Anti-Semitism in a world where Hitler never rose to power

Fair enough. Won't be as disruptive or as long-lasting as OTL, definitely.

We will see other crises, but it would look odd to us. Israel in this world will be part of a whole-mandate / bi-national / federal solution, which could itself come under attack from their neighbors, but with Jews and Palestinians fighting alongside this looks VERY different; or smaller and independent, with relatively more wide, soft support internationally (depending how the situation goes for Jewry in Poland and Russia).

And this all depends on how the War goes, if we assume that it was on track, and it wasn't just Hitler's machinations that caused it. If there is an open front line running through the Jewish heartland of the time, Jews will be disproportionately affected by it. Maybe not Holocaust or Holodomor level, but certainly something we'd say 'never again' about. If we see three million Eastern European Jews arrive in Western Europe, North America, and Oceania, and however many can make it end up in Israel, that looks quite different from the few hundred thousand to one million who survived historically.

One of the sadly forgotten parts of the Holocaust is that there was one whole strand of Judaism that was wiped out, it was centuries old, millions strong, and the fucking fascists nearly completely got rid of them. This timeline has this culture as around one third of all Jews.
 
We will see other crises, but it would look odd to us. Israel in this world will be part of a whole-mandate / bi-national / federal solution, which could itself come under attack from their neighbors, but with Jews and Palestinians fighting alongside this looks VERY different; or smaller and independent, with relatively more wide, soft support internationally (depending how the situation goes for Jewry in Poland and Russia).

And this all depends on how the War goes, if we assume that it was on track, and it wasn't just Hitler's machinations that caused it. If there is an open front line running through the Jewish heartland of the time, Jews will be disproportionately affected by it. Maybe not Holocaust or Holodomor level, but certainly something we'd say 'never again' about. If we see three million Eastern European Jews arrive in Western Europe, North America, and Oceania, and however many can make it end up in Israel, that looks quite different from the few hundred thousand to one million who survived historically.

One of the sadly forgotten parts of the Holocaust is that there was one whole strand of Judaism that was wiped out, it was centuries old, millions strong, and the fucking fascists nearly completely got rid of them. This timeline has this culture as around one third of all Jews.


I wish you were right about the 'never again'. However, I think the reason the Holocaust holds such a special place of horror in American/Western European Jews is that it impacted Western Jews (Dutch and Hungarian Jews). I suggest that if it were 3 million Eastern European Jews it would analogous to the Holdomar, the Armenian Genocide, the Rubber Terror in the Congo. Something known to students of history but not widely known. To support my point most Americans know about Aushwitz, few know about Treblinka, Belzec and Babi Yar.

To what strand of Judaism are you referring? All I can think of are the Hasidism who were not wiped out and have grown substantially in the past few decades.
 
I wish you were right about the 'never again'. However, I think the reason the Holocaust holds such a special place of horror in American/Western European Jews is that it impacted Western Jews (Dutch and Hungarian Jews). I suggest that if it were 3 million Eastern European Jews it would analogous to the Holdomar, the Armenian Genocide, the Rubber Terror in the Congo. Something known to students of history but not widely known. To support my point most Americans know about Aushwitz, few know about Treblinka, Belzec and Babi Yar.

To what strand of Judaism are you referring? All I can think of are the Hasidism who were not wiped out and have grown substantially in the past few decades.

There are all kinds of reasons we remember the Holocaust above other similar genocides. It's unusually well documented, and it happened in Europe to Europeans by Europeans, and the people who perpetrated it were defeated. It's possible that if Western European Jews were not affected, they or we (non-Jews like myself) wouldn't remember it so well.

There were some three million Jews in Poland and some three million Jews in Russian living in the 'Shtetl' - of these, maybe a few hundred thousand survived, I don't think there are good figures on exactly how many, but it's low. That's at ~90%, and 100% in some countries. I don't know what we lost there, I'm assuming we lost a lot of unique Jewish cultures and traditions that we'll never see again, and we might never even get to remember.
 
There are all kinds of reasons we remember the Holocaust above other similar genocides. It's unusually well documented, and it happened in Europe to Europeans by Europeans, and the people who perpetrated it were defeated. It's possible that if Western European Jews were not affected, they or we (non-Jews like myself) wouldn't remember it so well.

There were some three million Jews in Poland and some three million Jews in Russian living in the 'Shtetl' - of these, maybe a few hundred thousand survived, I don't think there are good figures on exactly how many, but it's low. That's at ~90%, and 100% in some countries. I don't know what we lost there, I'm assuming we lost a lot of unique Jewish cultures and traditions that we'll never see again, and we might never even get to remember.

Ah ok you mean Shtel culture rather than a specific strain of Jewish thought (e.g. Hasidim, Magdnim etc). This is getting well beyond my expertise but I am not sure how much of that culture had really survived to 1940. My sense is that it was largely getting eliminated by modernity. To the extent you have sources on this topic I would be interested in reading them.
 
Ah ok you mean Shtel culture rather than a specific strain of Jewish thought (e.g. Hasidim, Magdnim etc). This is getting well beyond my expertise but I am not sure how much of that culture had really survived to 1940. My sense is that it was largely getting eliminated by modernity. To the extent you have sources on this topic I would be interested in reading them.

I'm afraid I don't have sources readily available. I'm certain my main source was just reading regular sources about the Holocaust, they did mention it, but didn't seem to emphasize it. This is understandable to me, they were expressing Jewish solidarity and emphasizing the commonalities, they just dialed it a little too high.

The culture didn't remain stagnant, few do, so it was not the same Shtetl culture we might read about from the C18th and C19th. But it wasn't being assimilated either, it was likely to remain a ~10% minority in Poland and a ~5% minority in Russia for the next few centures, as it was for the past few centuries.

No culture is homogeneous. The Holocaust didn't just take one third of Jews at random, it took the ones who lived in Eastern Europe, and it is that culture/strain/mode/whatever of Judaism/Jewish thought that is lost to us. They have done well in preserving it, but it's a historical record now.
 

hammo1j

Donor
Remember that anti-semitism was pretty bad in the United States there was Henry Ford and others who outspokenly derided the influence of Jews on society.

The fact remains that you can easily take any sector of society and easily demonise them for their legitimate wants.

You could argue that the Jews were a closed society in that purity meant that you did not interbreed. But most probably it was the extreme nurture that gave them success. That extreme nurture had a human cost too, so fair enough, that did not mean masters of the universe without psycological unhappiness.

The peculiar fact remains that Hitler was recommended for the Iron Cross by a Jewish Officer and the only buyers of his art were Jewish just goes to show how bonkers racism of all forms is.
 
Hitler and the Nazis made antisemitism socially much less acceptable in the west (at least for a while). In spite of this in the USA (as an example) you had strict quotas on Jews entering Ivy League colleges and other private universities as undergraduates, quotas/restrictions in professional schools (law/medicine/dentistry), and subdivisions and entire towns where Jews were not allowed to rent or own homes. Hotels/resorts closed to Jews, many corporations that would not hire Jews or steel (not glass) ceilings, hospitals that would not allow Jews on the medical staff, and more of this sort. This persisted until the 1960s when the various civil rights laws were passed. All of this was in spite of antisemitism being poisoned by being tied to Nazism/Holocaust. You had variations of this throughout Western Europe, once you get to Eastern and Central Europe this got substantially worse. IMHO assuming the USSR does not expand in to Eastern Europe absent OTL's WWII, but stays in the 1938 borders, anticommunism/antibolshevism is still a big deal and the association of Jews with Bolshevism continues, as it did OTL.

Leaving aside the more recent issues of antisemitism due to the Arab-Israeli conflict, I expect a world without the Holocaust will have much more social antisemitism through today than OTL. If the civil rights laws get passed in the USA, either on schedule or later, some of the de jure restrictions will go away, but many of the de facto ones will remain. IMHO we are seeing a resurgence of antisemitism only partially fueled by the Arab-Israeli issues, folks like the AfD in Germany, and the various neo-fascist alt-right groups in Europe and the USA care not one bit about the Palestinians, its a lot of the old tropes repackaged for today. With no Hitler/Holocaust, even with civil rights legislation, the level of antisemitism will be much higher in the late 20th century than OTL, and the regrowth of antisemitism sooner and stronger than OTL. IMHO the only thing tamping it down now is that these groups have "reasons" to crap harder on Muslims than Jews for the moment.
 
I agree that there would be more residual anti-Semitism throughout society had there not been a Holocaust. I do though, believe the American civil rights movement would have mitigated it to the extent it opened up American commerce and housing to African-Americans. As we know, racism isn't gone today; it is only politically incorrect.

Remember accounts of the Dinah Shore Negro child allegation of the early fifties? The tabloids ran a (fake news) story that Shore, whose parents were Russian Jewish immigrants, failed to tell her that there was a "closet Negro" in the family, and when Dinah gave birth to a "dark skinned" baby, she had to give the child up for adoption. Back then, she could be barred from hotels, restaurants, and possibly her own home if a member of the family was black. The story was 100% false, but it damaged the family reputation to the point her husband had to work more.

Move forward to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Housing Rights Act of 1968. In a short time, all life-altering consequences of the Negro child allegation would have been moot. If public businesses must admit blacks, are they going to exclude any other racial/ethnic group or Jews with notable ethnic faith-based dress? I say no.
 
@Mark E : I agree, as I pointed out, that civil rights legislation removed the "formal" barriers for Jews as well as black. Absent the association with Nazism/Holocaust, "informal" antisemitism ("I prefer not to hire Jews", "you have to work on Saturday of you work here", "I wouldn't want my daughter to date one", and so forth) will be spoken out loud not whispered in corners. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" will be sold openly, not only in the back room of shops specializing in shady literature. The quotas for Ivy League schools and professional schools will be gone, but the reality is that if your name is Schwartz or Cohen or you show up for your interview wearing a kippah (skullcap), your odds of being accepted will be substantially less than one of the "right sort" with comparable or close to comparable qualifications - for these places once you weed out those who are truly not qualified, you still have more applicants than places and in a group of three or four with roughly the same grades etc why is one accepted and the others rejected. There is plenty of subjective wiggle room in the process, it's not all simple grades and board scores.
 
Top