2
January 2026
Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism
In the
secularized world, religious freedom became established, and therefore also the
freedom of Jews, who then generally became, for the most part, atheists.
There was a shift from anti-Judaism (religious) to antisemitism, that is, to the
Jew as a lineage rather than as a religion: a Jewish Christian remains a Jew.
One reason was that nationalists considered Jews to be internationalists (with relatives scattered around the world) and therefore unreliable (the Dreyfus affair, for example). However, in practice Jews were blending into the surrounding populations and thus risked disappearing; the founding of Israel had above all the purpose of preventing this disappearance.
Anti-Judaism was a religious phenomenon (even the first founders and Christian saints were Jews), whereas antisemitism is a genetic prejudice. But the idea that culture is inherited genetically is by now no longer shared by anyone, or almost anyone.