What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Who were the victims?
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distinction between ‘anti-Judaism’ and ‘antisemitism’
is classic and widespread. It can claim that the term
‘antisemitism’, used as a self-description, did not
appear till the second half of the nineteenth century.
As is well known, the term was originally intended
to indicate that the antisemites were not concerned
with religious prejudice, or the conflict between
Christians and Jews, but with the allegedly objective
contrast between the ‘Aryan’ and the ‘Semitic race’.
Wiese continues to outline how anti-Judaism
has at times been framed as being fundamentally
concerned with theology alone, as contrasted with
antisemitism. He actually presses against such a
neat separation, emphasising this sort of distinction
is ‘susceptible to the trivialization of religious Jewhatred’
and ignores the politics which also drove
anti-Judaism. His aim (one of them) is to highlight
what he calls the ‘continuities and discontinuities’
of ‘Christian antisemitism and modern antisemitism.
In this way, Wiese echoes the pioneering work
of James Parkes, who differentiated anti-Jewish
(Christian) hatred from (racial) antisemitism, but
regarded the former as absolutely necessary to
ensure the second succeeded with the Holocaust’
(Parkes 1963).
Some scholars identify an underlying continuity
of intolerance throughout history, or – as with Daniel
Goldhagen – they conceptualise ‘antisemitism as
a deep pattern of behaviour and beliefs already
established in the era of the French Revolution’
(Eley, 2000: 5). Something of a ‘third way’ has
been suggested by Saul Friedländer, with his
perceptive concept of ‘redemptive antisemitism’. For
Friedländer (1997: 86-7), redemptive antisemitism
shared presumptions of biological difference with
late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century racial
antisemitism, but also drew on ‘a decidedly religious
vision, that of a German (or Aryan) Christianity’.
Infusing the two was a ‘mythic dimension’, founded
on a presumed ‘struggle’ with Jewry, from which
‘redemption would come as liberation from the Jews’.
There are consequently several different
interpretations around whether the term ‘antisemitism’
should be used inclusively to refer to all forms of
anti-Jewish thought and deed throughout history,
or if it should be exclusively reserved to refer to
manifestations of these in the modern, generally
secular world. While the latter would uphold the
underlying spirit of the term’s original author Wilhelm
Marr as he introduced it in his 1879 publication The
Victory of Jewry over Germandom, Wiese (2010: 169)
astutely warns that this risks ignoring ‘the complex
interplay’ between theological, Christian anti-Judaism
and the avowedly racial antisemitism of the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In order to avoid any impasse in this regard,
and to achieve optimum accessibility, the survey
took a broad approach in defining antisemitism
as ‘prejudice against Jews’. To establish levels of
student understanding, survey respondents were
asked, ‘What does “antisemitism” mean?’ and
requested to tick one answer from a possible five
(survey question 25). From the total number of
respondents, just 31.8 per cent selected the correct
answer, ‘Prejudice against Jews’, suggesting that
over two-thirds of the students who answered this
question did not know the meaning of ‘antisemitism’.
When filtered by age, other notable findings emerged,
as shown in Figure 5.9.
On the surface, this data indicates a relation
between age and familiarity with the word
‘antisemitism’, yet closer inspection complicated
this finding. It is, perhaps, understandable that few
students in the youngest cohorts (Years 7 to 8)
answered this question correctly, but the relatively
low percentages in Years 9 to 11 are striking. One
might assume that, as part of a programme of study
on the Holocaust, students would encounter the
term ‘antisemitism’ and become familiar with its
meaning, but this is true of less than half of the 14
to 16 year olds who completed the survey, despite
these students having theoretically learned about the
subject. Although there is a sharp corrective to this
trend in Years 12 to 13, this masks how only 25.9
per cent of all 11 to 16 year olds responded to this
question correctly.
Substance was added to these statistics in
focus-group interviews. Among younger students,
the terms ‘antisemitism’ and ‘antisemitic’ were
introduced or alluded to on a handful of occasions.
When this occurred, students were asked to explain
their understanding of these words, with varying
results. Some struggled to recall or remember the
words, while others, like Ian (Year 10, SE1), sought
to piece together a vague response: ‘I think it’s
just when you basically are against … maybe like
other people, or a few people in particular just for
being them’.
More frequently, students forwarded terse or
generalised answers, but answers nonetheless
centred on the Jews. Indicative here were: Imogen
(Year 10, LON5), for whom antisemitism meant
‘against Jews basically’; Hannah (Year 9, EE1),
who framed antisemitism as ‘hatred against Jews’;
and Ariella (Year 9, LON6), who saw antisemitism
as ‘against Jews or for laws that are kind of
discriminating against them’. Meanwhile, in a notable
demonstration of the power of religious frames
of reference, Ellie (Year 9, EE1) indicated that she
understood the term to mean ‘hatred for Judaism’.
Given the centrality of antisemitism both to
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