examples. König points out that these different forms demonstrate that the "origins of antisemitic prejudices are rooted in different historical periods." König asserts that differences in the chronology of different antisemitic prejudices and the irregular distribution of such prejudices over different segments of the population create "serious difficulties in the definition of the different kinds of antisemitism." These difficulties may contribute to the existence of different taxonomies that have been developed to categorize the forms of antisemitism. The forms identified are substantially the same; it is primarily the number of forms and their definitions that differ. Bernard Lazare identifies three forms of antisemitism: Christian antisemitism, economic antisemitism, and ethnologic antisemitism. William Brustein names four categories: religious, racial, economic and political. The Roman Catholic historian Edward Flannery distinguished four varieties of antisemitism:

• political and economic antisemitism, giving as examples Cicero and Charles Lindbergh;
• theological or religious antisemitism, sometimes known as anti-Judaism;
• nationalistic antisemitism, citing Voltaire and other Enlightenment thinkers, who attacked Jews for supposedly having certain characteristics, such as greed and arrogance, and for observing customs such as kashrut and Shabbat;
• and racial antisemitism, with its extreme form resulting in the Holocaust by the Nazis.

Louis Harap separates "economic antisemitism" and merges "political" and "nationalistic" antisemitism into "ideological antisemitism". Harap also adds a category of "social antisemitism".

• religious (Jew as Christ-killer),
• economic (Jew as banker, usurer, money-obsessed),
• social (Jew as social inferior, "pushy," vulgar, therefore excluded from personal contact),
• racist (Jews as an inferior "race"),
• ideological (Jews regarded as subversive or revolutionary),
• cultural (Jews regarded as undermining the moral and structural fiber of civilization).