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Curr Psychol (2007) 26:213222
DOI 10.1007/s12144-007-9015-5
Richard Breitman
Published online: 30 October 2007# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2007
Abstract This article very briefly surveys and compares the history of Christian and Muslim anti-Semitism. Drawing on recent studies by German scholars and on newly declassified CIA records, the author focuses on the critical role of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. Through his radio broadcasts and other work during World War II, Haj Amin instilled Nazi images of the Jew as the international power behind the scenes to Arab nationalists and to the Middle East generally.
Keywords Christian . Nazi . Grand Mufti . Jerusalem . Haj Amin al-Husseini
If one understands how certain attitudes developed, one may have a starting point for a strategy to change them. To that extent, the history of anti-Semitism in the Middle East may have some bearing upon the climate in the Middle East and on Muslims in Europe today. This short article focuses on some interactions among European (Christian and secular) anti-Semites and Muslim anti-Semites.
Christian authorities sustained anti-Semitism throughout much of European history. The Catholic Church restricted and discriminated against Jews in ways that Nazi Germany later followed, consciously or not, during the 1930s. In his book On the Jews and Their Lies Martin Luther mentioned (without questioning them) accusations that Jews had poisoned wells and hacked children to pieces.1 Over many centuries some Catholic and Protestant theologians and clergy helped to instill stereotypes of the Jew and animosity toward Jews among the pious.
1Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1961), 19. This work was subsequently expanded and revised a number of times, but Hilberg always included the Christian precedents.
R. Breitman (*)
Department of History, Battelle-Tompkins 119, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20016, USAe-mail: [email protected]
NO9015; No of Pages
Muslim Anti-Semitism: Historical Background
214 Curr Psychol (2007) 26:213222
An essentially separate strand of secular anti-Semitism took root in Europe during the Enlightenment and spread during the nineteenth century; racial anti-Semitism was a late nineteenth-century offshoot of it.2 In most countries Christian anti-Semitism had greater resonance into the twentieth century.3
Given this background, Muslim anti-Semitism seems more anomalous. Walter Laqueur generalized that Jews fared better under Muslim...