Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

southern United States and South Africa, concluding that
“the absence of state-mandated segregation has made racial
injustice significantly more difficult to struggle against.” 6
But he might have added that the burdens it imposed on
its victims were also less onerous.
Finally, antisemitism was endemic to most central and
eastern European nations in the early twentieth century—
Austria and Poland are the most conspicuous examples—
but it did not lead to anything comparable to the massive
assault on Jewish rights that took place in Germany in the
1930s, at least not until Anschluss or conquest put these nations
under direct Nazi rule. Austria did manage to outdo
Germany in the strength and vitality of the political antisemitism
that emerged around the turn of the century, and
Vienna is where Adolph Hitler formed his attitude toward
Jews. But racial antisemitism did not gain clear ascendancy
over the older, Catholic tradition of viewing Jews as unbelievers
redeemable through conversion. 7 The closest approximation
to a full-blown racist regime among pre-Nazi
European states was Czarist Russia, which anticipated aspects
of South African apartheid by attempting to confine
Jews to particular geographical areas. But its massive mistreatment
of Jews drew more on religious and cultural
chauvinism than on an overtly racist ideology. Before the
early twentieth century the principle that a Jewish convert
“became a Christian like any other” was official doctrine. 8
A justification for focusing on the admittedly exceptional
and extreme cases of Nazi Germany, apartheid South
Africa, and the Jim Crow South is that they taught the
world a lesson about the consequences of rampant and unchecked
racism that eventually changed the standards for
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