In Jewish theology, God deemed the Jews his “chosen people.” Ironically, in their four-thousand-year history, Jews have frequently been chosen as a target for persecution by the societies in which they reside. Jews and the teachings of...

ANTI-SEMITISM. The term anti-Semitism is relatively recent, coined only at the end of the nineteenth century, when it became the identifying symbol of an innovative anti-Jewish political platform that projected the Jews as an alien element in European...

hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious or racial group. The term anti-Semitism was coined in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr to designate the anti-Jewish campaigns underway in central Europe at that time. Although this...

. Anti-Semitism or, more properly for the Middle Ages, anti-Judaism, was the set of attitudes toward Jews that derived from regarding their religion as inferior to Christianity and themselves as the heirs of deicides. By their persistence in adhering...

Anti-Semitism, in political terms the discrimination against or persecution of Jews, is nowadays associated in most people’s minds with Hitler’s Germany. In fact it has a very much longer history, has had some political importance in most...

Historical Christian doctrine of Jew-hatred and of contempt for Judaism, the religion. In common usage, the term also encompasses the racist anti-Semitism of the German Nazis and of some Islamic extremists, from which phenomena it rightly should be...

Hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious group or “race.” Although the term anti-Semitism has wide currency, it is regarded by some as a misnomer, implying discrimination against all Semites, including Arabs and other...

Hostility against the *Jews. Although the term ‘anti-Semitism’ is of 19th Century origin, dislike and persecution of the Jewish people goes back to ancient times. The New Testament has a strong anti-Semitic bias and, as the humanist Erasmus...