Antisemitism in Germany
In medieval German lands, Christian prejudice made Jews vulnerable to ritual accusations and scapegoating during crises such as the Black Death. The Reformation did not end that hostility: Luther’s later writings demanded persecution.
Explore GermanyPublished by WTJPublication updated
The accusation changes from faith to ancestry
In medieval German lands, Christian prejudice made Jews vulnerable to ritual accusations and scapegoating during crises such as the Black Death. The Reformation did not end that hostility: Luther’s later writings demanded persecution. Emancipation widened rights in the nineteenth century, but racial antisemites claimed Jewish ancestry made equality impossible. Nazi ideology combined that racial claim with conspiracy, and the regime turned it into laws, dispossession and genocide. Each change required institutions and people to adopt and enforce it.
1340s–1783
Older roots · Who gets blamed?
Religious accusations made a minority available for blame when disease or religious conflict frightened a wider society.
The plague needs a culprit
During the Black Death, Jews in European communities were falsely accused of poisoning wells. In German lands and elsewhere, the rumour helped fuel massacres. A frightening disease was given a minority culprit through an older climate of religious suspicion. The accusation was evidence of the persecutors’ prejudice, never evidence that Jews had caused the plague.
Luther’s call for persecution
In 1543, Martin Luther called for measures including burning synagogues, destroying Jewish homes and restricting livelihoods. His religious authority gave these demands a powerful voice. The Reformation had not ended Christian anti-Judaism. In 2015, Germany’s Protestant church explicitly repudiated this legacy and acknowledged the harm of its later reception.
Mendelssohn argues for freedom
Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, published in 1783, argued for religious freedom and against coercion in matters of faith. He remained Jewish while participating in Enlightenment debate. His work challenged the assumption that entry into modern public life required surrendering Judaism. Jews were thinkers in the struggle over equality, not simply its objects.
1871–1933
Citizenship · A right—and a challenge
As equal citizenship advanced, antisemites changed the test of belonging from belief to supposedly fixed ancestry.
The citizenship page
Jewish emancipation advanced unevenly across German territories: some reforms were reversed or never adopted. With unification in 1871, Jews gained equal citizenship. The law changed their status, but legal equality and everyday acceptance are different questions. Look for both when you move through time.
A new story of exclusion
In the late nineteenth century, racist politicians portrayed Jews as a separate, supposedly unchangeable race. That claim was false. It recast an older religious prejudice as a story about ancestry and national belonging, allowing exclusion to persist even when a person changed religion.
A voice in public life
Doctor and parliamentarian Emanuel Mendel helped found the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith in 1893. His preserved letters reveal a person with professional, political and communal commitments. Jewish citizens organized and participated in public life; their story cannot be reduced to the prejudices aimed at them.
1933–1945
Nazi rule · When prejudice governs
The Nazi regime used invented racial categories to organize exclusion, dispossession and genocide.
The rewritten law book
After 1933, the Nazi regime excluded Jews through successive laws. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws removed full citizenship and restricted marriage using invented racial categories. Officials turned antisemitic ideology into administrative rules. These classifications were instruments of persecution, not scientific descriptions of people.
A witness writes back
David Fiks wrote a detailed account of the November 1938 pogrom for his children after reaching England. He described how his Christian landlady, Hedwig Schmidt, hid him. His letter records violence and an individual act of help. It shows that people faced choices within a persecuting society.
The machinery of persecution
The Holocaust was the systematic persecution and murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators. War widened the regime's reach. State institutions, occupation and many participants made genocide possible; an account focused on one leader alone cannot explain how it happened.
After 1945
Postwar lives & memory · Memory is a beginning
After 1945, rebuilding and a reckoning with inherited ideas became part of the struggle against continuing antisemitism.
A community rebuilds after genocide
The Holocaust left German Jewish life shattered. Survivors and later arrivals rebuilt communities, while their relationships to Germany differed. A national culture of remembrance developed around the crimes. Living Jewish experience nevertheless includes religion, family and ordinary civic life as well as the memory of persecution.
The church confronts its inheritance
In 2015, Germany’s Protestant church confronted Luther’s anti-Jewish legacy. In 2016 it rejected a mission to convert Jews and affirmed a renewed relationship with Judaism. These decisions addressed teachings that had helped make hostility credible. Institutional reform is part of the history because inherited prejudice can be examined and repudiated.
2023–present
October 7 & today · October 7 & today
Nazi inheritance, resentment of Holocaust responsibility and Marxist–Islamist cooperation help explain Germany’s post-October 7 crisis.
The past does not keep people safe
After the Holocaust, Germany built a public culture of remembrance. Jewish communities rebuilt their lives within it. Remembering the destruction of Jewish life, however, did not guarantee the safety of the people living there now.
After October 7, the monitoring organization RIAS recorded a lasting rise in antisemitic incidents. By 2025, its annual total was more than three times the earlier baseline. The increase reached beyond arguments on a screen: people faced threats and assaults while the country continued to speak publicly about its responsibility to remember.
The Holocaust is turned against living Jews
German antisemitism had turned religious suspicion into racial exclusion and genocide. Postwar remembrance challenged it, but far-right racial conspiracy and Holocaust denial persisted. Another response evaded responsibility by reversing the accusation: Jews, through Israel, were portrayed as the new Nazis. Anti-imperialist hostility could borrow the language of anti-fascism while targeting Jews.
RIAS records a Jewish musician pressed to condemn genocide, then called a child murderer and Jewish Nazi and physically restrained. A political allegation had become a demand that one Jew answer for Israel. The child-murderer accusation revived blood-libel imagery; the Nazi label reversed the history of Jewish persecution. Here the conduct exposes the antisemitism: an individual’s Jewish identity, rather than a government decision, was made the basis for humiliation and coercion.
A shared enemy brings movements together
Berlin authorities describe Hamas supporters and secular PFLP supporters organizing under the VPNK umbrella, alongside cooperation with particular Marxist groups. Their shared hostility to Israel could outweigh incompatible religious and political beliefs. Other sections of the left rejected the agitation. This is a documented red–green connection, rather than an assumption about every protester.
Some religious fundamentalist attitudes in immigrant-origin communities predated October 7, as an older six-country study found. That background cannot measure today’s German population or explain every attack. Meanwhile, RIAS recorded increasing far-right incidents too. The surge arose in a setting where organized cooperation, circulating accusations and independent racial extremists could all intensify hostility towards the same Jewish neighbours.