This article traces the history of antisemitism across cultures and centuries, from ancient antiquity through the modern era. For interpretive frameworks and contemporary debates, see Antisemitism - Debate. For scholarly consensus on definitions and scope, see Antisemitism - Historical Consensus.

Hostility toward Jews as a distinct people appears in sources as early as the fifth century BCE. The Book of Esther describes a Persian official, Haman, seeking the destruction of Jews throughout the Achaemenid Empire on the grounds that they “do not keep the king's laws.” Historians debate whether this account is historical, but it reflects a pattern of perceived Jewish separateness that recurs across ancient literature.

In Hellenistic Egypt, tension between Jewish communities and their neighbors is documented from at least the third century BCE. The Greek writer Manetho, writing in the third century BCE, accused Jews of descending from diseased Egyptian lepers expelled from Egypt - an inversion of the Exodus narrative. The Alexandrian writer Apion elaborated similar charges in the first century CE, prompting Josephus's rebuttal Contra Apionem. Accusations included misanthropy, ritual murder (xenophobia in the ancient sense), and contempt for the gods of other peoples.

Roman writers including Tacitus, Juvenal, and Cicero expressed varying degrees of hostility. Tacitus in his Histories described Jewish customs as “sinister and shameful,” characterized by hatred of non-Jews. Cicero, defending a client against charges related to Jewish tax collections, described Judaism as a “barbaric superstition.” These characterizations circulated widely in educated Roman society.

The destruction of the Second Temple by Titus in 70 CE and the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt under Hadrian in 135 CE scattered Jewish populations throughout the Mediterranean and ended Jewish political autonomy in Judea for nearly two millennia.

As Christianity spread through the Roman Empire, theological conflict with Judaism produced a body of literature known as adversus Iudaeos - “against the Jews.” Church fathers including Chrysostom, whose Homilies Against the Jews (386-387 CE) characterized synagogues as houses of the devil, contributed to a theological framework that would shape European attitudes for centuries.

The Christianization of the Roman Empire under Constantine in the fourth century CE brought new legal disabilities for Jews. Councils and edicts progressively restricted Jewish ownership of Christian slaves, intermarriage with Christians, holding of public office, and construction of new synagogues. Jews were not expelled or systematically massacred at this stage, but their legal standing was reduced.

Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century articulated what became the dominant Western Christian position: Jews should be preserved as living witnesses to Christian truth and to the authenticity of the Old Testament, but in a degraded state that demonstrated the consequences of rejecting Christ. This “witness doctrine” paradoxically provided some protection to Jewish communities under medieval Christendom while simultaneously defining their subordinate status.

The First Crusade in 1096 CE marked a sharp escalation in organized violence against European Jews. Crusader forces and associated mobs massacred Jewish communities in the Rhineland cities of Worms, Mainz, and Speyer before departing for the Holy Land. Estimates of deaths range from several hundred to several thousand. Jewish chronicles, including the Mainz Anonymous, record survivors choosing death over forced baptism.

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw the emergence of new accusatory frameworks. The “blood libel” - the charge that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals - appears first in the case of William of Norwich (1144 CE), recorded by the monk Thomas of Monmouth. Similar charges spread across England and the continent. Pope Innocent IV issued a bull in 1247 CE declaring the charge false, as did later popes, but the accusation persisted in popular belief and periodic mob violence for centuries.

The “host desecration” libel - the charge that Jews stole and tortured consecrated Eucharistic wafers - appears from the mid-thirteenth century. The “well poisoning” accusation became widespread during the Black Death (1347-1351 CE), when Jewish communities across Europe were massacred on the grounds that they had poisoned water supplies to cause the plague. In Strasbourg alone, approximately 900 Jews were burned in 1349 CE. Pope Clement VI issued two bulls in 1348 CE rejecting the charge and condemning the massacres, without effect in most localities.

England expelled its Jewish population in 1290 CE under Edward I, following a period of escalating restrictions and forced conversions. France expelled Jews repeatedly between 1182 and 1394 CE. The Spanish Inquisition, established in 1478 CE, targeted conversos - Jews who had converted to Christianity - on suspicion of secretly practicing Judaism. The Alhambra Decree of 1492 CE expelled the remaining openly Jewish population of Spain, estimated at 40,000 to 100,000 people. Portugal followed in 1497 CE.

Jews in medieval Christian Europe were typically barred from owning land, practicing most crafts and trades, and holding public office. Moneylending at interest, forbidden to Christians by canon law, became one of the few economic niches available to Jews, reinforcing stereotypes of Jewish financial exploitation.

Jewish communities in the early Islamic world generally occupied a more stable position than in contemporary Christendom. The dhimmi system accorded Jews and Christians the status of protected peoples, with defined legal disabilities - including the jizya poll tax, restrictions on public worship, and prohibitions on bearing arms or riding horses - but without the systematic expulsions and large-scale massacres common in Europe during the same period.

Periods of deterioration occurred. The Almohad dynasty in North Africa and Iberia (twelfth century CE) forced conversions or expulsions of Jewish and Christian communities. The philosopher Maimonides was among those who fled Almohad territory. Anti-Jewish polemics appear in Islamic literature throughout the medieval period, drawing on Quranic passages describing Jewish betrayal of divine covenant.

The position of Jewish communities varied considerably across different Islamic polities and periods. The Ottoman Empire, after 1492 CE, actively welcomed Jewish refugees from Spain, and Jewish communities in Istanbul and Salonika reached significant size and influence.

Martin Luther's early writings expressed sympathy for Jews, arguing that their rejection of Christianity had been caused by the corruption of the Catholic Church. After Jewish communities declined to convert to his reformed Christianity, Luther published On the Jews and Their Lies (1543 CE), which called for the burning of synagogues, destruction of Jewish homes, confiscation of religious writings, prohibition of rabbinical teaching, and forced labor. Lutheran authorities in some German territories implemented portions of these recommendations.

The printing press spread both anti-Jewish tracts and Jewish responses more widely than manuscript culture had permitted. Ritual murder allegations appeared in illustrated pamphlets. At the same time, Christian Hebraism - scholarly study of Hebrew and Jewish texts - grew as a Renaissance pursuit, creating a strand of learned engagement with Judaism distinct from popular hostility.

The establishment of the Venice Ghetto in 1516 CE institutionalized a pattern of enforced Jewish residential segregation that spread through Catholic Europe. The term “ghetto” derives from the Venetian district where Jewish residents were confined.

Enlightenment thought produced contradictory effects on the Jewish question. Rationalist critique of Christianity sometimes extended to Judaism; Voltaire's writings contain sustained hostility toward Jews, drawing on ancient stereotypes while rejecting religious frameworks. At the same time, Enlightenment universalism provided arguments for Jewish civic emancipation on the grounds that all human beings possessed natural rights regardless of religion.

John Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689 CE) argued for extending toleration to Jews on grounds of religious liberty, though Locke's own position contained qualifications. The Haskalah - Jewish Enlightenment - began in the late eighteenth century, with figures like Moses Mendelssohn arguing that Jews could adopt European languages and customs while maintaining their religious identity.

The French Revolution brought the first large-scale legal emancipation of European Jews. The Constituent Assembly granted full civic equality to French Jews in 1791 CE. Napoleonic conquests spread emancipation to parts of Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, though restoration governments reversed many of these gains after 1815 CE.

The term “antisemitism” was coined by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr in 1879 CE. Marr founded the Antisemiten-Liga (Antisemites' League) and used the new term to give political Jew-hatred a secular, racial cast distinct from traditional religious anti-Judaism. The shift was significant: where religious hostility had in principle permitted conversion as a solution, racial antisemitism defined Jewish identity as biological and therefore immutable.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899 CE) provided an elaborate racial-historical framework presenting Aryan and Jewish peoples as locked in permanent civilizational conflict. The work was widely read in Germany and admired by Kaiser Wilhelm II.

The Dreyfus Affair in France (1894-1906 CE) exposed the persistence of antisemitism within a formally emancipated society. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French Army officer, was falsely convicted of treason on the basis of forged documents. His trial produced public mobs shouting anti-Jewish slogans in Paris. Émile Zola's “J'Accuse…!” (1898 CE) accused the army leadership of deliberate fraud. Dreyfus was ultimately exonerated, but the affair demonstrated that legal equality had not dissolved social hostility.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was fabricated by agents of the Russian Okhrana (secret police) around 1903 CE, drawing heavily on a French satirical pamphlet targeting Napoleon III. The text purported to be the minutes of a Jewish conspiracy for world domination. Russian pogroms - organized or tolerated mob violence against Jewish communities - intensified in the same period. Major pogroms occurred in Kishinev in 1903 CE and across Russia following the 1905 Revolution. Mass Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe to the United States and Western Europe followed.

In the United States, Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe provoked nativist hostility. Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager in Georgia, was lynched in 1915 CE after his death sentence for a murder conviction he almost certainly did not commit was commuted. Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent newspaper republished the Protocols and ran sustained antisemitic content from 1920 to 1927 CE.

The National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) under Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in January 1933 CE. Nazi ideology placed racial antisemitism at its center. Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925 CE) presented Jews as a parasitic race responsible for Germany's defeat in World War I, the Weimar Republic, Bolshevism, and international capitalism simultaneously.

The regime's anti-Jewish policy proceeded in stages. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (April 1933 CE) dismissed Jews from government positions. The Nuremberg Laws (September 1935 CE) stripped Jews of German citizenship and criminalized marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews. Identification, registration, and economic expropriation of Jewish property followed.

Kristallnacht (November 9-10, 1938 CE) - organized pogroms across Germany and Austria - destroyed approximately 7,500 Jewish businesses, burned 1,400 synagogues, killed at least 91 Jews directly, and sent 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps.

Following the invasion of Poland in September 1939 CE and the opening of the eastern front in June 1941 CE, German mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen) began mass shootings of Jewish populations. The Wannsee Conference (January 1942 CE) coordinated the systematic deportation of European Jews to extermination camps in occupied Poland - Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and Majdanek - where industrial killing by gas proceeded until 1945 CE.

Approximately six million Jews were killed - roughly two thirds of European Jewry and one third of the world's Jewish population. The event is known in Jewish tradition as the Shoah (Hebrew: catastrophe) and in English-language scholarship and common usage as the Holocaust.

The Holocaust produced a significant shift in how antisemitism was treated by states and international institutions. The Nuremberg Trials (1945-1946 CE) prosecuted Nazi leaders for crimes against humanity. The United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 CE. The state of Israel was established in May 1948 CE following the UN Partition Plan of 1947 CE, providing a Jewish state for the first time since antiquity.

Antisemitism did not disappear. Soviet anti-Jewish campaigns continued through Stalin's death in 1953 CE, including the fabricated “Doctors' Plot” (1953 CE) alleging a Jewish medical conspiracy. The Soviet Union systematically conflated Zionism with imperialism and racism in its propaganda from the 1960s onward, culminating in UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 (1975 CE), which declared Zionism a form of racism. The resolution was revoked in 1991 CE.

Neo-Nazi and white nationalist movements in Europe and North America perpetuated traditional racial antisemitism. The Pittsburgh synagogue shooting (October 2018 CE) killed eleven people and was the deadliest antisemitic attack in United States history. The Halle synagogue attack in Germany (October 2019 CE) targeted worshippers on Yom Kippur.

From the late twentieth century, antisemitism also appeared in contexts linked to hostility to Israel and Zionism, including in some Islamist movements and portions of the political left. The relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism remains actively contested. See Antisemitism - Debate.

Some historians argue that the continuity between ancient pagan hostility, medieval Christian anti-Judaism, and modern racial antisemitism reflects a single continuous tradition, while others maintain that racial antisemitism represents a qualitatively distinct modern phenomenon. See Antisemitism - Continuity Debate.

The degree of ordinary German civilian knowledge of and participation in the Holocaust is disputed, most prominently between Daniel Goldhagen's thesis in Hitler's Willing Executioners and the responses of historians including Christopher Browning and Hans Mommsen. See Holocaust - Perpetrators Debate.

Whether anti-Zionism constitutes a form of antisemitism, a legitimate political position, or a category that may encompass both depending on content and context, is contested among scholars, legal bodies, and advocacy organizations. See Antisemitism - Anti-Zionism Debate.

The applicability and scope of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, particularly its examples relating to Israel, is disputed among historians, civil liberties organizations, and Jewish community groups. See Antisemitism - Definition Debate.

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2. Tacitus. Historiae. Book V. c. 105 CE.
3. John Chrysostom. Adversus Iudaeos (Homilies Against the Jews). 386-387 CE. In Patrologia Graeca, vol. 48.
4. Augustine of Hippo. Contra Faustum Manichaeum. c. 400 CE.
5. Thomas of Monmouth. The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. c. 1150 CE. Ed. Augustus Jessopp and M. R. James. Cambridge University Press, 1896.
6. Pope Clement VI. Quamvis Perfidiam and Sicut Iudeis. 1348 CE.
7. Luther, Martin. Von den Juden und ihren Lügen (On the Jews and Their Lies). 1543 CE.
8. Marr, Wilhelm. Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums über das Judenthum (The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism). 1879 CE.
9. Chamberlain, Houston Stewart. Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Foundations of the Nineteenth Century). 1899 CE.
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