Eliminationist antisemitism is an extreme form ofantisemitism which seeks to completely purgeJews andJudaism from society, either throughgenocide or through other means.[1] Eliminationist antisemitism evolved from older concepts ofreligious antisemitism.[2][3] The concept was developed byDaniel Goldhagen in his bookHitler's Willing Executioners to describe German antisemitism in the twentieth century, but has since been adapted and used to describe antisemitism in other societies and eras.
The concept was originally developed byDaniel Goldhagen in his bookHitler's Willing Executioners, in which he proposed that Germans harbored uniquely eliminationist antisemitism which led them to perpetratethe Holocaust.[4]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.[5][6][7] Goldhagen's thesis is not accepted by most historians of Germany.[8][9] For example,Helmut Walser Smith argues that "eliminationst antisemitism" was not common inImperial Germany, but was found on the fringes of society voiced by such figures asTheodor Fritsch.[10]
Although he criticizes some aspects of Goldhagen's thesis,Aristotle Kallis contends that as Golhagen argues,eliminationism justifiesethnic cleansing andgenocide by making such crimes seem desirable and justified to the perpetrators and their society.[11]
In his more recent bookThe 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.[12] The concept has since been adapted and is used to describe other antisemitism in other societies, such asPolish antisemitism[9][13] andantisemitism in the Muslim world.[14][15][16] 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.[9] The "a-semitism" of theArrow Cross Party in Hungary has also been described as eliminationist.[17] Goldhagen's concept has also been expanded to analyze other forms of "eliminationist racism".[10]
^Kallis, Aristotle (2008).Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe. Routledge. p. 6.ISBN978-1-134-30034-1.
^Heni, Clemens (28 November 2017). "Antisemitism in the Twenty-first Century".Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism.1 (1):1–10.doi:10.26613/jca/1.1.1.S2CID158850406.
^Dan, Peter (2009). "Sanction for Genocide: Anti-Semitism and the Evolution of Evil".Studia Hebraica (9–10):395–416.ISSN1582-8158.CEEOL161255.
^Wistrich, Robert (28 November 2017). "Thirty Years of Research on Antisemitism".Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism.1 (1):23–32.doi:10.26613/jca/1.1.3.S2CID165608749.
^Beller, S. (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.25 (3):474–476.doi:10.1093/hgs/dcr040.
^Krzywiec, Grzegorz (2014). "Eliminationist Anti-Semitism at Home and Abroad: Polish Nationalism, the Jewish Question and Eastern European Right-Wing Mass Politics". In Rosenthal, L.; Rodic, V. (eds.).The New Nationalism and the First World War. Springer.ISBN978-1-137-46278-7.
