Myth: The Nazis invented antisemitism.

“The Nazis invented antisemitism.”

Persecution of Jews stretches back millennia. Expulsions, blood libels and pogroms long predate the 20th century. The Shoah was the genocidal extreme of a very old hatred, not its beginning. Adolf Hitler did not open a door that had been shut; he walked through one that European civilization had kept propped open, with religious, economic and legal machinery, since antiquity.

Origin of the claim

The claim rarely appears as a flat historical assertion; it usually starts from a real fact and gets stretched past what the fact supports. The word “antisemitism” itself is modern: German polemicist Wilhelm Marr coined “Antisemitismus” in 1879 to give Jew-hatred a pseudo-scientific, racial gloss, founding the League of Antisemites the same year, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Marr’s innovation was to recast an old religious and economic animus as a matter of “race,” a framing the Nazis later adopted wholesale and radicalized into policy. From that true fact, that the term is 19th-century and the racial pseudo-science is 19th- and 20th-century, some listeners slide into the false claim that the underlying hatred, and its violent expression, is equally recent. It is not. Marr named something that already had roughly 1,900 years of documented practice behind it.

The record before the Third Reich

The strongest honest version of the claim is narrower than “the Nazis invented antisemitism”: it is that the Nazis invented a specifically racial, pseudo-biological antisemitism, distinct from the older religious Judeophobia of Christian and Islamic societies. That narrower claim has real substance and is addressed below. But the plain claim, that organized Jew-hatred began with the Nazi Party, collapses against the documented record.

Rome expelled Jews from the city multiple times under the early empire and crushed two major Jewish revolts, the First Jewish-Roman War of 66 to 73 CE and the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132 to 136 CE, the latter ending Jewish sovereignty in Judea for nearly two millennia. Medieval Christian Europe produced the blood libel, first recorded at Norwich in 1144 and repeated across the continent for centuries, along with the well-poisoning libel that fueled massacres during the Black Death of 1348 to 1351. Whole kingdoms expelled their Jewish populations wholesale: England in 1290, France in 1306, and Spain in 1492 under the Alhambra Decree. The Crusades opened with massacres of Rhineland Jewish communities in 1096. Russia and Eastern Europe saw waves of pogroms, from the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1648 to 1649 through the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, the latter contemporaneous with the forged “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” first published in Russia in 1903, decades before any Nazi existed, a document Shoresh covers separately as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The Islamic world’s record runs parallel, not identical. The Pact of Umar, a set of restrictive terms imposed on Jewish and Christian communities and formalized by the 9th century, established the legal inferiority of dhimmi status across the Muslim world: special taxes, dress codes and prohibitions on building or repairing houses of worship, documented in full at the Fordham Medieval Sourcebook. Periodic violence followed under that legal framework for over a millennium, cataloged by the Jewish Virtual Library’s survey of the treatment of Jews in Arab and Islamic countries, and it did not stop when the Nazis fell. The Farhud, a two-day pogrom in Baghdad on 1 and 2 June 1941, killed at least 180 Jews and injured hundreds more, driven by local Iraqi nationalist and pro-Axis sentiment operating inside an already-established framework of legal and social subordination, as documented by the USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia. None of this required a swastika to happen; the Nazis borrowed a script that was already centuries old and added an industrial ending to it.

Who pushes this today

The claim circulates in two overlapping forms. The first is casual and uninformed: people who know the Holocaust as the only chapter of Jewish persecution taught in their schooling and assume, absent other information, that it has no antecedent. The second is more deliberate, surfacing in online arguments and among figures engaged in Holocaust distortion, cataloged generally by the USHMM’s page on Holocaust denial and distortion, who use the claim to relativize the Shoah as one atrocity among many rather than the culmination of a specific, traceable hatred, or to imply that Jewish historical grievance, and by extension any claim connected to it, is a 20th-century political invention rather than a documented multi-century pattern. Neither version survives contact with the trial record, the legal codes, or the demographic count of pogroms and expulsions compiled by historians long before 1933.

What the Nazis actually added

The strongest version of this objection is real and worth stating plainly: pre-modern Jew-hatred was overwhelmingly religious, aimed at conversion or subjugation, and it left an exit, baptism, tribute, or expulsion to somewhere else. Nazi antisemitism was racial and biological, drawing on 19th-century pseudo-science, and it left no exit; ancestry alone was the charge, and the sentence was death, formalized in the bureaucratic planning documented at the Nuremberg Charter and executed through the machinery described in the USHMM’s introduction to the Holocaust. That shift, from religious hatred with an escape hatch to racial hatred with none, is genuinely novel and genuinely the Nazis’ contribution. It is also why the Holocaust stands apart in scale and method from every pogrom and expulsion that came before it. But a novel mechanism built on an old foundation is not the same as inventing the foundation. The hatred is ancient; the Nazis perfected its delivery.