Wilhelm Marr & the League of Anti-Semites

Anti-Semitism Definition (Hatred of Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew)

In 1879, a German journalist, living in Leipzig, published an invitation in several German newspapers announcing that he had founded The League of Antisemites. Wilhelm Marr claimed that all Jews were biologically different from all other people and that Judaism is not a religion but a race.  Marr used the word Semite for Jews because the Torah, the Bible, tells us that the son of Noah, Sem, had settled in the area now called Israel, and that the Jewish people are descendants of Sem. Linguists, who are language scholars, had called Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew Semitic languages because these languages have much in common. English was viewed as an Indo-European language, together with many others.

Marr told the League of Antisemites that more and more people no longer believed that Jews drink Christian blood, poison the drinking water, and destroy all German culture. Fearing that Jews would no longer be persecuted, Marr asked his followers to make it widely known that Judaism is not a religion but a race and that Germans must drive all Jews out of Germany lest the superior German race be contaminated with Jewish blood.

Marr was supported in his views  by Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Arthur de Gobineau. Chamberlain was English, yet published books and pamphlets claiming that Germans were a superior race and Jews were the lowest form of life. De Gobineau published similar hateful materials in French.

The Germans were, of course, delighted to be called a super race by two foreign writers.  These opinions later became part of Hitler’s propaganda, as they were widely distributed throughout Europe, but particularly in Germany.

As a result, numerous non- Jewish people were murdered by the Nazi government because they had one Jewish ancestor and therefore had “Jewish blood.”

During the years of Hitler's reign, German genealogists were paid to search old records to discover whether someone who was not Jewish might have some Jewish ancestry. Many a German was terrified at the possibility of having a Jew among his ancestors.

Yet, the top general commanding the German Air Force in Hitler’s days, Erhard Milch, had a Jewish father. When Herrmann Göring was told about this, he screamed “Ich sage wer ein Jude ist,” or I determine who is a Jew. Hitler als exempted his mother’s doctor, a Jew, from all persecutions.

The belief that Jews are biological subhumans is as old as the Spanish Inquisition, when Jews who had converted to Christianity were called “Marranos,” meaning swine.

It  is unfortunate that our ignorant journalists continue to use the phrase “anti-Semite”. We are not Semites. We speak English. Let us drop this symbol of ignorance and name anti- Jewish conduct for what it is. i.e. religious bigotry.

Shalom u'vracha.

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