Download Racism: A Short History by George M. Fredrickson PDF

By George M. Fredrickson

Are antisemitism and white supremacy manifestations of a basic phenomenon? Why did not racism look in Europe sooner than the fourteenth century, and why did it flourish as by no means ahead of within the eighteenth and 19th centuries? Why did the 20th century see institutionalized racism in its so much severe kinds? Why are egalitarian societies relatively prone to virulent racism? What do apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany, and the yankee South below Jim Crow have in universal? How did the Holocaust strengthen civil rights within the usa?

With an extraordinary mix of studying, economic climate, and slicing perception, George Fredrickson surveys the background of Western racism from its emergence within the past due center a long time to the current. starting with the medieval antisemitism that positioned Jews past the light of humanity, he strains the unfold of racist considering within the wake of eu expansionism and the beginnings of the African slave exchange. And he examines how the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century romantic nationalism created a brand new highbrow context for debates over slavery and Jewish emancipation.

Fredrickson then makes the 1st sustained comparability among the color-coded racism of nineteenth-century the USA and the antisemitic racism that seemed in Germany round the related time. He unearths similarity sufficient to justify the typical label but additionally significant alterations within the nature and features of the stereotypes invoked. The publication concludes with a provocative account of the increase and decline of the 20 th century's openly racist regimes--the Jim Crow South, Nazi Germany, and apartheid South Africa--in the context of worldwide old advancements.

This illuminating paintings is the 1st to regard racism throughout this kind of sweep of heritage and geography. it's unique not just via its unique comparability of contemporary racism's most important varieties--white supremacy and antisemitism--but additionally through its eminent clarity.

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The premise of equality that operated for Christians was that all were equal in the eyes of God, whatever their earthly station. Those medieval Christians who viewed Jews as children of the Devil in effect excluded them from membership in the human race for which Christ had died on the cross. ) The scriptural passage most often quoted to associate Jews as a collectivity with Satan was Christ’s denunciation of the Jews who rejected him: “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires” ( John 8:44 RSV).

32 To the extent that it was enforced, the Spanish doctrine of purity of blood was undoubtedly racist. It represented the stigmatization of an entire ethnic group on the basis of deficiencies that allegedly could not be eradicated by conversion or assimilation. Inherited social status was nothing new; the concept of “noble blood” had long meant that the offspring of certain families were born with a claim to high status. But when the status of large numbers of people was depressed purely and simply because of their derivation from a denigrated ethnos, a line had been crossed that gave “race” a new and more comprehensive significance.

A substantial proportion of them retained a pride in their Jewish ancestry and contin34 ued to follow some Jewish customs, like refraining from the eating of pork. An indeterminate number, after going to Mass, secretly worshiped the Jehovah of the Old Testament at home. But it was to their advantage to conform at least outwardly to what was expected of them as Christian converts. The Moriscos, on the other hand, were mostly peasants and artisans who lived in their own villages or quarters. Because many of them resisted even the appearance of assimilation, it would be easier to characterize the feeling against them as based more on cultural than on racial difference.

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