Anti-Semitism (also spelled antisemitism or anti-semitism)
prejudice against or hostility towards Jews and people of Jewish origin, often rooted in hatred of their ethnic background, culture, or religion. Also a belief or ideology arguing for the exclusion of Jews and people of Jewish origin.
Anti-Semitism was manifested in European history from Middle Ages to Tsarist Russia in various ways: persecution and discrimination (ghettos), expulsions of entire Jewish communities, violent attacts (pogroms). The most extreme form of Anti-Semitism was a core of Nazi ideology; it culminated in genocide of Jewish nation in Nazi occupied Europe.
Anti-Semitism reached its peak in Germany beginning rom 1933 and was a core of the official Nazi state ideology. Various legal acts limiting participation of Jews in social, economic and political life and denying of basic civil rights were introduced. After 1939 in Nazi occupied Europe, a campaign of mass murder began, culminating, from 1941 to 1945, in genocide: the Holocaust . The decision on the “Final solution to the Jewish question” (“die Endlösung der Judenfrage”) was taken by Nazi senior officials at the Wannsee conference in January 1942.
