The Portuguese and Brazilian Encyclopedia, just published here, contains an outspoken article on anti-Semitism by the well-known Portuguese historian Dr. Antonio Sergio, former Minister of Education.
Anti-Semitism, the article declares, aims to exclude the Jews from posts of political and social importance. In its extreme form, it may bring about the actual expulsion of the Jews from their native countries on the excuse of their exercising a pernicious influence on the social order. The modern aspect of anti-Semitism is eminently social and economic and the religious issue plays a very unimportant role.
Dr. Sergio reviews the development of anti-Semitism in Germany since 1880 when Stocker, Treitschke and Duhring unsuccessfully tried to make the Reichstag vote restrictions against the Jews, up to its present-day “racist” form. Turning to France, he shows how anti-Semitic propaganda was started in that country about 1882 by Edward Drummond, editor of La Lible Parole, and assumed its most alarming proportions during the Dreyfus trial.
He describes the appalling conditions under which Jews lived in prewar Russia and ends with a vivid description of the Kishinev pogrom of 1963, and those of 1905 and 1906.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
