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The deep links between anti-Black racism and Jew-hate

Contrary to what some on the far-left want to believe, for long periods of history the two hatreds evolved as a single strand of Western racism

December 14, 2020 11:06
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ByTudor Parfitt, tudor parfitt

8 min read

The murder of nine African Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in 2015 and the murder of 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue three years later in Pittsburgh were no doubt similar events.

However, the ancient racial hatreds which provoked them — the racial hate and murder of Jews and the racial hatred, murder and enslavement of Africans, which together add up to the main objects of western racism — have usually been considered profoundly different.

Scholars who have devoted themselves to the field of antisemitism have rarely engaged in the field of anti-Black racism and vice versa.

In Towards the Final Solution (1979), George Lachmann Mosse, the great American Jewish historian, noted that these two racisms existed in separate geographical spheres. In the 18th and 19th centuries, in Great Britain, with its great overseas empire, there was a good deal of hatred of Blacks, and little hatred of Jews, about whom little was known. In parts of Europe such as Germany, the Hapsburg Empire or Russia, where Black people were relatively unknown, Jews were hated, and no-one bothered too much about Blacks.