HIS 380 History of Racism & Anti-Semitism

The course traces the development of racial prejudice and anti-Semitism, from their roots in the classical and mediaeval worlds to the rise of National Socialism in the early 10th century. Particular emphasis will be paid to the manner in which religious, cultural, linguistic and physical/biological forms of exclusion have overlapped and reinforced each other. It is one of the principal contentions of this course that National Socialism?s exterminatory anti-Semitism is not merely a product of centuries of anti-Jewish prejudice; rather, racial anti-Semitism must be understood as something which evolved in close symbiosis with racial prejudices directed against Africans - slave and free - and colonial peoples from the early modern period, culminating in the historically-particular form of exterminatory racial anti-Semitism which formed the necessary precondition of the Holocaust.