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The Florida Holocaust Museum: History, Heritage and Hope Permanent Exhibition

Modern Antisemitism

When countries have significant problems, their rulers often look for someone else to blame, to serve as scapegoats for their own mistakes. The Jews served as targets for such animus. In 1881, the czarist regime initiated and condoned anti-Jewish actions. In Vienna, at the turn of the 20th century, antisemitic factions used hatred against the Jews to gain political power. There, as elsewhere Jews were accused of seeking world domination.

The Nazis exploited the weaknesses of Weimar Germany and blamed the Jews for Germany's loss of World War I, for galloping inflation that wiped out the wings of the middle class in the early 1920s, and for the communist revolution in Russia. Political antisemitism was only one component of Nazi antisemitism: from the publication of Mein Kampf onward, Judaism was regarded as a race, not as a religious or national identity. The elimination of Jews - defined as bloodlines - was viewed as imperative to the German nation.

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6. Jewish Population in Europe, 1933 Jews have lived in Europe for more than two thousand years. The American Jewish Yearbook placed the total Jewish population of Europe at about 9.5 million in 1933. This number represented more than 60 percent of the world's Jewish population, which was estimated at 15.3 million. Most European Jews resided in eastern Europe, with about 5 1/2 million Jews living in Poland and the Soviet Union. Before the Nazi takeover of power in 1933, Europe had a dynamic and highly developed Jewish culture. In little more than a decade, most of Europe would be conquered, occupied, or annexed by Nazi Germany and most European Jews--two out of every three--would be dead. - Holocaust Encyclopedia, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

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