ABSTRACT

While Soviet Russia is building up a classless society more free from race prejudice than any country in the world, people have been witnessing such medieval and savage persecution of the Jews under Hitler's movement of National Socialism in Germany, and such a recrudescence of anti-semitism in other lands that it raises the whole question as to why the Jews are persecuted. The most pronounced manifestation of this hostility at the moment is found in Nazi propaganda, where they make the long-persecuted Jew the convenient scapegoat for many of the woes of the German people. Persecution of the Jews was, of course, common in ancient and medieval Europe from the time of the destruction of Jerusalem till they were scattered as a homeless people in the ghettos of Europe and subjected to pogroms and massacres. Most writers are agreed that there are three principal sources of Jewish prejudice today: the religious, the economic and the combined political and racial.