Guest article by Eva Illouz: Modern hatred of Jews is not religious, but political

WIlhelm Marr (1819-1904) was a German journalist and also what we would today call an activist. He gave the impetus to modern anti-Semitism and used this term to describe a racist rather than religious rejection of Jews and to distinguish it from traditional Christian “hatred of Jews”. Marr founded the Anti-Semiticthe first political organization that was explicitly committed to anti-Jewish activism, and published the propaganda pamphlet “The Victory of Judaism over Germanism” in 1879. In it he claimed that the Jews had succeeded in conquering Germany because they were convinced of their own racial superiority and called for their expulsion. Knowing of the many massacres of Jews that were committed in the period after Wilhelm Marr, reading this pamphlet is difficult to bear. Nevertheless, Marr’s pamphlet is helpful in understanding aspects of anti-Semitism today.