Claim: Adolf Hitler's ideology was racially motivated.

Antisemitism -LRB- also spelled anti-Semitism or anti-semitism -RRB- is hostility , prejudice , or discrimination directed against Jews as a group . A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite . Antisemitism is generally considered to be a form of racism .   The root word Semite gives the false impression that antisemitism is directed against all Semitic people , e.g. , including Arabs . The compound word antisemite was popularized in Germany in 1879 as a scientific-sounding term for Judenhass `` Jew-hatred '' , and that has been its common use since then .   Antisemitism may be manifested in many ways , ranging from expressions of hatred of or discrimination against individual Jews to organized pogroms by mobs , state police , or even military attacks on entire Jewish communities . Although the term did not come into common usage until the 19th century , it is now also applied to historic anti-Jewish incidents . Notable instances of persecution include the Rhineland massacres preceding the First Crusade in 1096 , the Edict of Expulsion from England in 1290 , the massacres of Spanish Jews in 1391 , the persecutions of the Spanish Inquisition , the expulsion from Spain in 1492 , the Cossack massacres in Ukraine from 1648 to 1657 , various anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire between 1821 and 1906 , the 1894 -- 1906 Dreyfus affair in France , the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe , official Soviet anti-Jewish policies , and Arab and Muslim involvement in the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries .