Eliminationist antisemitism

Origin

The concept was originally developed by Daniel Goldhagen in his book Hitler's Willing Executioners, in which he proposed that Germans harbored uniquely eliminationist antisemitism which led them to perpetrate the Holocaust. Robert Wistrich is another historian who has written about the idea of eliminationist antisemitism with regards to Germany, although he does not believe the phenomenon is unique to Germany. Goldhagen's thesis is not accepted by most historians of Germany. For example, Helmut Walser Smith argues that "eliminationst antisemitism" was not common in Imperial Germany, but was found on the fringes of society voiced by such figures as Theodor Fritsch.

Although he criticizes some aspects of Goldhagen's thesis, Aristotle Kallis contends that as Golhagen argues, eliminationism justifies ethnic cleansing and genocide by making such crimes seem desirable and justified to the perpetrators and their society.

Other uses

In his more recent book The Devil that Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Anti-Semitism, Goldhagen argued that eliminationist antisemitism has grown and spread since World War II. The concept has since been adapted and is used to describe other antisemitism in other societies, such as Polish antisemitism and antisemitism in the Muslim world. For example, Robert Blobaum has argued that the antisemitism in Poland in the early twentieth century should be considered "eliminationist" because its aim was to completely remove the Jews from Poland. The "a-semitism" of the Arrow Cross Party in Hungary has also been described as eliminationist. Goldhagen's concept has also been expanded to analyze other forms of "eliminationist racism".

References

References

1. (2008). "Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe". Routledge.
2. (28 November 2017). "Antisemitism in the Twenty-first Century". Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism.
3. (2009). "Sanction for Genocide: Anti-Semitism and the Evolution of Evil". Studia Hebraica.
4. (2013). "Antisemitismus in der deutschen Geschichte". Springer-Verlag.
5. (28 November 2017). "Thirty Years of Research on Antisemitism". Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism.
6. (2010). "A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad". Random House Publishing Group.
7. (2 December 2011). "A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, Robert S. Wistrich (New York: Random House, 2010), xii + 1,184 pp., cloth $40.00". Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
8. (2010). "Belonging and Genocide: Hitler's Community, 1918-1945". Yale University Press.
9. (2005). "Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland". Cornell University Press.
10. (22 March 2015). "Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. the Devil That Never Dies, the Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism". Journal of Third World Studies.
11. (2014). "The New Nationalism and the First World War". Springer.
12. (2010). "Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine". Enigma Books.
13. (6 August 2019). "Steinberg: Calling out the eliminationists". The Canadian Jewish News.
14. (2014). "Kritik des islamischen Antisemitismus: Zur gesellschaftlichen Genese und Semantik des Antisemitismus in der Islamischen Republik Iran". LIT Verlag Münster.
15. (2008). "The Continuities of German History Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century". Cambridge University Press.